“You better,” she said.
“Are you ready to go in?” he asked. I nodded, slipping my phone into my pocket. We walked over to the ticket taker, and Marco put his phone under a scanner. She told us to head to Theater 8.
“I probably should have mentioned this earlier,” he said as we went into our theater, “but Marie-Angelique called a paparazzo to be here tonight during the movie. He’s going to take pictures of us together.”
“Okay. It feels a little creepy that we’re going to be watched all night.” I paused and then asked the question that was burning a tiny jealous hole in my soul. “Who is Marie-Angelique?”
“My assistant.”
His assistant, whom he’d never referred to by name before. Marie-Angelique was not a name that you’d forget. “Is she French with flawless skin and dark hair, and five four?”
His raised eyebrows let me know I was close enough. She was probably gorgeous and good at her job and someday Marco was going to look across his office at her sitting perfectly at her desk and realize what a fool he’d been to let someone so perfect escape his notice before and . . .
“This is us,” he interrupted my paranoid fantasy to say. “Seats eleven and twelve.”
I glanced around before we sat down, wondering where the paparazzo would be sitting. How weird had my life become that I was currently concerned about this?
“What movie are we seeing again?” I asked.
“It’s the Noah Douglas / Chase Covington buddy-cop comedy. It’s getting really good reviews.”
We settled in our seats, splitting up the food. I sat on his left. “It’s kind of hard to get to know each other during a movie,” I pointed out.
“It hasn’t started yet. How would your friends describe you?”
At the moment, Catalina would say that I was stupid for not taking advantage of Marco. “Shouldn’t you be asking me like, where I went to school or something like that?”
“You went to USC.”
I kind of gaped at him. I didn’t remember telling him that.
But he’d remembered.
“And you went to Harvard.” He hadn’t made a big deal about it when he’d told me, but apparently I’d mentally filed it away in my brain. “But if you want to know what my friends think of me, shouldn’t you ask my friends?”
He shifted in his seat, his large frame not fitting easily into the stadium-style chairs. “I’m your friend. So maybe I should ask myself.”
“What do you think of me?” Why did this feel so important?
“I think you are smart and loyal and passionate and dedicated to the things you love.” He paused while I took all of this in. “How would you describe me?”
“Kind of the same, actually.” Which was surprising, because on paper nobody would think we were the same kind of person.
I decided to leave out the parts about him being too charming for his own good and hotter than the melting point of tungsten （3,420 degrees Celsius）。
“Good,” he said gruffly, and I wondered what his response was about. Then he splayed his hands against his thighs, and I wondered if he’d try to hold my hand again. This time I would not hit myself in the mouth or sweat like I was trapped in a sauna. “Tell me about the last date you went on.”
“It shouldn’t be spoken of,” I told him. “Let’s just say he was much more interested in his food than he was in me. He didn’t ask me anything about myself and wouldn’t answer any of my questions except with some vague response. It was like going out with a Magic 8 Ball.”
“My last date, she spent the entire night filming herself with her phone for TikTok. I’m not even sure she knew my name.”
“You probably don’t want to play weird-date poker with me,” I said. “I’m going to win this one.”
“Oh? Now I’m curious. What was your first date?” he asked.
“In junior high, a guy put his arm around my shoulders, and I punched him in the chest.”
“When I was thirteen, a girl invited me over to her tree house. She tried to kiss me and so I climbed higher.”
I took a sip of my Icee and asked, “So when you got over your irrational fear of girls, what was your go-to move?”
“I’ll show you.” He leaned back in his chair. “We should count shoulders.”
“What?” Had I misheard him? I thought he was going to do something else.
Marco touched his right shoulder with his left hand. “One.” Then his left shoulder. “Two.” He touched my right shoulder. “Three.
“Don’t punch me in the chest, okay?” he said. Then he had his hand on my left shoulder. “Four.”
Only he kept his hand there. He had his arm around me. “Cute, but that seems like a lot of effort. Did women actually fall for that?”
That I was falling for it was beside the point.
“Like a charm.” He stayed where he was, his arm in place, watching the movie with me, sharing food and laughing at the on-screen jokes like we were a couple.
It wasn’t the hand-holding I’d been hoping for, but I’d take it.
I hoped the paparazzo was getting some good shots.
And that’s how Marco acted for the entire following week. Like he was my actual boyfriend. He asked me out every night and I said yes. Every single time.
It was all under the guise of getting to know each other and being more comfortable together, and that’s what I repeatedly told Catalina, but I knew it wasn’t true.
So did she.
Marco took me axe throwing, and it turned out I was pretty good with the smaller axes. But every time someone said the word axe, which was a lot, he would turn and give me a mischievous grin.
We went mini golfing, to a sci-fi/fantasy trivia night at a local bar, to a concert, to dinner at fancy restaurants. Everywhere we went, our picture was taken. Catalina put an alert on her phone and would forward me a link every time a picture was posted. If what Marco had said about Craig’s assistant was true, there was no way Craig didn’t know about his brother and me.
I wondered if Craig had said anything to Marco, but Marco never indicated that he had. I was dealing with my own family drama—once my grandmother realized that I was going out every night with Marco, she said, “I don’t know if I like the idea of you two spending so much time together.”
“I am twenty-six,” I reminded her. “I can decide who I want to spend my time with.”
It was obvious she blamed him for the makeover thing, but that wasn’t even his fault. I mean, technically yes it was his fault because he’d arranged and paid for the whole thing, but I hadn’t done it for him.
I also had never really seriously dated someone before. Men were always secondary for me after schooling and my job. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be in a relationship—I very much wanted to fall in love and have my own romantic fairy tale like my parents and grandparents. I’d just never made it a priority before.
I was proud of myself for sticking to my resolution in going after what I wanted and trying to be happy.
Marco and I finished out our week by going to an art museum for the debut of a new collection. There was a red carpet, and one of the Minx publicists was there to introduce us to the press.