“I don’t want to go out,” I whined.

Sam yanked a tee shirt over his head, covering up everything that I’d been perving at moments ago, which was enough of a reason to get pissed off. Abs like that should not have been covered. Though the tee molded over them perfectly.

“Yes you do. Because you’re going out with me,” he teased, pulling his hair into a bun. “And everyone else, of course. Plus crazy Emma is going to be there, so we’ll get ringside seats to see what happens with her and Wyatt. Babe, we do not want to miss that.”

I frowned as I slipped my heel on. My new heel.

Lexie and I had gone shopping today.

Some kind of exposure therapy, I guessed. The cameras were there. People stared. Yelled my name. Asked about Sam. I felt sick the entire time, even with my empty stomach, but I smiled through it. Pretended I was okay.

Lexie didn’t believe me. Which was why she bought me the shoes.

I protested, despite their utter beauty. She was not buying me $700 shoes. I tried to tell her as much, very firmly. It hadn’t worked.

I took the damn shoes.

And they did make me feel a little better.

Especially when Sam saw them, ripped all of my clothes off and fucked me wearing only the heels.

But now I was filled with dread all over again.

Sam yanked me to my expensively shod feet, his eyes hungrily roving over every inch of me.

I had been tempted to wear some kind of shapeless and tent-like paper bag. Very tempted.

Just like I’d been very tempted to get in a taxi and then on a plane to anywhere but here.

The images in that magazine taunted me as I flipped through the hangers of dresses I’d put in Sam’s closet.

Lexie’s words had played alongside the ones written in that dreaded article.

It was hard. Extremely effing hard, but I put on my favorite little black dress. It was simple, strapless and tight. It showed all my curves and sucked them in at the same time, a marriage between a dress and a pair of Spanx. Though it showed a lot, it covered most of me, finishing just above my ankles, which was the perfect place to showcase my fabulous new shoes.

I had put on a giant pair of earrings that had tassels so long they brushed the bare skin of my shoulders. My hair was piled up in a messy bun at the top of my head. I’d decided on light makeup and vibrant pink lipstick.

If I was going out, I needed to do it properly. The magazines wanted to call me a whale? Fine, but I was going to be a whale with great style and a contour so sharp it could cut a bitch.

“Okay, I’ve totally changed my mind,” he said, his eyes traveling back to my face. “You’re right. We’re not going out. I’ll be fighting them off the entire night. Then I’ll have to kill someone for coveting what’s mine, and it’ll be a big thing,” he said seriously.

I laughed. Genuinely that time, not the fake one I’d been getting extremely good at lately.

Sam glared, resting his hands lightly on my hips. “I’m serious, baby. You look too good. I’m worried about my well-being.”

“Your well-being?”

“Well, yes. Because I’m obviously going to have to fight every single guy in the joint. And while I do not doubt my fighting prowess or my stamina, I’m still at least going to break a few fingers.”

I laughed again, for longer that time.

“Well, you know I am all about staying in,” I probed.

He squared his shoulders, moving to grasp my hands in his. “No, I have a surprise for you,” he said. “And I’ll brave broken fingers if I have to. I kind of love you, you know.”

“I kind of love you too,” I whispered.

And that was it. Lexie was right. The sweet canceled out the bitter.

For a time, at least.

* * *

“Do you know what he’s doing?” Emma asked as Sam strutted onto the stage.

“Does anyone ever know what Sam’s doing?”

“Touché.”

I glanced at her. She’d been sucking down drinks like they were going out of fashion and she hadn’t even begun to slur her words. I’d had one beer and my tongue already felt heavy in my mouth.

That might have been on account of the empty stomach.

She’d been drinking like a fish in an attempt to deal with the death stares Wyatt had been directing her way since she’d arrived two hours ago. She’d studiously ignored him when she’d greeted everyone with hugs and kisses.

“Babe!” she’d half screamed when she got to me, yanking me into her skinny arms. “I’m so fucking happy that you’re here and the planets have finally aligned to bring you two together.” She glanced between Sam and me, grinning. “I’ve known it since the start. It was meant to be. Like Romeo and Juliet, you know, without all those freaky suicide pacts.”

She had used Lexie and me as human shields throughout the night. And Lexie and Killian had left early, which meant I was the only female left to help her out, apart from Jenna, the band’s publicist. She was much like Mark, giving me a handshake and a friendly hello before focusing on her phone once more. Though she was good at her job; not a single photo had been taken of us in the little bar.

