Page 100 of Going Viral for Christmas
Her gaze snaps up to meet mine. Still, she doesn’t move. In this charged moment of almosts, it’s definitely something I consider a win, even though it isn’t a game for me. I need to show her she has me twisted up in ways I’ve never known.
Right now, I’ll let the moment breathe. Let her have her space. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about Ava in the last twenty-four hours, she’s a wildfire dressed as frostbite, and you don’t rush her thaw.
Standing here in this haunted house, witnessing her wrestle with her iron-clad walls andnearlyletting me in, I make myself a promise. Patience, Pembry. Ava Bell is worth the wait.
I’m not walking away. Even when shit gets hard. And with her, it’s bound to get hard.
But not in the way she writes about.
Unfortunately.
Seventeen
AVA
There’s a spot past the old wharf, down a narrow, gravel path that tourists never find. It hugs the edge of the salt marsh where the tide breathes in and out as though it’s the world’s longest-held sigh. A single weathered bench tilts slightly beneath the bare-limbed willow tree, right where the coastline curves.
I’ve been coming here since I was a kid. It’s my quiet refuge through everything—schoolyard disasters, heartbreaks that hollowed me out, rejection emails that felt personal, deadlines that tried to eat me alive.
It always smells of salt and damp wood, kelp clinging to rocks, and something older beneath it all. It’s calming. So naturally, I brought Soren Pembry here.
Idiot.
In my defense, I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t meant in athis is my sacred place, come share it with me, oh-so-handsome-boysort of way. I just needed air. Space. A moment that wasn’t filled with haunted floorboards and Soren’s devastating voice saying things I don’t know how to process.
I nearly had a panic attack inside the Witch House. Right after, Soren stood there, six feet of messy sincerity, and told methat the second he saw me in the flesh, chin lifted with something to prove, he just… knew.
Knew what?
We’ve known each other face-to-face for what? Three weeks? Ish. Twenty-plus days of fake dating, public spectacles, and private moments that were never supposed to amount to anything except positive numbers.
What does he truly know about me? He doesn’t know what I look like when I fall apart in a hotel room over a bad review. He doesn’t know that sometimes I reread the first rejection email an agent ever sent me to remember how far I’ve come. He doesn’t know how hard I have to work to feel likeenoughin this industry.
So what if he’s read all my books? He’s obviously created this bold, clever version of me in his head—one where the heroine possesses edgy dialogue and a soft heart that she keeps hidden until chapter twenty-two.
I’m not her.
Soren’s swept up in the rush. The buzz. The fake romance, the unresolved tension pulsing with more lust than logic.
And for a minute—no, longer than a minute—I almost got pulled under with him.
I dove on top of him last night inside my innocent childhood treehouse, the same place I used to read library books and eat peanut butter sandwiches, and proceeded to grind over his very real, very hard cock. There was nothinginnocentabout it.
The wine and the emotions made me forget what boundaries were. And Iwantedto forget. Iwantedto let go and drown in that moment, in him, with him.
Thankfully, a tiny, screaming voice of reason yanked me back before I made a grave mistake and did something I couldn’t explain or undo.
Lust is easy. Lust feels good. Whatever this is with Soren—it could burn through more than our clothes. It could level me.
The stakes are too high, the numbers between us too big. And he’s the fuck boy of ShelfSpace. I’m already fighting an uphill battle to be taken seriously—I don’t need to hand the internet a scandal with a bow on top.
I do want to believe him. When he looks at me, it’s not for a stage. It’s mind-bending. Andwaytoo risky for me to consider. Feelings are reckless and don’t come with a safety net.
That’s not romantic.
That’s terrifying.
So, when Soren and I walked out of the Witch House and he asked me, “Where to next?” I just... pointed.
