Page 46 of Her Billion Dollar Groom

“Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

I open the door and shut it quietly behind me. She’s in her own office space, plucking out a melody on her guitar, her hair falling around her face as she stares down at the floor.

“How are you doing?” I smile as I slide into the room.

She shrugs. “Good.”

“Good?” I question.

“Good,” she repeats firmly. She hasn’t said more than two words to me all week, and it’s starting to worry me.

I grimace and decide it’s time to broach the topic with her. “Hey, Eliza. What’s wrong with you lately?”

“What’s wrong with me? Nothing.” She says it with such an artificial levity that even she must be able to see how transparently false she sounds. I don’t understand why she won’t let me in.

“I came to see if you wanted to go out today,” I say, not letting myself be dissuaded by her attitude.

“No, thank you,” she says, barely looking at me.

And something about that just rubs me the wrong way. This isn’t the Eliza I’ve been falling for. “Look, I don’t care if you’re in a bad mood, okay? But you have to talk to me. Or don’t you want my attention anymore?”

She looks up at me, finally, her eyes wide. I wince. That sounded harsher than I meant it.

“Come on, where do you want to go?” I say as brightly as I can. “We can go to the aquarium. Or?—”

“I said I don’t want to,” she snaps. “What part of that are you not understanding?”

“I just thought it would be nice. That’s all.”

“Yeah. Well, you don’t have to bother. I’m busy.”

“Where is this coming from?” I demand, stalking over to her. As usual, she’s getting right under my skin. “Just last week, every day you were demanding my attention, and now I’m lucky if I see you at all.”

“We’re both busy, aren’t we?” she snaps back. “You’ve got your work, and I’ve got mine. That’s all this is about, isn’t it? Us? Work. It’s a business transaction. I didn’t think we were in this to be friends. I thought we were in this to help each other out.That’s it.” She glares back down at her guitar and plucks the strings discordantly.

My mouth drops open. “Eliza, youaremy friend,” I say, unable to comprehend the words coming out of her mouth. “Come on, let’s go and do something. You love going and doing something.”

“I won’t tell you again,” she hisses, glaring up at me, her eyes shining. “I don’t want to come out with you. Why is this such an important deal to you today?”

“Because I thought it was important to you,” I say, all the confidence I’d felt before I came into this room cracking like glass. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I ask one more time. “You’ve been kind of distant all week. Is there something going on?”

“On a scale of one to ten,” she says, “how much do you actually care?”

My lips tremble. That’s too loaded a question for me to be able to answer. Of course I care. But what does a ten mean to her?

“Yeah, I thought so,” she mutters. “Look, Jason, I know you’re probably busy, so you don’t have to entertain me. It’s fine, okay? You don’t have to pretend that this is something it’s not.”

“But I like spending time with you,” I try to insist. “Please.”

She huffs. “You’re just lying to yourself now.”

Seeing her sitting there looking so bitter makes my heart splinter. Have I been getting our relationship wrong all this time? I knew she didn’t care in the way I might have wanted her to, but I at least thought we were friends. I at least thought she liked me enough to want to do things, to want to bother me all the time.

Even when I didn’t want her to, there was a part of me that always liked it when she came and interrupted me in the office.

The memory of Chris and his warning flashes across my mind.She’s a pop star. For people like her, things like this never last.Could he have been right all this time? I had thought that Eliza was different, but is this her way of proving that she is just as hollow as all the others?

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