***
"You did not." Jenn's laugh carries over the pier noise, over the ocean, over everything. "God, Bennet. You're such a bizarre person."
"That's fair."
We're walking the Santa Monica Pier with ice cream cones like two people who planned this, which we did not, which was Jenn's idea approximately forty minutes into dinner when she saidI want to go somewhereand I saidwhereand she saidsomewhere that isn't hereand I paid the check.
"Okay, so let me get this straight." She licks her cone, unbothered by the crowd moving around us. "You're single. You look like — that." She gestures at me with her free hand. "You're a gazillionaire. And you have genuinely no idea how to seduce a woman."
"I have ideas."
"The childbearing age thing was an idea?"
"A poorly executed one."
"Talk about a unicorn." She shakes her head, still laughing, and something about the laugh — easy, unperformed, like she finds the whole situation genuinely funny rather than something to manage — makes me laugh too.
We finish our cones somewhere near the end of the pier. The ocean is dark past the railing. The lights from the rides color everything amber and pink, and the whole thing is aggressively,almost satirically picturesque. I am aware that I am having something resembling a good time, which was not in the forecast for today.
Maybe I'm broken in a different way than I thought.
Jenn glances over my shoulder and smirks.
"I guess we'll be kissing sooner rather than later after all."
Before I can process that sentence, she's up on her toes, hands sliding around the back of my neck into my hair, pulling me down toward her mouth.
"We've got a stalker," she murmurs, lips a breath from mine. "Play along, playboy."
Then she kisses me.
It's a good kiss. She isn't nervous about it, and I wish I could say the same. I put my hand at her waist and lean into it because that's the job, that's what this is. The photographer over my shoulder is going to get exactly what the narrative needs.
I close my eyes.
And the thing that moves through me is...quiet.
Like standing in a room where the lights are on and everything is in order and you're waiting for something to happen and it doesn't.
She's warm. She smells good. She is objectively kissing me well, and I am present for it, and I feel — fine. Just...fine.
I open my eyes when she pulls back.
She's reading my face. She does it quickly, efficiently, and whatever she finds there she stores away without comment.
"Well," she says. Straightening. Smoothing her dress.
"Well,"
Behind me, I hear the shutter sound — unmistakable, even at a distance. Got it. We got it. Bennet Sullivan and an unnamedredhead on the Santa Monica Pier, personal and unguarded and exactly what two months of headlines need to move away from fountain footage.
Blaire will be pleased.
There’s that thought again.Goddamnit.
Jenn loops her arm through mine, and we start walking back toward the entrance like two people who planned all of this from the beginning. She tips her head against my shoulder briefly, easy and without expectation.
"Friends?" she says.
