Page 15 of The Last Kind of Kiss
Cameras, Lila. They’re watching. They’re always watching. Just hold out until after the gala. Plus, a Big Mac with fries in your comfy, stretchy sweatpants sounds way better than stuffing your face with mouse food.
“Pretty underwhelming, huh?” a voice says in that same rumbly baritone that I’m beginning to think all hot guys just magically possess.
I turn to the man next to me, pleasantly surprised at the handsome symmetry of his face, the rigid composure of his body, the professionalism evident in both his seamless suit and heavily styled hair. He’s perfection personified. His hair is honeycomb blonde—a far cry from the chocolate brown of Bristol’s hair. His eyes are a bright, glacial blue—not bourbon colored like Bristol’s. And his physique is lean, sophisticated—contrastingly different from the slabs of muscle on Bristol’s hulking, athletic body.
Why am I comparing him to Bristol? This man is conventionally attractive. Am I insane? Actually, I probably am, because this whole ordeal has definitely taken thirty years off my life span. Is there some invisible gas leak polluting my brain and tricking me into channel-surfing a Bristol-only station?
He doesn’t deserve to be in my thoughts. He’s the last person I want to be thinking about right now, and yet, even with my efforts to keep a generous distance, I can’t seem to escape him.
“Hello?” the disembodied voice asks, tugging me back to the present.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your…” I trail off, gesturing to the buffet table.
“You weren’t interrupting anything,” he insists with a smile, and I expect butterflies to wreak havoc in my gut, but there’s no fluttering sensation to be found. No spark. No nothing. Disappointment twinges inside me instead, and I’m not sure how convincing my smile is, but I strain my lips to make it believable.
“Plus, getting interrupted by someone as beautiful as you is hardly a nuisance.”
Ugh! He’s a total gentleman. Suave, smooth with his words, seductive in all the right ways. Any sensible woman would swoon at his feet.
I blink a few times, not sure why forming a simple “thank you” seems to be such an impossible task. “Oh, uh.”
The Ryan Gosling doppelganger leans in closer to me, engulfing me in the faintest hint of vanilla-tinged cologne. “I hope I’m not overstepping by asking you this, but are you alright? You seem a bit pale.”
Oh, that’s great. Just what every girl wants to hear—that they look like a walking corpse.
“I’m okay, thanks. Just…a bit all over the place,” I admit, dismissing him with a wave of my hand, and I think I’m so used to Bristol’s combative, concern-driven interrogations that I’m surprised when this man accepts my bold-faced lie.
As I set my sights on the bodies in motion around me, wondering how everyone else is faring during a night that’s supposed to be nothing short of exhilarating, a particular headof brown hair jockeys through the congested mass, headed right toward me with frightening determination.
Shit. He found me. Which, given the volume of people in here, is actually quite impressive.
Now, kicked into full throttle, dignity on the line, I turn toward the man next to me and blurt out my hilariously unbelievable truth.
“Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but I need your help. There’s this guy, right? He’s my ex-fling, and he’s coming this way, and I kind of totally lied about having a new boyfriend, and you just so happen to be right here, and I will literally pay you to pretend to be my boyfriend for the next ten minutes. He can’t know I lied. And I know I should’ve been truthful with him from the beginning, but we didn’t really end on good terms, and I want to show him that I’m totally good with the fact that he broke my heart.”
I glance back to gauge the time I have left to convince this stranger to partake in some harmless cahoots, but thanks to Bristol’s stupidly long legs, he’ll be here within two to four strides.
I’m just about to say something when Bristol butts into the conversation, the mask of courtesy stuck to his face slowly cracking along the edges. “There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you. Some reporters want to ask us questions about the campaign,” he informs me, completely ignoring the other person in the vicinity.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” I hiss through gritted teeth, inclining my head toward my—fingers crossed—new fake boyfriend.
Bristol gives his competition a languid onceover, his lips quirking down. “I can wait,” he replies, widening his stance and crossing his arms over his chest.
Bristol has at least five inches overI-never-even-got-his-name, and even if my partner in crime tried to stand up to him, Bristol would undoubtedly take him between his forefinger and thumb and squish him like a pathetic bug. He stands by my side in guard dog mode, never once taking his eyes off the man next to me, singeing a jealousy-lined hole into his skull.
Oh my God. I can’t believe him! He’s so fucking obnoxious. If there weren’t a hundred plus witnesses around, I’d take a kebab skewer and shove it right into his eye socket. I’m running out of excuses; I’m running out of lies. I can’t speed-walk my way out of this one.
And then, by some miracle, my knight in shining Armani slings his arm over my shoulder, pulls me into his side, and delivers the most Oscar-worthy performance of a lifetime. “Babe, who’s this?” he asks, really hammering the nail in the coffin with a squeeze to my shoulder.
Bristol momentarily loses his cool, unable to downplay the cocktail of shock and anger battling for dominance over his features, and that forehead vein of his—the one I’ve nicknamed Colosso because it’s so fucking big—gets dangerously close to bursting. “Babe?”
Suck it, Bristol Brenner.
“That’s right,” I say smugly, resting my hand on my fake boyfriend’s chest and batting my eyelashes. “Uh…”
“Glifford,” he supplies.
“Gliffordhere is the boyfriend I was telling you about.”