It wasn’t exactly where I’d expected, not in the middle of Hollywood or with a red carpet, or any carpet outside. Just a sidewalk and a rusty sign reading Alfie’s atop the door. There wasn’t even valet parking.

Nor were there any camera-toting assholes, as Sam called them.

Which I thought was by design.

The bar was small, unassuming and had been barely full when we’d arrived. The crowd had steadily grown as the night wore on, but no one really bothered our table. Killian stared anyone down who did so. Then when he left, the residual menacing footprint of his presence seemed to deter most. Sam had kept his chair close to mine, dangling his arm over the back of it casually, stroking the back of my neck every now and then, kissing me when the mood took him.

He was not afraid of PDA, nor ashamed to make sure everyone in the bar knew I was his and he was mine.

A few minutes ago, he’d leaned forward on his chair, mouth going to my ear. “Time for your surprise, babe,” he murmured.

Then he’d kissed me. French.

And it seemed that I didn’t mind PDA at all.

He parted the crowd like some rock star version of Moses, and they swallowed him back up once they let him pass.

I found myself becoming antsy the second he went out of sight, and I both hated and loved that.

Sam stood up on the stage, the bright lights illuminating every part of him, his ink reflecting with the light, his form carved from the shadows behind him. “All right, team, I’m sure you know me,” he spoke softly into the mic.

The returning roar of the crowd was not a murmur. Multiple girls screamed. I winced slightly.

Sam grinned wickedly. “Yeah, you know me. I’m usually the drummer of a little group called Unquiet Mind. But for tonight, I’m here to sing a little song for y’all. Be kind, it’s my first time. You’re popping my cherry.”

More screams.

Sam waited patiently for the noise to die down.

Emma nudged me. “Did you know he was doing this?” she whispered.

I shook my head.

She wordlessly slid a tequila shot over to me.

I downed it without hesitation.

“Be nice to me. I’m not as good on the six-string as my girl Lexie,” he said, jostling the guitar on his shoulder. “But I’m way better than Wyatt.” He winked again.

Then his eyes scanned the crowd. Like I was some kind of magnet and he was metal, they fastened on me, melting away the masses, the screams. Everything was silent. Apart from him.

“This is for my girl. Yeah, I’m off the market and happily so. And also, she’s totally and utterly mine. I’ll kill anyone who thinks differently.” He grinned with half humor, half menace. “And I’m serious about that. I’ve got a gun and everything.”

“For fuck’s sake, he’s just assured me I’ll be doing damage control on that one all night,” Jenna moaned next to me.

I barely heard it. Or anything.

Especially when he began to strum, began to sing.

I didn’t know what it was immediately, but afterward, I played the original Chris Cornell played live: “Thank You.”

And everyone paused. Like, everyone. It was a strange thing watching the man you loved stand up in front of a crowd and have them scream at him. I’d seen it before on television, in the magazines, but it was something else entirely to see it in person.

So there was that.

And then there was watching him literally bring the crowd to a standstill.

Sure, everyone was shocked to see the rogue drummer known for causing trouble and epitomizing rock ‘n’ roll by behaving badly standing there singing and playing a guitar.

But it wasn’t just that. He was playing. Above playing. His voice was indescribable. Husky, low and pleasing, fragrancing the air with the verbal version of his scent.

When you listen to songs, you only half listen to them. I did that. Kind of like I was half living my mind, until Sam. This Sam, singing this song. The power of it and Sam’s connection to it grabbed every person in the room like it was an entirely separate beast, clutching them in its grasp, demanding they not just hear but listen.

To feel.

Every single word, every single sentence it belonged to, and witness someone’s suffering at feeling this so intensely that their body couldn’t contain it. They physically had to put it somewhere, anywhere, so it wouldn’t kill them. So they put it into a song.

And he was singing it to me.

Like he’d written it. Like he was feeling every single one of those words. That they were filling him up. That love was filling him up.

The crowd didn’t exist. That magazine article didn’t exist. Simon didn’t exist. The worries about the reality of this working, of how I was going to make this work, didn’t exist.

It was like his voice, that song, was the audible version of Xanax.

The audible version of Nirvana.

