Page 23 of Claim to Fame

“Then I’ll order from somewhere else.”

“Or you could come to dinner with us. Unless you don’t want to come.”

“You’re already doing so much for me. And what if there are photographers there?”

“In Aster Bay?” He snorted. “Not likely. Even if there were, I promised Daemon I’d look after you.” He leaned against the wall opposite her, arching an eyebrow, like he was daring her to turn him down again.

Right. The only reason he was doing this was as a favor to their mutual friend.

“It’s nothing fancy, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he continued. “We get together every Monday night at a local bar and eat too much fried food, have a few drinks, and make complete asses of ourselves losing at bar trivia. If you come, we’ll have enough people for two full teams. Double our chances of embarrassing ourselves.”

“Double your chances of winning, you mean.”

“We never win.”

Hannah got to her feet, sliding back on her heels. “You’ve never had me on your team before.”

His lip twitched. Not quite a smile, but she considered it a victory all the same. “We leave in fifteen minutes.”

∞∞∞

The bar was crowded for a Monday night. People in Aster Bay took their bar trivia very seriously, it seemed. Ethan’s friends were already there when they arrived and he made quick work of introducing her to everyone. She was grateful to see Tessa at the table, her smile light and open as she invited Hannah to take a seat next to her.

On the other side of Tessa sat her husband, Jamie, who looked so much like his brother it was uncanny. Then came Gavin, with an open, curious smile and shaggy hair, and his wife, Kyla, a pretty blonde with a heart-shaped face. Next to Kyla was Sabrina, a tall redhead in a fitted dress, and her suit-wearing husband, Baz, who seemed to have a permanent scowl except when his eyes fell on his wife.

“Tonight’s the night we win. I can feel it,” Gavin said, grinning, as he grabbed another mozzarella stick from the platter in the center of the table.

Ethan hadn’t been kidding about the fried food and Hannah had to take a moment to breathe, to remind herself there was no moral high ground for abstaining from foods that had been cooked in oil. Depriving herself of mozzarella sticks and Texmex eggrolls and some kind of buffalo chicken wonton thing that smelled amazing wasn’t going to solve her problems.

Or make the press stop picking apart five-year-old photographs of her, sweaty from dance rehearsals.

And yet, the little voice in the back of her head—so much quieter now than it had been for the last decade and a half—still whispered that she shouldn’t eat anything. She should down a glass of ice cold water before she took even a bite, suck on the lemon wedge that came with said water, slowly chew on the celery stick shoved to the edge of the platter. ThenSuperfan wouldn’t be able to compare her cellulite against the swimsuit models’ toned asses and concave thighs.

No. You do not have to starve to be in control. You can eat the buffalo chicken thing.

Hannah made a mental note to schedule a phone appointment with her therapist in the morning and carefully placed one of each appetizer on the plate in front of her. No one stared in shock at the fat girl daring to eat fried food. No one stood on their stool and shouted about her inability to control herself. No one even noticed. Despite nearly a year of being in recovery, she still marveled at the complete lack of attention others paid to her eating, as though they weren’t all silently calculating the calorie count of every plate of food in sight.

Not that she did that anymore, but she’d done it often enough over the last fifteen years that sometimes the numbers flitted through her brain unbidden, especially in times of stress.

Like having every inch of her body analyzed in the media for people’s entertainment.

Her therapist had assured her the constant internal chatter about food would stop in time, but Hannah found that hard to believe. Though her therapist had been right about the other things that stopped—the exhausting need to plan every meal, snack, and beverage in advance; the incessant staticky noise in her brain; the uncontrollable cravings for Oreos.

“Hannah?”

She looked up into the kind face of the tall redhead—Sabrina, was it?—who had clearly said her name more than once. Hannah set down her half-eaten wonton and folded her hands in her lap.

You are in control.

“I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“How are you liking Aster Bay so far?” Sabrina asked.

“This is all I’ve seen of it aside from the vineyard,” Hannah answered, “but it looked beautiful on the drive in.”

“You have to come with us tomorrow,” Kyla, the blonde, said with a wide smile. "We’re taking a painting class in the park. Girl’s day out.”

“That’s so kind of you to offer, but I’m sure there are things I should be doing tomorrow other than intruding on your plans,” Hannah said.

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