Page 48 of Rosé with My Fake Fiancé
For the first time, I feel like my smile matches his, open and wide and barely contained on my face. He pulls me into his arms, kissing me soundly as if to reiterate that, if nothing else, he’s solid and secure and certain.
We kiss for an inappropriately long time, even for the city of love, and someone eventually jostles us on the sidewalk. Luc pulls back, tugging me with him toward the cafe.
“Come on, let’s get your stuff and figure out how to spend every moment we can together.”
EPILOGUE
Tessa
Months later...
Luc joltsawake next to me, making me squeak and drawing the attention of several people around us.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “Sorry.”
Some lady two seats over and one row up huffs at me.
Luc rubs his hands over his face, up into his hair, where he scratches his scalp and blinks at me.
Sorry, he mouths.
It’s not his fault, entirely. He took a red-eye to Vienna to spend the weekend with us at the insistence of Jade, Emma, and Sara. This was one of the weekends Luc and I had originally scheduled to spend time together, but when Jade asked if we would come to see her presentation instead, we did some schedule shuffling, and, well...
Luc kept his bartending shift last night because he refused to let me pay for the flight. He didn’t sleep much last night, and we started early. Jade’s presentation began at eight a.m.
However—and I say this with all the love in my heart for my best friend—Jade’s presentation is really boring.
Who would have thought that this gregarious, outgoing woman has a horrible public speaking fear and hides behind statistics and studies?
My eyes drift from the presentation slides to the translator. He works at the same company as Jade in the marketing department and is a polyglot. Thus, he’s been traveling around the continent with Jade translating her presentations.
This is the guy: the Clark-Kent look-alike Jade has alternatively called Chin Dimple, Superman, or That Asshat, depending on her mood, though his name is Carlos.
He’s very attractive. When we first saw them this morning standing together, Sara, Emma, and I all shared a glance with three sets of raised eyebrows. They look good together. He’s ruggedly handsome, taller, and Spanish. Jade's skin tone, with her Mexican heritage, is slightly darker than his, and with both of them in black suits walking in together, Jade’s streak of white in her ponytail stands out.
Carlos looks just as bored as the audience is, droning on with an echo of Jade’s words in German. Most of the audience is Austrian, and while plenty of people here speak English, Jade’s company has brought in a mix: some industry professionals, some pharmacists, but also a large contingency of patients, people who traveled from neighboring countries or from more rural areas and are probably not fluent in the technical language Jade uses.
Hell, I don’t understand a lot of the stuff Jade is sayingin English.
For the rest of the presentation, Luc shifts around a lot, trying to stay awake. He leaves his hand on my thigh, the heat of him burning through my jeans. He took a power nap earlier, but it’s been two weeks since I’ve seen him, and I’m definitely ready for some alone time. While Luc didn’t let me pay for his flight, I insisted on paying for our hotel room so we could stay together.
To be honest, between visiting my friends and Luc, I’m not staying in my cute apartment all that much. Last month, Anouk traveled to Aix-en-Provence to visit a friend of hers for a week, so I packed up my things and stayed with Luc, working from the small desk in their sitting room.
People start clapping, and I focus my eyes back on Jade, who’s got a relieved smile on. The four of us stand and applaud enthusiastically, maybe too loudly to make up for our thoughts.
It also gets everyone else moving, so we’ll take it. The crowd ambles to the back of the ballroom, where cocktail tables are set up and displays with information about the various products Jade’s company offers.
We head right to the coffee bar.
“Oh my god,” Sara hisses while pumping hot water into a mug. “Jade is going to ask us how she did. What on earth are we going to say?”
Emma selects her coffee. “It’s okay. We can come up with nice, truthful things.”
Luc’s hand shoots up. “I call, ‘you really know your stuff.’”
Emma, Sara, and I glance at each other. “She looks great,” I say.
“The presentation was very legible,” Sara suggests.
