by Grant, Pippa
My mother makes the best cinnamon rolls on the entire planet. I’ve flown home overnight from Australia before just to be there when she pulled them out of the oven. When we were kids, everyone knew when she made cinnamon rolls, because you could smell them baking all the way down to the end of the street at the Wilsons’ house, and she always made enough to feed an army, because that’s how many kids would show up on the doorstep looking for Saturday morning cinnamon rolls.
But when I head for the kitchen, Ellie blocks me. “Tell me you’re not pulling the Hollywood fake relationship thing with my neighbor,” she says in that deadly tone of voice that suggests there’s one right answer and one wrong answer that will result in a titty twister to end all titty twisters.
But it still doesn’t stop me from fantasizing about Sarah, which I’ve been trying very hard not to do all morning.
Those eyes. Those intense, wary eyes. And don’t get me started on the curves hiding under her clothes.
She has me fascinated. Which is dangerous, because I know she has secrets.
“What? Fake relationship with Sarah? No. You know me better than that.”
She crosses her arms and demonstrates how much she’s learned about being a mom in the year since she and Wyatt started dating seriously.
Shit, she’s good at that don’t give me your bullshit glare.
“What?” I ask again.
“The apology video?” she prompts.
“She wanted to spread the word about giraffes. I wanted to apologize. Win-win.” And my growing belief that it was that simple, that she’s not interested in anything else, is both refreshing and frustrating, because I think I like her.
“Have you talked to your team this morning?” Ellie asks.
“Hey, nudie dude, your brains are here,” Davis calls.
“Was he always this not-funny?” I ask Ellie.
“Were you always this sensitive? That was hilarious. And I take it that’s a no to talking to your team yet.”
“It’s Sunday. I told them to take the day off.” Not that they listened, because we’re in crisis mode, but it was a nice dream.
“At this rate, I’ll take a Sunday off in three years,” Charlie says. She stops in the doorway too and looks me up and down, her no-bullshit meter also clearly pinging high today. “You’re not answering your phone.”
“You want one of my mom’s cinnamon rolls? They go great with bad news. Did I miss Vaughn?”
“No, and it’s not all bad news.”
That means it’s mostly bad news with a side of sunshine. “New plan. Cancel all my appearances for the next month, and I’ll go into hiding in Shipwreck while we tell people I’m in rehab.”
“Everyone who invited you to appearances for the next four months canceled them already. We’re at a point of having to make up an event for you to have an appearance at if you’re ever going to be seen in public again.”
“So…we just need to spread the rehab rumors?”
“It’s astonishing to me that you run a billion-dollar fashion empire with this kind of attitude,” Ellie says.
I grunt. It won’t be a billion-dollar fashion empire for long at this rate.
“He’s a lot smarter when we’re in Milan or Paris,” Charlie tells her. “Being home turns him into a teenager who just wants to play video games again.”
I’d argue that that’s not fair, except it’s true. “Home’s for kicking back and relaxing. I work four hundred eighty-seven days of the year, so when I get my twenty-six to relax, I relax. Work hard, play hard.”
“Until you fuck up hard,” Charlie points out.
“Video didn’t work?”
“Worked too well.”
Ellie glares harder.
Charlie gives me the you’re so screwed smile.
And I realize that whatever’s going on, cinnamon rolls won’t solve it.
Nine
Sarah
Mackenzie shows up shortly after noon with peace offerings in the form of caramel corn and takeout burgers. And because I would’ve posted the video by now myself anyway—maybe edited, maybe not—and I still haven’t told her the truth about where I grew up, I let her in and hug her tight.
“Why are there two black cars with scary looking men parked across the street?” she asks me.
“Security. In case I get doxed. Charlie set it up.”
“Doxed?”
“Doxed. When the crazies on the internet find someone’s address and post it so weird stalker people can come by to see if Beck Ryder’s really my boyfriend.” I roll my eyes like it’s no big deal, but the internet is a scary place with scary people sometimes.
Can’t deny that I was grateful to get Charlie’s message this morning that they’d put extra security in the neighborhood as a precaution.
Especially after I logged onto Twitter to see how bad it was when I got home a couple hours ago.
Currently fifty-fifty, with half the world wondering if Beck Ryder’s apology was sincere enough to result in me crushing on him, and the other half of the world in total chaos arguing still over whether Beck or I are the uglier, stupider, assholier, or more desperate of the pair of us.
No one speculating about where I came from or who my parents are.
I just might’ve pulled this off.
“You two were really cute on the video,” my best friend tells me, leaving no doubt where she falls on the scale. “I can totally see tons of people making the same mistake as everyone at the nature center this morning. Not that an underwear model could ever be another Trent Fornicus—I mean, they stuff the briefs before they shoot the pictures, right?—but it’s your fifteen minutes of fame and you’re using it to save the giraffes.”
That’s it.
That’s my opening.
I suck in a deep breath to tell her, but she impulsively hugs me. “Seriously, I’m so proud of you. Where’s your jersey? The game’s on in ten minutes.”
And the moment is gone.
