But what if she’d had it wrong?
What if he’d been trying to help her?
She drew her knees to her chin, wrapping her arms around them, something unfamiliar aching deep inside her. Close to loneliness, but more pointed. Emptier. Like her rib cage had been replaced by a black hole.
She wished he was there with her now. The urge to invite him over was so powerful that she had her phone in her hand before she knew it. She stared at it for a long time.
Sure, she could text him, but then what? He’d come over with food, and he’d make her laugh, and he’d smell so fucking good, and she’d fall even more in love with him than she already was.
She sat upright with a jolt, nausea surging through her.
No. She didn’t love him. She didn’t. It was impossible to be in love with someone she wasn’t even dating. Someone she’d hated for years.
And even if she did, she had no idea how she’d begin to tell him. To dig up the courage to lay herself bare in front of him like that, after everything they’d been through. After pushing him away again so recently. The prospect felt impossibly heavy, like she was a beached whale, crushed from the inside by the weight of her own tangled emotions.
Despite her best efforts, he refused to be consigned to a messy, complicated footnote in her past.
She let herself consider, just for the hell of it, what it would mean for him to be her future, too.
Obviously, their chemistry had always been explosive—to the point where it sent other people running for cover. She wasn’t interested in that kind of chaos anymore. But, while she’d never stopped feeling that spark, it was hard to deny that the past few months had felt different, and not just from the way things had been with him before. From the way they’d been with anyone.
As she tossed around the word “boyfriend,” though, it didn’t quite fit. It felt too juvenile, too simple, barely skimming the surface of everything their relationship had come to encompass.
But the only other title she could come up with was “partner,” and he was already her partner. Even after they’d stopped sleeping together, even when the sight of him made her blood boil, they’d still spent the better part of a decade side by side, sharing scenes and screens and red carpets and interviews and magazine covers, her name linked with his above all others.Not for much longer,she realized with a pang.
And then there was the last and biggest thing: the show. The fact that the two of them together, for real, would attract the kind of invasive attention that made her stomach turn. That would reset all the work she’d done to balance her mental health with the reality of being a public figure.
There was something about the inevitability of it, too, that grated on her now as much as it did then. It had poisoned her relationship with Shane from the very beginning; she’d resented him for how badly she wanted him, and resented herself for being so predictable.
Her phone buzzed again.
SHANE:you’re watching, aren’t you
LILAH:maybe
SHANE:you looked really cute in that lab coat
Her throat tightened.
She couldn’t tell him. Not right now, anyway. Not until she figured out what the fuck she even wanted from him—fromthem. The last thing they needed was to complicate things again.
And maybe she wouldn’t ever have to. Maybe, if she was very, very lucky, it would pass.
24
Shane’sLate Night Liveepisode was scheduled for their second week back in production after the holidays.Intangiblehad arranged it so his time in New York would coincide with shooting the backdoor pilot for Rosie and Ryder’s potential spin-off, so neither he nor Lilah would have much to do that week. He tried not to wonder how she planned to spend her time off, whether she’d be seeing that guy from the party again.
He couldn’t stop himself from texting her after his first meeting with theLNLwriters, though.
SHANE:hey
Were you planning on coming out to New York to watch the show?
She replied almost instantly.
LILAH:ummm maybe
I haven’t bought a plane ticket yet or anything
