by Hazel Parker
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re acting like a brat.”
Jace rolled his eyes. “I was joking around,” he defended, but Jessica wasn’t buying it.
“No, you weren’t. You were being mean. For no reason.” She crossed her arms over her chest. Typical, he thought, that Jessica would be clueless about Adam flirting with her, but the second Jace tried to react, she had eyes like a hawk. “Adam is a really good guy.”
“Of course you’d think that.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Are you seriously that dense, Jessica?” he accused, unable to keep the volume of his voice down in his anger. “He likes you. He wants to fuck you. That’s why he’s being nice.”
Jessica’s cheeks turned scarlet. “It’s just like you to think that people can’t be nice just because they’re nice!” she shouted. He’d never seen her get angry like this before and almost felt a little fearful. She was tiny but mighty, and he wouldn’t put it past her to fight a little dirty. Before he could counter, she was taking an aggressive step toward him. “And so what if he does like me?”
“You know exactly ‘what.’ If you go flirting it up with guys, then—”
“—I’m not flirting with him!—”
“—then it’s over. Everyone finds out that you don’t have feelings for me and the whole engagement was for nothing.” He tried not to care when Jessica’s eyes surprisingly filled with tears, whether from frustration or upset or some combination. It was difficult to get inside her head, sometimes, even though she wore her heart on her sleeve. Was it that Jessica was impossible to read, or that Jace was just illiterate when it came to her feelings?
Suddenly, something seemed to catch Jessica’s eye, morphing her expression from one of righteous anger to one of concern. She pointed behind them, and Jace’s stomach sank—a paparazzi, one who had been standing far enough away that he couldn’t have heard specifics, but close enough to have gotten pictures of their argument and had probably caught the highlights that they’d yelled at one another.
“Hey, get out of here!” Jace shouted, taking a few intimidating steps toward the man before he ran off in the other direction too quickly to even think about catching him. “Well, shit.”
“Yeah, ‘shit,’” Jessica agreed. “What happens now?”
“Depends on what news source he works for, but… probably nothing good.” He watched her try to hide the fear on her face, but, as always, she was transparent to him. Even as much as he wanted to reassure her that everything would be okay, he wasn’t confident enough himself to say so. No matter what angle he thought about this from, he couldn’t think of a single way that they could get out of this without taking possibly irreparable damage.
As it turned out, the paparazzi that had overheard their conversation had not only apparently had superhuman hearing but had gotten some very close-up pictures of their fight, and by the next morning, their “breakup” was plastered all over the headlines. The double-edged sword that fame was, they’d only done this whole stunt to achieve notoriety, but the fact that they were no longer just a sitcom actor and some advertising eye-candy meant that people actually cared about the story. It was trending on social media sites and the covers of several tabloids. He couldn’t even decide if he was angry at Jessica or at himself, but he knew he was angry.
Coincidentally, it appeared that Jessica was, too.
“Before you say anything,” Jace took the defensive position, “this wasn’t all my fault.”
Jessica bristled. “What do you mean, it’s not your fault?” she demanded. “The whole fight was your fault!”
“I had a legitimate concern that I voiced to you.”
“You ‘voiced’ it to the whole world,” Jessica pointed out. “Jace, you’ve been famous for how long now? You know even better than I do that shit like this travels fast.” It was pretty rare to hear Jessica curse, so he knew that the assertion that the argument had been her fault, too, was grating on her. Likely, however, he knew that it wasn’t because she starkly believed that she didn’t have a hand in their current predicament, but because she believed that she was partially responsible and that made her feel guilty and anxious. He took a deep breath, ran his hands through his hair, and sat down on the bed next to her. Jessica moved to get up so that she didn’t have to sit beside him, but he tugged at her wrist gently, all the anger having dissipated, and it made her curious enough to remain where she was. He intertwined his hand in hers and stroked her palm gently.
“Look, the damage is done,” Jace reasoned. “I’m sorry. We both messed up. Is it worth arguing about?” Jessica’s jaw dropped, and he knew why as soon as he heard what he’d said in his ears—the apology. Jace had never apologized to anyone before in his professional adult life unless it was public and bullshit. Sure, he’d gone on television and rescinded tactless comments he’d made offhandedly when they created social media outrage or said he was sorry to producers whom he’d pissed off by acting entitled so as to continue a working relationship, but this was different. He didn’t want anything from Jessica except that she stopped making that worried face with those sad, green eyes. She looked so fragile and it not only wasn’t something he was used to seeing in her, but it was something that he didn’t like to see in her. He didn’t like the feeling of her being angry at him. He wanted her to forgive him.