I change, pop popcorn, use some of my mom’s old meditation techniques to forget Mackenzie brought up Trent and to clear my mind enough to focus on how I’m going to tell her I’ve basically been lying to her for almost a decade, and we’ve just turned the TV on when she leaps to her feet and dashes to the kitchen.
“Wha—” I start, but then I hear voices at the back door.
Now familiar voices.
“Hey. Am I late?”
“No! Come in! Come in! Wait. What’s that? We don’t eat cotton candy during baseball games. It’s bad luck. Throw it away. But is that Fletchers caramel corn? Oooh, we haven’t tried that yet.”
Meda’s once again sitting on the top of the recliner. She gives me the seriously, the underwear model again? stare, and her blue eye looks a little more irritated than her amber eye, which makes me wonder if she, too, is having conflicting thoughts about him.
I shrug and ignore the little blip in my pulse.
He’s not here for me.
He’s here because it looks good.
Except…why come in the back door if that’s the case? Isn’t the point to get caught coming to see me?
Mackenzie shoves him into the living room. “Sarah! Look who wants to watch the game with us.”
He smiles a self-deprecating smile that exudes sexual masculinity and the suggestion that he knows what to do with his equipment, which I also know is most likely a Hollywood lie, or if not, I can at least take comfort in that old rumor so I don’t feel like I might be missing out on something.
“Gotta go with what works to keep the team winning,” he tells me.
“That’s your line?” I ask.
“You remember that year they went to the World Series?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Sarah grew up in Oregon,” Mackenzie says, and I wince, which she doesn’t notice at all. “I converted her.”
“Oregon, huh?”’
Oregon, Los Angeles, it’s all the same. Except not really, but for my purpos
es, it counts.
Until today.
I really, really need to tell her. But not with Beck here. “Mm-hmm.”
He grins, because that’s apparently all he ever does. “Portland’s awesome.”
“Mm,” I agree again. “Game’s starting.”
Mackenzie shoos me over so Beck can sit in the same seat he was in last night, which puts his long frame right up next to my padded hips.
He smells like bergamot and fresh cut grass today, and he’s sporting thicker scruff than he had last night. If he slept as poorly as I did, you can’t tell by looking at him.
He pops the lid on the popcorn tin and angles it toward me. “For luck?”
Of course he got the kind with caramel and cheese corn mixed together. That’s my favorite.
“Where’s Charlie?” I ask while I help myself, because it’s not weird to be sitting here with an underwear model who insulted me on Twitter two nights ago, let me taser him yesterday morning and then came back for an apology video last night, and randomly showed up for good luck for our favorite baseball team today.
And by it’s not weird, I definitely mean a wormhole opened in my living room.
I wonder if he’s irritated by loud chewers, because I don’t think I can chew popcorn quietly, and it’s going to be crunching in his ear, and that has to be the least attractive sound in the universe.
Not that I care if I’m attractive to him.
Just like maybe he’s a loud chewer and that’ll be perfect because I’m not attracted to him at all.
Or curious about why he’s really here.
“Charlie’s on a conference call with my management team,” he tells me.
“So you escaped?”
“Actually, they chased me off so I didn’t fuck anything up.”
“How’d Mackenzie know you were coming?”
“Psychic powers.” He grins at me, and I swear that makes thirty-two panty-melting grins in four minutes, and the real dig is that I’m wearing RYDE panties, because they are so damn comfortable that I couldn’t bring myself to burn them with the decreasing number of women posting videos on Twitter of themselves doing just that to stand with me in solidarity.
I’m betraying my biggest supporters.
But it’s not like burning my panties takes any dollar bills out of his bank account. I already bought them. I won’t buy more.
“Yes! That’s how you start a game!” Mackenzie pumps a fist in the air. The Fireballs just led off with a single.
That’s remarkably positive of them.
“You ever catch a game in person?” Beck asks.
“Every bobblehead doll game,” my best friend confirms. “And Sunday afternoon games when they’re at home.”
“They have a home series starting tomorrow,” he muses.
I stop chewing slowly—and therefore quietly—to shoot a glance at him.
Is he implying he wants to go to a Fireballs game with us?
And if so, why?
“You have any root beer?” he asks suddenly. “When I was growing up, we’d all crash in Cash’s basement with root beer and caramel corn and watch Friday night games. Man, good times.”
“Ohmygod, I love Cash Rivers,” Mackenzie breathes. “He was my favorite. I even saw him as the cheetah man in that really bad first movie he made after—wait. You’re not going to tell him I said that, are you?”
“Not as long as you don’t tell anyone Sarah got me with a taser yesterday.”
“The whole world already knows that, because it’s on your video,” Mackenzie reminds him.
“Huh.”
Great. Now she has no leverage at all for Beck not telling Cash Rivers that she thinks her Hollywood idol’s first movie sucked, which I know isn’t a big deal, but she doesn’t, and her face is going beet red.
“Airsh Ark ivva didge,” I say around a mouthful of caramel corn that I can’t chew quietly to save my life.
“Sweet,” he says, and he hops up and heads for the kitchen.
“What?” Mackenzie hisses.
I chew fast and gulp down the popcorn. “The Barq’s is in the fridge,” I hiss back.