“Okay, I don’t think anyone’s even going to remember the gun comment now,” Jenna hissed happily, the song touching her. Her, someone who, up until now, I hadn’t even been sure had a heart. I’d been entertaining the idea that she was one of the latest and most lifelike robots that Sam had bought along with all of his other electronic toys.

Even through my amazement, I barely even acknowledged her.

I didn’t have the ability or the emotional capacity to acknowledge anything but the words coming out of Sam’s mouth. Out of his heart.

Sam made sure he spent a lot of time letting me know what I meant to him. Trying to tear down the walls I’d created, that the world and my shitty circumstances had created.

Among other things, I worried he’d get sick of trying, decide I was too much work. That I wasn’t worth it. He literally had girls falling at his feet. Easy girls. Girls who would give him everything he needed, everything he wanted without difficulty.

Without drama.

Without the inconvenience of my feelings and the reality of them. Because that was what true love really was—an inconvenience, constantly informing, impacting and changing your path in a way you never could’ve expected. And it would ensure that your life was never your own as long as the other person existed and as long as that love existed.

No matter how many times he said things to the contrary, that always lived there in the corner of my mind, embroiled with my self-consciousness I’d nurtured my entire life.

That song, him singing it to me in front of the bar, in front of the world, it did something that his private words could not.

It changed something.

Changed everything.

It didn’t wipe all my worries and insecurities away completely—nothing could do that. Humans couldn’t exist without insecurities and worries. It was part of our nature.

But it shrank them. Substantially.

So I could breathe around them.

I didn’t even realize he’d stopped singing until the roar of the small crowd started ringing in my ears.

Until the crowd parted once more and spat him back out.

And then he made it to me.

Yanked me into his arms.

Into his universe.

“You get it now, babe?” he murmured, the softness of his voice cutting through the screaming of the crowd around us.

I looked into his eyes. Into his universe. And I saw that it was me.

I was his universe. So it was okay for him to be mine.

“Yeah,” I yelled back to him. “Yeah, I get it now.”

* * *

One Week Later

“This is all kinds of fucked up... just the way I like it.”

It took me a second to tear my eyes away from the ruthless torture scene captivating the sickest depths of my imagination.

Sam was standing in the corner of the living room, arms crossed and grinning at the screen, then at me.

Wyatt and I had discovered our mutual love for Game of Thrones and he had come over to shoot the shit with Sam, who had gone away on a phone call and we decided to have a mini marathon in his prolonged absence.

“What is this and why haven’t I watched it?” he asked.

“Because your attention span is that of a gnat and you couldn’t follow the storyline if you had Gina’s panties to lead the way,” Wyatt snapped. “Now shut the fuck up, we’re trying to watch.”

I couldn’t help but grin slightly at Wyatt’s words. A grin that turned into a full on giggle as Sam stomped over to Wyatt and clipped him on the back of the head. Wyatt’s head dodged as he tried to move to watch the scene. Sam held steady.

“The only one that gets to talk about my woman’s panties is me, got it?” He glared at Wyatt, who glared back and then nodded. Not because he actually agreed but more likely because he wanted Sam to get out of his way.

And he did. By making his way over to me and effortlessly lifting me from my spot on the sofa so he could sit with me in his arms.

He kissed the side of my neck.

“I will be inspecting those panties in great detail when this shit is done, just FYI,” he whispered.

My stomach dipped with desire, chasing away hunger pangs.

I sucked in a breath, eyes on the screen.

“Okay,” I whispered back.

* * *

I’d gotten up to get water when it happened. One second I was talking to Wyatt about the possibility of a Catlyn Stark reincarnation while Sam muttered about “being surrounded by total fucking nerds,” the next I was staring at a blurry ceiling without any knowledge of how I got there.

Since I was staring at the ceiling, my fuzzy mind still logically thought I should have been lying on a cold and uncomfortable surface, that surface being the ground, since I was staring at the ceiling and all.

That was not the case. In fact, I was encased in a both warm and comfortable cocoon of muscle that was hard and soft at the same time.

Then I was no longer staring at the ceiling, I was staring into the eyes I recognized. The face they were attached to was slightly blurry, but I recognized it as Sam. He was stark and chiseled while the rest of the background around him was like a fuzzy television screen in between the channels.

His features were contorted into pure worry, as if the carefree smile of before had never even existed.

“Gina,” he demanded, his voice shaking with urgency.