“Yeah,” Jessica agreed dumbfoundedly, still blinking slowly in shock, “I guess it doesn’t matter. We’ve just got to figure out what we’re going to do. I’m sure Nora can get us a meeting with the magazine so we can clear this up and say it was a misunderstanding if you ask her to. Or we could go to a different tabloid. You two probably know the best course of action better than I do. ”
Jace shrugged. “Well, have you considered… not doing anything?” he asked. The question made him feel uneasy, like he was giving up something that he wanted, that he’d worked for, though he didn’t know what it was.
“What do you mean?”
“Our contract is up in another two weeks,” he explained. “Nora already said that we’re going to have to start dropping hints that we’re going to call the engagement off. Maybe we just… let this be the beginning of the end. If we’re asked about it, we just say it was a fight, and we worked things out, but we won’t deny it. Let people speculate whatever they want to.”
The imminence of the ending of their contract hadn’t fully hit him until that moment, and from the looks of it, Jessica hadn’t considered it all that much, either. She fiddled with her hands in her lap, not looking up from them to make eye contact with Jace.
“Oh, that’s… that’s true,” was the best she could manage. “We don’t have to do anything, I guess.”
Jace nodded. Something inside him was screaming that this didn’t feel right, that it wasn’t how he wanted to leave this conversation even though it made total logical sense. What was that voice? What did it want?
“This way, we don’t even have to stage anything major to make the breakup believable. It’s much more convenient.”
“Lucky us,” Jessica agreed, a hint of bitterness in her forced cheer. Now, she looked up at him and touched his face with her hand, rubbing his cheekbone with the soft pad of her thumb and gazing at him with a sad smile. “You really are smart, Jace Oliver. You always know how to get what you want.” He frowned as she stood, wanting to stop her and ask her what the hell that meant, but she was already walking toward the door, and he found himself, for once, at a loss for words.
Chapter Thirteen: Jessica
When Jace mentioned beginning the descent into their public breakup, a wave of emotions flooded over Jessica so intensely that she couldn’t even begin to pinpoint them. She’d always been good at knowing her feelings. Her real flaw wasn’t that she didn’t know what she wanted, but that she didn’t know how to get it, or that she wasn’t able to stomach the things she had to do to rise above competitors. However, she had always been achingly, painfully
aware of the things that her heart desired.
This time, she hadn’t allowed herself to piece together that she wanted Jace, likely because she already had him in certain aspects, until it was time for her to give him up. His suggestion to not make reparations to their spiraling, downfalling relationship was enough to spark intense disappointment. But she’d seen it coming; she’d agreed to it; she’d been anticipating and even looking forward to this moment from the second she’d set the pen down on the line of the contract that would bind her to Jace for the foreseeable future.
No, she thought. It wasn’t that she wanted Jace that made her sad. She could handle disappointment, and it wasn’t as if he’d just taken the rug out from under her and surprised her in the way that some of her past exes had done. It was that, wrapped up complexly in her feelings of wanting him was also an intense desire to be wanted by him, and that was what she’d convinced herself she might be able to achieve and was now seeing clearly that she could not.
Jace had looked completely unbothered by the breakup. Accelerating its pace had no effect on him, just like she’d thought it wouldn’t on her, and that hurt worse than if she’d just ran the contract out and allowed their time together to end after some staged fight. To think, she’d even allowed herself the fantasy that he might return her feelings.
Jace didn’t come after her as she calmly left their room, not immediately. In fact, she didn’t run into him again until dinner, despite intentionally trying to avoid him, when her cell phone began to buzz, and she glanced down at it to see his contact flash across the screen. Normally, she’d ignore it—she wanted to ignore it. But the contract made her press the little green phone icon.
“Jessica,” his deep voice greeted into the phone, just as he always did. No frills, no small talk. He was here to get to the point and be finished. “I want to have dinner with you.”
“You don’t have to,” she reminded him. “No one will be expecting us to—”
“I’m texting you the address of a restaurant,” he barreled on as if she hadn’t spoken. “Go up to the hotel room and get changed into something fancy, then meet me there. A cab will come to get you, so you’d better not be late.”
She looked up to the room and didn’t see him standing on the balcony, from which he would definitely be able to see her, so she had to assume he wasn’t in the room. “Where are you?”
“Just get dressed. Remember the dress you were wearing on the night I gave you the contract? I know it’s in your closet; I’ve seen it. Wear that.”
“Pushy,” Jessica joked, hoping that maybe he’d cave and tell her what he was planning, but she had no such luck.