“That is not what you said.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Oh my god, it sounded like you were summoning a popcorn demon.”
“It did not.”
“It did. And popcorn demons are not the positive spiritual energy the Fireballs need to win today.”
Okay, she has me there.
“You ladies need anything?” Beck pops his head back into the living room. “Root beer? Man, you’ve got shoestring fries in the freezer. I haven’t had those in years. Fucking road diet.”
This is getting weird. “Please. Make yourself at home.”
“Throw some bacon in at the same time,” Mackenzie tells him. “We’ll melt gouda over them and toss on bacon bits and then Sarah will pretty much be yours for the taking.”
“Mackenzie,” I hiss.
“What? I want to see you taser him again when he blatantly tries to get in your pants. Because he’s still no Trent. I mean, who can ever be Trent?”
I wince and try to give myself a pep talk. Just tell her, Sarah. Tell her why you really broke up with Trent.
She misunderstands my wince and she also winces. “Sorry,” she whispers. “But I bet he’s not.”
Beck, who of course has overheard everything, grins and shakes his head, then disappears back into the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” I hiss at her.
“Testing him,” she hisses back. “I realized his PR people might have told him to schmooze you because of so many people shipping you.”
“What-ing us?”
“Shipping. Sarah. They’re fantasizing about you dating.”
“What? No. People don’t do that.”
She gives me the duh, yes they do look, and I realize I can’t actually argue that people don’t do it in general, because I can’t count the number of times growing up I’d hear at school that my classmates wished my parents would get divorced so one or the other of them could marry whichever movie star they happened to have just been in a movie with.
Okay, really, I just didn’t know it had a name.
Because fine, half the Twitterverse was speculating that Beck and I are dating. But not wishing. There’s a difference.
Also, a full twenty percent are still pissed at him and another thirty percent think I’m too fugly—yes, fugly, because ugly by itself isn’t good enough—to ever actually score a hot guy like Beck, and also that women need to stay out of science.
“Okay, fine, people ship people. But not geeks like me,” I amend.
I might look all nice and normal, watching baseball with my superstitious best friend, but I was up well past midnight last night playing Vikings in Space while checking in on Persephone, and I’m legitimately itching to get back to it, because my Viking captainess just made contact with a new species of aliens who can either bend time or hypnotize people with folk music, and I’m not sure which yet.
Also, the last time Mackenzie made me go to a wine and paint night, while everyone else was making spring flowers, I might’ve inadvertently painted a Pokémon.
“You’re a geek accidentally involved with an underwear model,” she whispers. “And you were so freaking adorable in that video. In case I haven’t said it sixteen times yet.”
“Whoa, you have real bacon,” Beck says from the kitchen. “Not turkey bacon. What other goodies do you have hidden in here?”
Mackenzie flails her fingers wide and waves her hands in the air like every excited valley girl ever depicted on TV.
“That’s not fake,” she whispers.
“Stop it,” I warn her. “Give him three weeks, and he won’t even remember my name. And, as you pointed out, he’s still no Trent Fornicus. Oh, look. Stafford’s pitching. You think his shoulder’s going to hold out for the whole season?”
“Yes. And he’s not going to forget your name.”
“We st
ill have nothing in common.”
“Holy shit, that’s a really fucking cool Firefly print. Like when they were babies. Where’d you get that?” Beck calls from the kitchen.
Mackenzie smirks. “Yep. Nothing at all in common.”
Ten
Beck
I hate being an asshole.
Yet here I am, falling in love with Sarah’s kitchen and knowing we’re doomed. I can’t stay here forever with her shoestring fries and real center cut bacon and this fucking amazing artwork from my favorite space cowboy show.
And when she finds out why I’m here, I’m basically losing her forever.
Her and her kitchen.
And those big dark eyes.
It’s like the taser totally glued them to the front of my memory lobes, and even knowing that I have a really bad track record with women, and that Sarah has secrets, I still can’t help mourning the loss of her and her house and food and impeccable taste.
“No, no, no!” Mackenzie moans from the living room. “Beck! Get back here! They’re losing while you’re not watching!”
Sarah’s cat sashays into the room, gives me a disdainful look like she knows I’m supposed to ask Sarah if she’d consider doing another video with me, or go out in public with me, or make sure to use the magic phrase we’re just friends whenever anyone asks this week.
I want to tell my team to fuck off, that this is a terrible idea, except it’s not.
Vaughn bought the video too. Hook, line, and sinker. We chatted an hour ago, and now that he’s not pissed and calling me a backwoods woman-hater, he asked if I’m actually into her, or if I’m just doing it to clear my reputation.
I can’t honestly tell him I don’t like her. I do. Do I trust her enough to date her? Not so much. But I like her.
And I want this foundation to work, so when he told me to keep her happy, then you’re damn right I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep her happy.
Do I feel guilty? Yeah. It’s not cool to keep dragging her into this.
But it’s for kids who don’t have the same opportunities I had when I was growing up. Kids who need support and help to get involved with team sports and have a place to go after school, and who wouldn’t have a chance to play on a team without us.