I didn’t answer because my tongue felt limp and swollen in my mouth, I wasn’t completely sure I could form words with it.

“Babe?” he probed. “Talk to me.”

In slow motion, his head moved to someone who existed in that world between the channels.

“Wyatt, where the fuck is that ambulance?”

A low and muffled voice replied.

It was like I was only tuned into one station, the Sam station, the rest was just static.

Somewhere in the middle of the static reply I began to regain comprehension. Ambulance. Me on the ground. In Sam’s arms.

Fuck.

I struggled to push my lead limps up, but like my tongue, they were too heavy to use for their intended purposes.

But now my tongue felt a little better, a little more usable.

“No ambulance,” I slurred. “I’m fine.”

Sam’s eyes, still swimming with concern, narrowed slightly. “Despite the fact that when a woman utters ‘fine’ it is accurately the signal of the upcoming apocalypse,” he clipped. “You fainted. Were unconscious for four minutes and fifty-one seconds. You are not fine,” he spat the word out.

“You counted?” I blinked, the world coming into focus.

His eyes narrowed further. “You collapsed. Out of nowhere and were unresponsive in my fucking arms. Motionless. Of course I fucking counted. You tend to take note of the period of time when you can’t fucking breathe.”

I stared at him in shaky wonder. I couldn’t fathom his words completely yet they warmed up all the spaces that had been chilled to the bone seconds before.

“You’re getting in the ambulance and I’ll hear no fucking protest from you,” he declared.

So I gave him no fucking protest.

* * *

“Okay, you’re totally fine,” the doctor informed me after glancing through my chart.

I smirked at Sam in triumph.

He glared right back at me, and then at the poor doctor, who didn’t even know the existence of the ‘fine’ debate.

“If she was fine, she wouldn’t have fucking fainted,” Sam clipped.

“Sam!” I chastised. “You can’t swear at a doctor.”

“I can when he’s not fucking doctoring,” he countered. “You don’t faint out of nowhere.”

The doctor didn’t even blink at the exchange. I guess he worked in the L.A Emergency room after all, a cursing rock star was likely one of the more boring cases he’d had for the day.

“No, a person doesn’t,” he agreed, scanning the chart again. He focused his eyes on me. “Your blood sugar was dangerously low. Which was likely why you lost consciousness. Do you suffer from diabetes?”

I shook my head.

“When was your last meal?”

Shit.

“Ummm,” I drew out the world trying to think of a lie.

Though I may have mastered the art of the fake laugh while I was here, I was yet to master the lie.

Hence Sam directing the death glare he’d been treating the doctor to at me. “Gina,” he demanded. “You have to think about the last time you ate?”

“I don’t know, it’s been a stressful couple of days,” I snapped.

He gaped at me. “Couple of days?” he repeated. “How the fuck have I not noticed? Why the fuck haven’t you eaten in days?”

He hadn’t noticed because his recording sessions conveniently worked out to last for long periods of time, so whenever he was chowing down on takeout and tried to offer it to me, I could murmur something about a big lunch with Lexie or Emma.

They weren’t exactly lies. I usually had been hanging out with either of them, and when I did, they did have big lunches. I just didn’t. I picked at a garden salad and made sure to keep the conversation going continuously so they didn’t notice the fact I hadn’t eaten anything.

Simon would have been proud.

Sam was watching my face and didn’t let me craft my lie in my head, let alone attempt to tell it.

“It’s because of that fuckin’ article, isn’t it?” he hissed through his teeth. “I’m going to burn that fucking publishing office to the ground.”

He sounded dangerously serious.

“No, I told you, I’ve just been busy,” I lied.

“Cut the shit,” he ordered harshly. “It’s because that poison settled in your fucking mind and I didn’t even fucking notice. I’ve been too busy with stupid shit.” Guilt saturated his tone.

“Hey,” I said. “It’s not your fault. I just… wanted to drop a couple of pounds,” I said meekly.

He squeezed my hand to almost the point of pain. I could see it. His battle with fury and love. His urge to unleash that dragon.

But then his hand slackened. He lifted both of our intertwined fingers so he could kiss my palm gently, lighter than a feather but somehow heavier than anything that I’d ever held there.

“Out, Doc, now,” he hissed, not moving his eyes from mine.

“We’ll keep you in here for another couple of hours, get you back to normal, then I’ll be back to check on you,” the doctor said, not perturbed by Sam’s harsh command.

