That motherfucker.
She dumped the box on the table, not even bothering to open it before turning on her heel and making a beeline for Shane, who still seemed oblivious that she was even in the room.
Don’t say anything. Don’t say anything. You can still take the high road. Just brush it off.
“You’re such a dick,” she muttered as she slid into her seat,the high road so deserted there were probably tumbleweeds blowing across it.
“Nice to see you, too, Lilah,” he replied coolly, his eyes never leaving his script.
“Itold you about Mitzi’s donuts. You knew I’d bring them today. This is petty, even for you.”
“And this is self-involved, even foryou.I wanted to do something nice for the first day back. Who says it has anything to do with you?”
“It’s not even in your neighborhood. You had to go totally out of your way to get them.”
“Oh yeah. I guess I did.” He finally looked up at her, that familiar lopsided smirk creeping lazily across his face.
She kept her tone nonchalant, though inside she was seething. “Well. I hope it was worth it.”
He shrugged, returning to his script. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about. All I see are two identical boxes of donuts. Unless you had each of yours inscribed with ‘Courtesy of Lilah Hunter’ in icing so everyone knows who to thank.” He punctuated his sentence with an enormous bite of the half-eaten vanilla-lavender donut in front of him, releasing a moan so loud it bordered on orgasmic. A few heads turned in their direction.
It was uncanny how quickly he had her careening from angry to gaslit to belittled to ashamed—all over something as insignificant as donuts. He was right. It didn’t matter that he’d brought his own box. But there was no doubt in her mind that he’d done it to rile her up and then make her feel ridiculous for even caring; and, of course, it had worked. It always did.
No one else knew how to push her buttons quite like Shane. She just wished he didn’t feel the need to pounce on every opportunity to do so.
Lilah pushed her chair back with a dull scrape against thecarpet and took off in the direction of the bathroom without another word.
She wasn’t going there to hide. That would be beneath her. She was thirty-one years old, and, as much as it might feel like it right now, she wasn’t in high school anymore. She just needed to be alone for a second. And if that second happened to last all thirteen minutes before the table read started, well, that was just a coincidence.
She locked herself in the farthest stall from the door, plunked herself on the toilet, lid down, and scrolled idly through her phone. She was halfway through responding to a text from her sister asking how things were going (which mainly involved searching for the GIF of Real Housewife Dorinda Medley shouting “Not well, bitch!”) when she heard the door of the bathroom open, along with the tail end of a conversation.
“…that they showed at upfronts. Apparently it was the Kate and Harrison show.”
Lilah froze as a stall door swung shut near the bathroom’s entrance.
“I mean, what did you expect? We might as well be extras now that she’s back.” This voice sounded closer to Lilah, next to the sink.
“I know. It’s such bullshit. And here I thought I might actually get a decent storyline this year.”
“Wanna trade?Iget to be the bitch that’s keeping them apart.”
The first woman laughed, flushing the toilet and emerging from the stall. “Noooo thank you. You better lock down your Instagram now, before the Karrisons come for you.”
The second woman groaned. “God. Maybe I should go into witness protection. Just, like, fuck it, new identity.”
Lilah’s stomach twisted, her mind racing. Her first instinctwas to get defensive.Fuck ’em. If they wanted to resent her for something that was out of her control—tilting the balance of the show back toward her and Shane—there was nothing she could do about it. But maybe that was unfair. It wouldn’t hurt her to be the bigger person in this situation, especially since they were upset about theideaof her, not anything she’d done.
Should she go out there and confront them, break the ice, get it all out in the open now? Or just pretend she’d never heard it, and try to kill them with kindness once she met them? She sat, stone-still, paralyzed with indecision, as the two of them laughed and chattered their way back out of the bathroom.
After a long, slow count of ten, she followed them.
…
Shane had always had a thing for redheads.
Not that he was weird about it or anything. For the most part, he didn’t have much of a physical type, his mind wandering whenever bro-talk inevitably turned to debating the hierarchy of tits versus asses. It felt like a Frankenstein-esque approach to attraction, one that had never resonated with him. He’d dated and slept with women of a variety of shapes, sizes, and backgrounds (and hair colors, for the record), and found it was usually the complete package that did it for him, rather than any individual piece.
But all that aside, there was only one feature guaranteed to turn his head every time. Real or fake, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t sure if he’d always been wired that way, or if he’d just seenWho Framed Roger Rabbitone too many times at an impressionable age. Whatever it was, it had started early, it was embedded deep, and it was completely out of his control.
