Rex could reject me. Which would suck. I couldn’t imagine being rejected by my fake boyfriend. That would be worse than being rejected by a real boyfriend because at least he’d have been real to start with.
Or maybe he’d kiss me out of pity. The only thing worse than no kiss at all was a pity kiss that tasted of failure and bone-crushing loneliness.
Or Rex could give me a shot only to decide that he didn’t like my career after all.
Blue exhaled. “You’re the only person I know who makes me feel like I need to bring a brick to a pep talk so I can beat you over the head with it and knock some sense into you.”
“That’s unnecessarily violent of you.”
“Okay, let me ask this. What’s the best thing that could happen?”
Rex could like me back. He could date me for real. Kiss me because he wanted to. Rex could be true to what he’d said and not care about what I did for a living. I wouldn’t do porn forever, but I’d never been good at picking a direction in life and so far this was the only thing that had stuck with me. I’d dropped out of college after a semester because I’d hated every moment of it.
I’d entertained something like hair or nails but had no aptitude for that kind of work. I’d had my fair share of minimum wage gigs. Fry cook. Convenience store clerk. Six miserable hours handing out free samples at a grocery store once. Sometimes I thought that the only thing I was good at was having sex.
And I was fucking great at sex.
But I wanted to be great at other things too. Like being a boyfriend. Or thinking of the perfect date to take someone on. And not just any someone. Rex.
“You can’t say anything to Rex about this,” I told Blue. “Not a word.”
“I know.” Blue looked almost offended. “For the record, I think you should tell him, but I’m not getting in the middle of this.”
“You literally introduced me to him so I could be his fake boyfriend. You’re already in the middle of this.”
“Okay, so I don’t want to be in the middle of the middle.”
“You make zero sense.”
“All the more reason to keep my mouth shut, am I right?” Blue grinned at me, and it was easy to see why all the boys loved him. He was charming when he wanted to be. But his grin faded into a more serious expression. “I need you to know that it’s worth it to let the right people in. Before Jax and Asher, I was pretty closed off. I had my reasons and I don’t regret protecting myself, but I would have regretted not making space in my life for Jax and Asher. So before you decide what to say or do, if anything at all, have a good long think about what kind of regret you can live with.”
“Pretty sure there’s only one kind of regret.”
“Not really. You can regret the things you have done. We all know what that’s like. But there’s also regretting the things you didn’t do, and the pain of not knowing is a special kind of burn.”
I sighed and closed my eyes, letting my head rest against the wall.
After a minute, I finally spoke. “Hey, Blue?”
“Yeah, Perry?”
“Remind me next time to just google shit to do on a date instead of asking you.”
“Happy to be of service.”
I could hear the humor in Blue’s voice, but I couldn’t make myself open my eyes. “You mean happy to be a menace.”
“That too.”
I heard Blue shift around on the couch, and then his feet padded toward the door to leave the room. “I’ll be a menace whenever you need, okay?”
Finally, I cracked an eye open and looked at him standing in the doorway, ready to leave but needing to know if he should or not.
“Okay,” I answered, silently promising him that I was okay now and would be okay later. I’d be even better when I figured out where to take Rex for our next date. With a sigh, I did what I should have done from the beginning and pulled out my phone to scour the internet for ideas.
THIRTEEN
REX
