Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 565(@200wpm)___ 452(@250wpm)___ 377(@300wpm)
She nods, licking her lips again, and it splits my focus into foggy tendrils. I squeeze my eyes closed for a beat to recapture the thread. “Because it’s a limited series, you’ll only really be tied up for about five weeks.”
“Tied up, huh?” Fizzy grins. “Sounds fun.”
“You’re trouble.”
She laughs. “I think that’s why you chose me.”
“I chose you because you’re beloved by your fan base. But yes, I am excited to do this in part because you’re also a bit mischievous.”
“Excited?” She drops her balled-up napkin and plants her elbows on the table. “That’s a new development.”
I take a bite, chew. “What can I say? I am continually evolving.”
“I see that.”
“I know this matters to you,” I tell her. “I want you to know it matters to me, too.”
Fizzy takes a long breath, opens her mouth to speak, and then seems to change track. “You said you moved here when you were fifteen?”
A flicker of unease quells the vibrating hum in my blood, and I take a bite to delay what I suspect will be a gentle but surgical interrogation. “Yes, that’s right.”
“And your mother is the Brit?”
I nod. “She lives with her parents now, just outside Blackpool, but she met my father when she was studying abroad in the States. She got pregnant, and my father wasn’t interested in being a father yet. He’d visit every year or so to pop in and tell her what she was doing wrong.”
“Wow, sounds like a nice guy.”
“He’s a mixture of unbearably selfish and unremittingly dutiful.”
She laughs at this. “Why’d you go live with him?” I narrow my eyes at her, calculating whether I want to get into it, and she smiles under the inspection. “What?” she asks. “Is this story escandaloso?”
“Perhaps a bit.”
“Oh, well now you have to tell me.”
“My mum and I were in a very bad car accident when I was twelve. We were both fine, eventually, but the entire thing really shook her up.”
Fizzy’s expression straightens. “Oh no.”
“For… a few years,” I explain, “Mum didn’t leave the house. I had to for school, of course, and to take on odd jobs. But she suffered from a great deal of anxiety. This whole period is when I got into film, so I can’t resent the solitude, but in hindsight I do see how much I missed of my adolescence.” Before this can veer too bleak, I wrap it up: “Anyway, my father visited when I was fifteen and didn’t like what he saw. By then he’d married and had a couple of kids with my stepmother, but eventually Mum conceded that I needed a change of scenery and agreed to let him take me until I was ready to go to university.”
“Do you ever go back to England?”
“Of course,” I say. “I spend some Christmases there. I speak to my mother regularly. I’d planned to move back after I’d graduated uni, but life had other plans.”
“And what about present day?” she asks. “Are you remarried? Out every night, living the hot single life?”
I clear my throat, frowning as I adjust the napkin on my lap. “I—no. Neither,” I admit. “My daughter is still quite young. I only have her on weekends, and I work late most weeknights—so I haven’t. I don’t. That is, I don’t date much.” I hear the stumbling clutter of my words and squint past her, to stare at a flock of birds picking at something on the sand.
“What’s her name?”
I’m grateful that she’s letting me move on. “Stefania Elena Garcia Prince.” Fizzy bites back a smile and I laugh in understanding. “I know. My last name always sounds like the sad friend at the party. She’s a trip, though. Part princess, part evil mastermind.”
“She sounds like my kind of girl.”
“I genuinely fear the day you two meet. I think Nostradamus wrote about it.”
When I look up at her, I register that she’s been studying me. Her dark eyes are wide and gently set on my face.
“Anyway, we should be talking about you, not me.”
She doesn’t look away as my gaze holds hers. It’s this, and the way her voice goes a little hoarse when she says, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” that make me suspect I am absolutely, irrevocably, and undeniably fucked.
thirteen FIZZY
I assume we all have the proverbial angel on one shoulder and devil on the other, but in my case, they’re very real, and the devil is a shouter.
I know that it is stupid to flirt with Connor. I know how absurd it is to develop sexy desires for this man in particular, but it’s been so long since I’ve been attracted to anyone that I feel like a starving dog staring at a T-bone.
Connor licks his lips, pulling them in between his teeth, and I realize he’s reacting to the weight of my stare. Blinking away, I focus my attention on the waves crashing into the smooth sand instead.