Page 46 of Meet Hate Love
A text buzzed on my phone. “If it makes you feel any better, they absolutely filmed the scenes at the racetrack in Alabama.” I swiped my device from the table and read Theo’s text.
Dude.
Please tell me this is that hot chick from your office.
Almost as soon as I’d clicked on it, music blasted through the speaker, followed by video footage of Blake’s antics from the previous night, auto-tuned to a Whitney Houston song. “What the fuck…”
“Oh, yeah.” Blake shoveled another forkful of syrup-covered pancake into her mouth. “That.”
Is that you doing the worm in the background? Why are you doing the worm, man?
I went back to the video. I could barely make out the shadow of my silhouette. Theo had a point. My trying to yank up my jeans looked like the worm, which I would gladly take over the alternative.
I shot off a response, crammed my phone into my pocket, then met Blake’s gaze from across the table. “I’m not going to lie. It’s funny.”
The focus of her blue eyes lifted from the table, landing on me.
“It kind of is…” And the soft smile that crept onto her face made me feel like I’d just won—a lottery would be too cliché, and nothing about how her smile made me feel was cliché. It was like the feeling I thought I would get if I’d won a lifetime supply of organizers. Bliss.
I downed the rest of my coffee. Wanting to fuck Blake was one thing. It was male and primal. Even wanting to date her, fine. But her smile affecting me enough to make me think those thoughts when we hadn’t even kissed—that was something else entirely.
* * *
We left the “diner”and took the metro over to Père Lachaise.
Blake’s eyes had lit up when she’d grabbed a map at the entrance and proudly informed me that we were about to enter the most-visited necropolis in the world. I’d bet anything she’d been waiting all day to use that word in a sentence.
Everything about graveyards made me uneasy. And yet, there I stood half an hour into our self-led tour, taking a photo of Blake looking all solemn, hands clasped at her front a few feet away from Jim Morrison’s grave.
“This seems… wrong,” I said, handing the device back to her. “You realize normal people do not take selfies in front of dead people’s graves.”
She walked away from the aged tombstone. “That was a total pleonasm. Only dead people have graves. And it wasn’t a selfie. You took it.”
“I’m sorry.” I followed her down the well-shaded path. “You lost me at pleonasm.”
“Had me at hello. Lost me at pleonasm….” She shook her head. “It’s when you use more words than necessary to convey meaning. And I’d dare to say, if you can’t find enjoyment in paying homage to those who’ve come before us, you’re uncultured.”
“So, what you would consider cultured is taking a photo in front of a famous person’s grave that you are, one hundred and ten percent, planning to post to your Wanderlust InstaPic account?”
She shook her head before ducking underneath a low-hanging branch.
Blake’s steps faltered when we came to a cobblestone path flanked by mausoleums. “Look at all of them,” she whispered, placing a hand over her heart.
My guess? The trauma from her New Orleans lock-in had reared its ugly head.
“There are about a hundred other paths we could take that won’t give you a traumatic flashback.”
Shaking her head, she pushed her shoulders back. “I’m going to do this.” Said like she was about to walk a rotten swing bridge connecting two of the highest peaks in the Andes Mountains.
When she didn’t move, I patted the top of her head. “You can do it.”
She glared up at me. “Did you just pet me like I’m some pomeranian?”
“It was patting, not petting. Petting would be this.” Smiling, I stroked a hand over her silky hair, and she whacked my stomach hard enough that it forced a grunt from me.
Then she walked cautiously down the path like the old, corpse-holding buildings were going to rise from their foundations and swallow her up. Halfway down the walkway, she stopped to snap about fifteen rapid-fire pictures of a weeping angel statue erected between two mausoleums. “I have a confession to make,” she said, taking another photo.
“You put arsenic in my coffee earlier when I went to the restroom?”
