“And?”
“He dates a lot, and by a lot I mean an exponential amount. There are like, a bajillion different photos of him with various model types.”
Models, huh? That seemed about right. Sticking with his own kind.
“I tried to look up his social media accounts, but as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any. That seems both sus and refreshing at the same time.”
“What does sus mean?” I asked.
“Go online once in a while, Anna! It means suspicious. You have accounts, even though you never post. I’m not sure how I feel about this, and I have drawn many possibly incorrect conclusions about him, so now I need you to give me the details.”
I tried to shake my feet off, but the glitter was stuck to my soles like glue. Defeated, I got back into bed. I had wanted Catalina’s opinion—time to share it all with her.
So I explained how Marco had stopped by unexpectedly, our weird conversation, and then the incident with her self-tanner. “Which, by the way, you should know tends toward orange when you leave it on for too long.”
“How did you confuse a mask and self-tanner—you know what? Never mind. I’ve met you. So now your face was orange and . . .”
“And he invited me out to lunch.”
“Yes, as rich CEOs do. What did he do after you turned him down?”
I grimaced slightly. “I didn’t turn him down.”
There was a long pause on the other end. “You went out with him . . . to eat in public . . . while your face was orange.”
“It was a paler orange after I scrubbed it,” I said defensively. “Anybody would have gone. You would have. You saw that he’s hot.”
She seemed to consider this. “I mean, his hotness would definitely be a factor in his favor. But a guy who had seen me at my absolute worst wanting to hang out and talk to me? No thanks. Plus, I would have been too embarrassed to go out in public with residual self-tanner on my face.”
This meant Marco was right in his assertion that most people wouldn’t have gone to lunch with him. I didn’t accept that. “He wouldn’t tell me what he wanted to talk about. I had to go.”
“And what did he want to talk about?”
“He wants to break up Craig’s engagement.”
She gasped. “Is he in love with Craig’s fiancée?”
“They used to date. Casually,” I added, as if Marco himself were saying it. “There might have been cheating involved on her part, but I’m not sure. No, he wants to protect Craig, and he’s worried Leighton’s after Minx, so he also wants to protect the company.”
“Wait. I’m confused. Why would he want you to help out with this? You don’t even work at Minx anymore.”
That was like a little knife twist in my stomach. “Apparently, Craig and Marco have a terrible rivalry. He thinks if he and I pretend to date, that Craig will want me for himself and break off his relationship.”
I half expected an outburst, but to her credit, she didn’t laugh. “Holy duck.” She hesitated and then asked, “He really thinks you guys pretending to date will make Craig drop his fiancée?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. That is some rom-com-level delusion right there,” she said. “It’s never going to work.”
“Marco seems to think it will.”
“It’s a good thing that man is pretty, because he’s obviously not very in touch with reality. I’ve seen the movies. This sort of thing never works out. If anything, it’s only guaranteed to make you fall in love with him.”
I pulled my blanket up over my face, glad she couldn’t see me. “He made it pretty clear that that won’t happen. Not that I would want it to. I’m in love with Craig.”
That sounded a little weak, even to my ears.
“This is just some basic math here. I’m calculating some serious trouble ahead for you. It’s coming. There’s no way you get out of this without catching feelings. Because if you’re the dragon Smaug, he’s going to be your Dwarven treasure hoard you will want to keep all to yourself.”
“That’s not true. I like him as a friend. He’s easy to talk to—”
“Easy to talk to?” she interrupted me. “The man who has had two assistants quit in the last six months because he’s so terse and stern with everyone? He’s supposed to be scary.”
Scary? Marco? I couldn’t imagine it. “He’s not like that.”
“Maybe not with you. If you had ever plugged in to the office gossip once in a while and talked to someone besides just me, you would know that.”
I pushed my blanket down. It was getting hard to breathe, and my glasses were fogging up. “He’s nice. Perceptive, kind. Understanding. Smart. Maybe a little ruthless when it comes to breaking up Craig and Leighton. He can be kind of annoying sometimes, too. But I don’t know why anyone would say he’s scary. He was telling me dumb jokes at lunch.”
“Like what?”
I told her the vegan pizza one, and there was another long pause on her end. Then she said, “That’s kind of graphic.”
Sighing, I responded, “You’re not supposed to visualize it. He obviously wasn’t being serious or literal. It didn’t strike me as graphic, just funny.”
“That’s because you have the sense of humor of a ten-year-old child. Or a forty-year-old dad. I guess if nothing else, you guys will have your dumb vaudeville comedy routine in common.”
I was about to say that wasn’t true, but she did kind of have a point. “Dumb or not, it made me smile.”
“You like him!” she exclaimed.
I made a face. “I just told you he was nice. Yes, I like him.”
“No, I mean you like like him. You’re attracted to him.”
“What? I am not!” I immediately said.
I wasn’t the only one not believing the lie. “Anna!”
“Catalina!” I retorted, as strong a comeback as I could manage given the dishonesty.
“You do so. I can hear it in your voice.”
“Okay, yes. You saw the picture. He’s very handsome. I’ve been thinking about it, and I figured it out. The reason I find him attractive is because he’s Craig’s brother. There’s got to be a genetic component there that I’m instinctually responding to.”
“They’re half siblings. They only share twenty-five percent of their DNA. I reject your claim. You want to science up another excuse?”
No, because that was the only one I had. I had grown up believing that there was one perfect person for everybody in the whole world. I rejected the notion that I could be in love with one man and attracted to his brother.
When I didn’t respond, Catalina’s tone shifted to concerned. “Based on the ancient texts, or every romantic comedy that we’ve ever watched together, I say again that this is going to blow up in your face. I’m sorry if I keep repeating myself, but I’m worried about you. I don’t want you to get your heart broken.”
I smiled a little. Catalina was the only person who could call rom-coms “the ancient texts” and sound like it was a real thing people said. “It may not end well, but maybe I’ll have some fun in the middle.”