My throat closes a little at the memory of him. “He was so kind. Always stopping to help people on the side of the road even though he didn’t know anything about cars. And he loved building stuff, but he was awful at it. He spent, like, ten years making me a tree house in the backyard, and even then, it was only a shoddy platform that couldn’t support both our weights at once. He always let me order pizza from his least favorite place because he knew I had a crush on the delivery driver, even though I couldn’t bear to say so out loud. But he was a great cook too, and he loved his job—managing a small chain of bargain basement stores. He loved the people he worked with, and he always told me that he was just thankful to have a job that could provide for us and—” I take a breath. “I…He was my favorite person.” It’s all I can manage to say without letting myself cry, which I have no intention of doing.
“He sounds like the kind of guy I’d like to know,” Henry says softly.
Beside me, a crew member moves, and I’m reminded that this is no normal date. I feel myself clamming up a little as I say, “You would have loved him. He would have been unsure about you and all your fancy suits, but he’d see past all that soon enough.”
“To be honest, the fancy suits aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.” He leans toward me. “Now, tell me more about this pizza delivery driver. Should I be worried?”
My lips spread into a toothy grin. “Very.”
The mood lightens some, and we talk for a while longer. Wes asks us for a few specific shots, including aLady and the Trampspaghetti moment over a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs while Irina has an absolute fit over the possibility of marinara sauce in a ten-foot radius of this dress on loan. And just like that I can feel our night slowly slipping away from us, like it was never ours to begin with.
“What’s next?” I ask.
“Well, I thought we could take a stroll and maybe catch a show,” Henry says.
As we stand to leave, Beck says, “We just want some B-roll of you two walking around the city, so we’ll follow at a distance, but your mics won’t pick anything up. We’ll come grab you after a few blocks and then drive over to the theater.”
I nearly tell her thank you for the brief privacy but think better of it.
Outside, the two of us crowd under an umbrella and step out into the drizzling rain.
“New York smells the most like New York after a fresh rain,” Henry says.
I can’t help but laugh. “You say that like it’s a good thing. What kind of New Yorker are you? Do you even take the subway?”
He scoffs. “I’ve been known to take a subway or two.”
“How cultured of you,” I tell him. “Do you think they really can’t hear us?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t really care either.” He holds his hand outside the protection of the umbrella. “Rain stopped.” He closes the umbrella and drops it in a souvenir store umbrella stand for someone else to find. “Besides, I’ve been waiting to do this.” In one swift motion, he takes my hand and holds it to his mouth, inhaling deeply before kissing my open palm.
My breath hitches at the touch of his warm lips against my skin and the unexpectedness of it. My brain feels foggy at first, but if he’s going to catch me off guard, I’m going to do the same to him. “Is this real for you?”
He glances over his shoulder. “Coming in with the big-gun questions, eh?” He thinks for a moment before saying in a very matter-of-fact way, “It wasn’t, but now it is. At first it was a joke, sort of. I was newly single when the producers approached me. What better way to rebound?”
“Newly single?” I ask. I only have vague memories of him in a few local gossip mags with a thin model on his arm.
“Sabrina,” he says, his voice low.
“Sabrina Allen?” I ask. “You were dating Sabrina Allen? She’s, like…huge now. She’s a household name.”
“Not when I first met her.” He takes a deep breath. “We met at a Labor Day party.” He laughs. “It was a white party and she showed up in red. Mom loved her immediately. It got serious fast. She closed out Mom’s next show. Featured in print ads. And I loved her…or at least I loved that my mom loved her.” He shakes his head. “Wow, that sounds awful. I promise I only have the normally allotted amount of mommy issues.”
I snort at that, wishing I could tell him about my own real-life stepmommy issues.
“My mom and…We don’t share a lot in common. Sabrina was something we could share. God, just saying it now, I see how messed up it was.” He sighs. “I proposed. In Paris. She said no, and the next day she’d signed a one-year exclusive contract with Victoria’s Secret. When I told my mom that Sabrina didn’t say yes, I quickly realized she was more upset about losing her ingénue and muse than she was about my heart being broken. So I took a step back from the business. From Mom.”
“If you took a step back, how did you end up on a dating show trying to drum up excitement about the brand?” I ask, trying to fill in the gaps.
“I was bumbling around out in LA for a few months when I met Beck. She tried getting me to meet with her boss, and I kept saying no, but she was relentless. Then one day, my dad called, and he basically said, ‘Your mother’s arthritis is debilitating and the only thing she can do to slow it down is to step back from LuMac. Either you come home and run it, or we sell it for parts.’ When I got back to the city and teamed up with Jay, I found out that the brand was in bigger trouble than I thought. We were past the normal measures you could take for a failing business. We needed something wild. Something viral. I called Beck, and next thing I knew, I was the next suitor onBefore Midnight.”
We briefly stop at a crosswalk like good New Yorkers, and I look up to him. “But what about when we first met? You said you had missed your first flight because you couldn’t decide if you wanted to go to LA?”
His jaw twitches. “I didn’t say this whole thing didn’t freak me out. I’ve seen dozens of people I grew up with open themselves up to fame. It doesn’t usually end well. The internet has a way of digging up your past or—”
“Are there things to dig up?” I ask. “In your past?”
“Oh, you know,” he says. “Just the standard skeletons. Family drama. A few questionable drunk pictures, but…I never wanted to be a public person. I wasn’t some child star or something, but to a degree, our lives were always public property anyway. Going on this show sort of feels like giving up what privacy I had left.”