“I’ll see you in forty-five minutes,” he dismissed before hanging up on her without another word. A bit irritably, she began to walk back to their hotel room, not recognizing the address he texted her as anywhere they’d been before and not having the time to look it up since she wanted to fix her hair from the windy day that had tossed it around. She also hadn’t bothered to reapply makeup after she’d removed the cakey amounts of foundation that were required for filming, so she covered up the dark spots under her eyes (neither of them had slept well the night before, not after the fight) and applied some mascara and a dark red lipstick to go with the dark dress that she was lucky she’d even brought with her. Why had he paid so much attention to her wardrobe to know she had it?
By the time the bellhop called the room to tell her that the cab was here and she needed to go, Jessica had just finished putting on her shoes and a necklace to complete the outfit. After all, no matter how much she felt like doing nothing but curling up in bed with a pint of ice cream for a week, there was always the annoying potential for paparazzi. That might be exciting once she was famous for her own movies, but when she was only garnering attention because she was attached to Jace’s arm, it was torture. The cab ride took fifteen minutes, so she knew that he was bringing her to a place that she’d never been before, as all the places that they frequented were within walking distance of the hotel in that same amount of time.
When the taxi pulled up outside the place, she quite honestly felt underwhelmed. Everything Jace did was enormous. She frankly didn’t know if he knew how to make a gesture that wasn’t sweeping, but at this moment, she discovered that he could, in fact, do that, because instead of bringing her to a club full of people or a huge, expensive restaurant that would be filled with other stars, this place was small and elegant. The windows were dim enough that she couldn’t see inside, making her wonder for a moment if she even had the right address. However, when she repeated it to the driver, he assured her that’s where they were, so she thanked him, attempted to pay (but found out that Jace already had, plus tip), and walked up the long drive to the restaurant doors.
Inside, even if she’d expected some kind of magic to make the interior bigger than the exterior, she found that the whole place was quaint and quiet. So quiet, in fact, that it quickly came to her attention that there was not another soul in the restaurant. Curiously, she looked around for Jace. Ukulele music played softly from the back of the restaurant—a live band, if she weren’t mistaken—and she followed it, wondering why there appeared to be no servers or other patrons. She finally approached a staircase that led her up to an upper level, which she climbed, and at the top, she finally was able to see Jace, who was sitting outside on the terrace full of lights. She waved at the band as she passed them and opened the door. Jace, dressed in a tuxedo and with his hair slicked back in a put-together way she’d never seen from him before, looked up at her and smiled.
“What’s all this?” Jessica asked, smiling widely. “I thought we were going to let the fake relationship end.”
Jace nodded. “That’s why I rented out the whole restaurant; so no one could see us,” he replied. “That way, there’s no pressure. If we have a great time, we have a great time, and if we fight, we fight. Either way, there’s no one here to tell us what to do.” Jessica’s face was brilliantly shining, her grin more genuine than any she’d ever shown to Jace. The rosy gaze she’d perfected over the past month and a half was now genuine as she looked over their private moment, at an unguarded Jace who wasn’t putting on a show for anyone but her.
“It’s beautiful. I can’t believe you did all this.”
“You’re beautiful,” he returned, standing to pull her chair out for her. She sat across from him and bit her lower lip, unable to mask how happy she felt.
“So,” Jessica mused, “I’m about to see the real, unfiltered Jace. No audience to impress.”
He laughed. “I’d have to work harder to impress you than I would for any camera.”
“I just mean that… I guess this is the first time I feel like I’m seeing the real you. I’m not sure how I’ll feel about it.” Part of her, she would only admit to herself, was worried that she only liked a farce of Jace, someone who was doing what he had to in order to meet an end. Almost like an employee schmoozing with their boss, this was work for him. After all, he was an actor, and a good one at that. It was entirely possible that he could be completely ingenuine to her and she would be none the wiser.
“You’ve seen almost nothing but the real me,” he replied. “Since I got you to sign the contract, I dropped the ‘nice because I had to be’ act. I haven’t spent a single moment trying to convince you I’m something I’m not.”
Jessica took a sip of the wine that he’d ordered. He had a habit of ordering for her, for planning out their schedule, for surprising her with opportunities disguised as obligations. However, she realized, just as he claimed not to have been pretending, she’d never felt any pressure, at least not in private, to appease him, either. When she was angry, she told him; when she didn’t like something, she told him. In fact, ironically, the businesslike arrangement of their relationship was something that allowed her to overcome the fact that she tended to be timid and yielding with her boyfriends in the past, never correcting them when they did something for her that she didn’t like o
r forgot things that were important to her. She’d been so focused on seeing him as almost a business superior to report to that she didn’t have to worry about whether he might still find her attractive if she wasn’t trying so hard or if he’d think she was pushy when she argued.
“Well, that makes two of us,” she agreed.