The soft footfalls and the closing of my door signaled his exit.

Sam hadn’t noticed any of that. Or he didn’t let on, anyway. His focus was on me.

“Baby, the thought that you somehow believe you need to change a single thing about yourself breaks my fucking heart,” he whispered. “Makes me want to break the kneecaps of every fucker in this universe who had a hand in that shit,” he seethed. “You. Are. Perfect.”

I didn’t let his eyes go, but couldn’t let his words penetrate. Not all the way at least. “I’m a size twelve, Sam,” I said back, my voice harsher than I’d intended. Most likely to mask my pain and embarrassment. “I have stretch marks, cellulite, and flabby skin. I’m not perfect. You’re perfect. You’re photoshopped but in real life. And that’s what you should have beside you. Someone like that. Someone suited to you.” I poured it all out quickly, like a verbal Band-Aid, hoping that it would hurt less.

It didn’t.

The pain in Sam’s eyes mirrored my own. But it was different. More carnal.

I expected him to immediately fight me on my words, try to convince me I was wrong. But he was Sam, so he never did what was expected.

“I used to do this thing,” he said, looking outwards, eyes away from me. Actively looking away from me. He never looked away from me. Not when we were together. When we were together, every aspect of his being was focused on me. The simple aversion of eye contact signified the magnitude of what he was about to say.

About to confess.

“I’d see people,” he continued. “Anyone, a guy driving past me on the highway in a plumbing van. The family eating at McDonalds when I sneak in to get myself a McFlurry.” He winked at me. “And I do love McFlurrys.” The joke fell short. It didn’t work as a mask anymore, not now that mask was lying on the ground at our feet and I saw that face, his real face, in all its beautiful reality.

“Heck, even when I was on stage, in front of thousands of people who were there for me. For us. I’d imagine I was any of them. That I was living in a skin that wasn’t mine. It didn’t matter whose it was, just as long as it wasn’t mine.”

His eyes finally flickered to me.

“The music, the girls, the booze, the screaming crowd, the fat bank account… my band, my family. It’s everything to me. It’s exactly what I imagined, I dreamed of. I was exactly who I’d imagined. You know how kids say what they want to be in kindergarten? Like astronaut, fireman, fucking Harry Potter? Well, I said rock star. Even then. And look at me now, world, four-year-old fucking Sammy.” He held his arms up in the air, presenting himself to God, to the world, to the past. “I am everything I dreamed of.” He dropped his hands. Only for a second. Because then they were raised, grasping either side of my face, pulling me to him, up out of the bed.

“And even then, even when my fast life was bursting at those moments, felt empty. So much so, I’d do whatever the fuck I could to transplant myself out of it all. To something simpler. Fucking easier. Fucking harder. I don’t know. I didn’t know why I wanted to Freaky fucking Friday with some dude who literally dealt in shit for a living. I just knew it was something that I couldn’t control.” A grin tickled the edge of his serious face, cracking the marble of it. “That and my utter electric sexuality.” The crack repaired itself as he stared into the depths of me.

“And it scared me, babe. More than I was willing to admit. And I worked so fucking hard to try to convince myself I had everything. When, even then, I knew, deep down beyond the bullshit, I knew. I had nothing, because I didn’t have you. I missed you before I even knew I needed you. Before I even knew I loved you. And that makes me wonder if I didn’t love you all along. Since that moment in junior high when I saw you walking down the corridors wearing a pink scrunchy in your hair and those terrible sandals with flowers on them, reading some book not noticing the world around you.”

My heart skipped a beat. About five of them. I knew what he was telling me. He’d known me. He’d seen me.

And he wasn’t done.

“Maybe it was when I saw those girls made you cry. Maybe it just took me a fucking long time to realize that all I’ve been wanting to do is escape into that world you made and make it mine. Make you mine. And at the same time take you out of it and show you the world. Give you the world.” He leaned forward and kissed my head, his hands running down the sides of my body. “I’m gonna give you the world,” he promised. “First, I’m gonna work every single day for the rest of forever to give you something else. To give you the true image of who you are. What you are. Beauty. Unique and special.” He moved his hands back up to caress my jaw. “And I know it’s gonna take some time to chip away at years of lies. Lies you told yourself, and that people let you believe. But baby, I’ve got time. We’ve got time. I believe we’ve got forever.”

