Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 68987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68987 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
“Why don’t you share your thoughts on last night’s reading?” Professor Duncan offered.
“Oh. Uh, well, I really enjoyed it,” I said. “I’ve never seen an integrated view of intellectual development described that way, especially regarding adaptive skills.”
He nodded. “Well, it’s clear you read the assignment. Just try to pay attention here in class, too, all right?”
“Of course. I’m so sorry, again.”
It was the cherry on top of a humiliating sundae. Prof was right—I really had done the reading, late last night, bleary-eyed and tired as all fucking hell. I’d only gotten four hours of sleep, but I always did the reading. I was also never the kind of person to look at my phone during class. But ever since I’d started following the Fixer Brothers show page on social media, I was getting more and more addicted. Most of the posts were simple, typical home renovation snippets, the kind I’d watched my mom love for years. Gleaming new kitchen counters, back decks, or dining rooms. But every morning, I checked to see if they’d posted any new footage of me and Charlie.
As soon as class ended, I navigated through my phone to some old dating app I hadn’t used in at least two years. I couldn’t believe they’d found my profile on there, but sure enough, it was still there and definitely said that I was straight. I deleted it, my heart pounding in my chest.
I dialed Charlie’s number as I walked out of the building onto the grassy quad.
“Jax,” he said over the phone.
“Have you seen the comments?”
“Yeah. Not good,” he confirmed. “Maybe it’s not going to work out. People are too goddamn savvy these days. It’s annoying. But we definitely drummed up some engagement, right?”
My chest tightened all over again, worse than before. Fuck that. Somehow, the idea of calling off the whole fake boyfriend thing sounded ten times worse than anything else. I furrowed my brow, kicking away a stray acorn on the path in front of me.
“What? Not going to work out?” I asked him. “I thought we’d just have to double down.”
“Double down?” he asked.
I could hear the high-pitched sounds of power tools from over the phone, and I knew Charlie must be at a job site, hard at work renovating someone’s home. It was easy to forget that Charlie had a whole life outside of all of this—a successful career and full world. I’d been spending all week daydreaming about our kiss, but to him, it was probably just a blip on the radar.
“Well, we could just… make people believe us,” I told him. “Go out in public more. Be spotted by random fans. Do more stuff together.”
“Kiss each other more, you mean?” he joked. “With big ol’ cameras shoved in our faces?”
“Yes,” I said, ignoring the fact that I was starting to blush. “We should kiss more. Probably a lot more. Or, I don’t know, maybe grind up against each other on a dance floor, or something.”
Charlie’s warm laugh came through the phone as I squinted out into the sunlight on the quad. “I can tell you with one hundred percent honesty that I never, in a million years, thought that I would hear you say those words to me.”
“Of course that’s what I want,” I blurted out. I swallowed, checking myself. “I mean, it’s what the show publicity needs. And I have no shame in that game.”
“Wow,” he said softly. “I was worried that you’d be upset by the comments.”
“Not upset, really,” I told him. “I just want to prove them wrong.”
He hummed. “So you’d do more of it, huh?”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “I’d do just about anything for you, Charlie.”
It was a strange thing to say to someone who’d basically just been an acquaintance and a bar customer until a few weeks ago. But somewhere along the way, whether it was in the last few weeks or slowly, over the past couple of months, Charlie really had become something more than that to me.
I’d seen him go through hell emotionally. And now, I’d seen him try to pick up the pieces of his life and start to improve, bit by bit, in an astonishing transformation. I admired that more than I could express. Charlie had become someone I wanted to forge a real friendship with.
Now I just had to find a way to open myself up to him. Easier said than done, when I had no fucking clue what was going on in my own mind and heart half the time.
“Tomorrow night, then?” Charlie asked. “Meet me at the brewery around seven?”
I raked a hand through my hair, already dead tired thinking about everything I had to do. I had a huge test for Social Psych at four o’clock in the afternoon tomorrow, and after today’s practice and classes, I was planning on cram-studying all night, knocking out tomorrow’s classes and a tutoring session before the test.