His words were a statement and a promise. And so much more than that. They didn’t fix it all, but they did a fricking great job at beginning to.

I slowly nodded. “Forever,” I agreed, on little more than a whisper.

“For right now, we’re going to get McFlurry’s,” he said, eyes glowing.

Three Weeks Later

We were having a girls’ night. It was after a considerable amount of debate with Sam, and—from what I’d heard from the two other girls involved in girls’ night—both Killian and Wyatt too.

Apparently each of the men did not have good feelings toward the sacred tradition of girls’ night.

I didn’t even have a particular kind of feeling toward it either.

I’d never strictly had a girls’ night. Unless you counted Game of Thrones night with Pria, which you couldn’t really since Garth was always in attendance too.

And in high school, I hung out mainly with retirees who were in bed, teeth out and sedatives in by 8:00 p.m.

The only reason why girls’ night had been allowed by three very protective and slightly deluded males was because it wasn’t located anywhere that anyone could get kidnapped by a crazed stalker. That statement was verbatim by Sam.

And he hadn’t even known about the various texts I’d been getting from Simon, which had started around the time I’d arrived in LA.

It had been over a month and he had yet to stop.

They varied between pathetic groveling or aggressive insults. The number of pathetic ones was dwindling, the aggressive ones increasing. It was getting ugly. Nasty.

And although I didn’t want to admit it, scary.

I planned on calling the phone company to block his number.

I didn’t have the great desire to add that to the already heated argument we’d had about the whole thing. To have any kind of conversation, heated or otherwise, about Simon with Sam.

I was sick of it.

Entertaining his ghost. Letting it seep into what Sam and I had. Despite a couple of moments, the time I’d had existing within his life, his Sam Kennedy life, I was happy. There was a place for me somewhere. Somehow, I fit.

Maybe because I stopped trying to think I had to fit in somewhere. Into something. Whether it be a size twelve dress or what I thought a size six beauty would do. I just was.

In the fakest place in the world, full of actors trying to make millions out of creating fantasy, I found my truth, created my reality.

And it was good.

No way was I letting anything touch that. Letting Simon touch that.

Plus there was no imminent threat. Simon was halfway across the country and nowhere near stupid enough to do anything beyond texting. Not with charges pending against him and having already lost his badge.

Despite the town rallying around him, because of his badge and his carefully constructed reputation, he was facing real prison time. I knew Sam—or more accurately, Sam’s very expensive lawyers—had everything to do with that. And he wouldn’t find the same understanding if he went to prison. Inmates didn’t tend to like cops in there.

Or so I’d heard.

The texts were Simon’s last-ditch attempt to try to exert power over the last person he deluded himself into thinking he had control over. To get to me.

He wasn’t. He wasn’t even coming close.

I had a lot of things to be happy about, ecstatic about. Namely Sam. And a lot of more important things to worry about. Namely Sam.

After the way things blew up after the bar and the public outpouring of support for us—for me—he’d been pushing me more to move in with him.

He saw that I could handle his lifestyle, that his lifestyle could handle me, and he wasn’t wasting time to make sure everything became permanent. After the incident that put me in hospital, he made sure we ate together, three times a day, no matter what. Not that I needed him there to assure me to eat. I was done with that. Trying to cut myself up so I could fit somewhere that I wasn’t meant to be. I was still insecure, still caught myself in photos and cringed. But those were split seconds. The rest of the day, I believed I was what Sam told me I was. What I’d known I was, somewhere, deep down.

He had been dragging me around real estate showings for the past week and a half.

When he wasn’t recording, of course. And that was often.

Not that I minded.

I missed him, obviously, but I was good at entertaining myself. I liked my own company.

I kept myself busy. Read. Hung out with Emma a lot. We were becoming very close. She was the exact opposite of me: loud, confident, crazy. On the outside, at least. Sometimes I saw glimpses of insecurity I recognized and demons I didn’t.

They were much too dark for me.

She wasn’t usually in town for this long—she was an arts dealer who traveled often—but she was here for “a stretch.” She made it sound like it was a jail sentence. Which may or may not have had something to do with Wyatt, despite all her efforts to ignore him, avoid mentioning him and pretend she wasn’t utterly in love with him.

He was doing the same.

Sam had snatched me away from Emma’s yesterday and took me to the first house I actually liked. It wasn’t an ostentatious mansion that made me feel uncomfortable like the rest of them had been. Empty, but full of expectations and image and built to entertain people. Entertain the surface. All surfaces encouraging the cold taste of fantasy.

And for once I didn’t want the fantasy.

I wanted soft and curvy surfaces, like the ones Sam was encouraging me to love on myself. The ones that invited reality.

That would keep me warmer much longer than fantasy would.

It was smaller, on the beach out of Hollywood and away from the entire lifestyle.

“So, what do you think?” Sam asked, eyes going around the empty room that was overlooking the ocean, only five minutes away from Lexie and Killian’s beach house.

It was perfect. The floor-to-ceiling windows covered three of the four walls, one of them a sliding door opening to a large balcony.

“It would be the perfect library,” he said, mirroring my own thoughts.

But my thoughts were mingled in fantasy. Despite how I’d been living the past two weeks, I had to get back to reality.

The cold one first, and then maybe I’d get the softer one.

“I already own a home, Sam,” I informed him, even though he already knew that. “And I already have a mortgage, which I’m going to have to get myself employed to pay.”

Saying it out loud only made the issue more pressing.

The media circus had tripled since the serenade at the bar.

Most of it was positive and supportive, shaming the publication that had published the ugly article. The publication that was quickly losing circulation and readership.

I didn’t know how much of that had to do with Sam buying a substantial number of shares in the company.

“Sam, that’s a waste of money,” I’d complained when he told me.

He eyed me. “Anything to fix what cost you a fucking second of suffering, caused you a moment of pain, is priceless, babe. It’s worth every fucking cent I have in the bank. I end up poor with you, happy when I die? That’s a life lived right. I want to be on my deathbed and not count the items I own, the money in the bank. I want to count moments. Ones I create with you. Happiness I create with you. I’m already a fuckin’ billionaire, babe. In your smiles. In the times I’ve made you laugh. Made you happy. Right now, I bite it, I’m done. I’ve accomplished everything I need to.”

When he said that, I’d stopped complaining.

But I’d also gotten panicky and emotional at the thought of him being “done.”

“Sam, that’s one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard,” I whispered. “But you promise right here and now that you stay with me till I’ve accomplished everything I need to. And I’m warning you, it’s going to take forever.”

He’d beamed at me. “I promise, baby.”

With that promise made, it was as if the world sensed our happiness and wanted to fuel it for once, not squash it.

I’d received an outpouring of support from women everywhere, writing to me, telling me how it made them feel good to see someone real and beautiful. How I’d inspired them.

Me.

Inspiring people.

I even had a multitude of offers from clothing companies to be a model.

Me.

A model.

I’d laughed the first time Mark mentioned it, assuming it had been a joke.

When he hadn’t laughed, I got that it wasn’t.

And they weren’t even “plus size” labels.

Apparently they wanted to move away from perpetuating an unhealthy body image toward their consumers.

I hadn’t accepted any of them, despite Sam’s and Lexie’s gentle encouragement.

Despite the number of zeroes on the shoot offer.

It might have paid my mortgage with enough left over to buy my own mansion, but it would’ve cost more than I had to give.

I was willing to show a little bit of myself, the tiniest little bit that I had to being attached to Sam, but I wasn’t going to give all of it. I was willing to be in the spotlight, if not slightly to the left. I wasn’t ever going to be comfortable in it. Thrive in it. The center of it, anyway. I could handle slightly to the left. Not the middle.

That was not my thing.

And neither was teaching toddlers, as it seemed. It was painfully apparent that I wouldn’t be able to go back to work there. Robyn had called me saying as much, then told me she was sending me all the cards the kids had made to say goodbye.

I wasn’t as disappointed as I thought I would be. I’d miss my kids for sure, but Sam had been right. It was me living that uncertain life. The one in between the pages. The one I wasn’t living for myself. It was the unassuming one I’d been living for… I didn’t even know who.

I didn’t even know what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to finish my master’s. I wanted to work with teenagers like me, help them, teach them.

I had enough money for about six months’ worth of mortgage payments if I was careful.

Not that I needed to be. Sam refused, flat-out refused to let me pay for anything.

I’d tried.

Multiple times.

It had insulted him.

“Babe, you give me enough. You give me everything. This is all I have to give you. This life has turned it upside down, so at least let it pay for our fuckin’ dinner.”

So I relented.

It was clear that he considered restaurant bills to be in the same realm as house mortgages, based on his next statement, back in the present. He waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, I’ll take care of that,” he said. “Mark’s already on it. I think you need to sign some shit.”

I stilled.

“You’ll take care of it?” I parroted.

He must have sensed the danger in the air, as he regarded me carefully. “Yeah, babe. It’s no big deal. And if you think about it, I’m the reason you lost your job. I’m the guy trying to get you to uproot your entire life and move out here. It’s only logical that I take care of it.”

“It’s logical for the man I’ve been dating for only two months, at a stretch, to pay my mortgage for me?” I clarified. “That’s on the insane side of logical, Sam. Even for you.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I’ll ignore that because you’re obviously upset,” he quipped.

“Everything’s a joke to you, Sam,” I hissed.

His eyes held none of the humor that I’d decided was tattooed in his irises, as characteristic to him as the ink that covered his body. Without it, he looked like a stranger. At the same time, he was more familiar to me than anyone on this earth.

“Almost everything,” he replied, nodding. He stepped forward.

Like we were doing some of stupid coordinated dance, I stepped back.

The air turned sweet and sour at the same time as this exotically beautiful predator stalked its prey.

“Only way to get through it is to treat it like a joke. Life, I mean. Because that’s all it is, really. Someone, somewhere, is holding a fuck of a lot of invisible strings, controlling us on a whim. And most of the time, that fucker has a sadistic and cruel sense of humor. Most of the time it’s a joke. A dark one, to be sure, but a joke all the same. And you’ve got to laugh at it, the grand old joke, because the only other option is to let it destroy you. I’m not too fond of destruction, babe.” His eyes burned into mine as he took another step forward. I was too enraptured by his words, his eyes, his everything to retreat.

“Well, not until recently. Now I’m praying to Kurt Cobain for a particular brand of destruction. And I’m looking right at her.”

My anger and reason disappeared with his words, as it seemed to do when he did things like this. He knew this, and he continued.

“Babe, I plan on you having my last name in the very close future. Fuck, I’ll even take yours if that’s what chicks are into these days. I don’t care. As long as it’s written on paper and tattooed somewhere on my body that you’re mine forever, I don’t care.”

It was safe to say the argument had fizzled out rather quickly after that. Rather, I’d melted into a puddle at his feet and stupidly let him pay my mortgage. I still didn’t have it in my feminist self to regret it.

I didn’t even break out in hives or anything when I realized he meant a wedding, and what a spectacle the aforementioned wedding would turn into.

In the spirit of Sam, fuck the world.

So yeah, we’d had more than enough speed bumps to worry about my asshole ex trying to inject himself into my life.

He was failing anyway, and he would fail.

He’d get the picture eventually and move on to torment some other poor girl.

Sam clutched my neck, pulling our foreheads together as we sat in his car outside Emma’s apartment complex. “You call me the moment you start to get even the slightest vibe that things are getting kidnapping-y.”

I swallowed my smile when I realized just how serious he was. “And what kind of vibe would ‘kidnapping-y’ be?” I asked.

“I don’t know: white vans, men with pantyhose on their head. You know, the usual,” he said, scanning the quiet street as if he was expecting a pantyhose-wearing man to jump out of a white van and snatch me out of his arms.

I kissed his head. “I’ll be sure to keep vigilant,” I reassured him.

“You do that. Or better yet I’ll just come with you. Much safer,” he decided.

I smiled at him. “It’s girls’ night, remember? No boys allowed.”

He grunted. “No good has come from girls’ night. I don’t like this. Being away from you. I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

“That’s because you’re convinced we’re going to be having pillow fights in our underwear and you’ll miss out on watching,” I quipped.

His eyes bulged. “I knew it,” he hissed. “I’m definitely coming now.”

I giggled and put my hand on his chest. “You’re not. Now go and have your boys’ night. Pillow fight in your underwear and take pictures.” I winked.

Sam still looked uneasy.

I kissed him hard on the mouth, intending it to be closemouthed.

Sam did not have that same intention.

We eventually detached, both of us breathing heavily and me feeling ready to abandon girls’ night altogether.

I found my sense eventually. “Nothing bad is going to happen, I promise.”

Thing with promises like that, they were self-fulfilling for the exact opposite.

About how everything bad was going to happen.

And destroy everything in its path.