Page 57 of Looking for Love in All the Haunted Places
The parking situation turned out to be awful. Georgia found a garage a good distance away from the restaurant she’d chosen after charitably deciding to skip the bar crawl. They walked over,passing other shops, pubs, and bars that were ignored in favor of going to Ditto Road—because her family also owned it.
“We get to eat for free and have as many drinks as we want,” Georgia said, waving her hand. “Stop looking so shocked.”
“You’re as bad as Xander.”
She shook her head with a serious look. “I may be small-town princess rich, but that philanthropic asshole is fucking loaded.”
At Ditto Road, they were seated right away by a hostess with reddened, sunburned skin and a teal ear-length bowl cut. Lucky immediately channeled her indecisiveness. From the scale tattoo on the inside of her wrist to the way her shoulders naturally sloped downward as if they were bowing from the pressure of dealing with too many choices—she was a Libra, left to her own devices for too long.
“She must be new,” Georgia whispered as she left with their drink order.
“Have you spotted anyone you know?”
“No one worth talking to.” Georgia glanced around the room. “Or worth a new introduction.”
Interesting. “Are you hoping to pick someone up?”
“Never hoping, no. My options are wide open if you know what I mean,” she said. “I have a feeling I’m going to meet my future spouse here or somewhere mundane like a bar or a grocery store. Don’t ask me why.”
“Aren’t you supposed to despise your hometown and all it represents? No one worthy of your time kind of vibe.”
“Why would I do that?” Georgia laughed.
“I don’t know. Sorry. I haven’t read you—that was my best uneducated guess.” She cleared her throat. “Sorry.”
Georgia gave her a funny look, but it didn’t last. “If I could’venetworked and got work experience from here, I never would’ve left. But I want to make movies—when Xander offered me a job as an intern I was on the next flight out of here, no questions asked. I thought I’d go the usual route by slogging it out as a PA to work my way up and writing my scripts whenever I could, but then I met Maverick. He started sharing some of his story ideas with me. They were so atmospheric and cerebral, but also viscerally heartfelt and sensual, all wrapped in an intriguingly horrifying bow. I knew immediately I wanted to be the one to interpret them visually.”
“He wants to make movies?”
“He wants to tell original stories. I want to adapt said stories. We work really well together. He gets me.” Georgia smiled. “He was the one who pushed me to lobby for a promotion to coproducer onBARDafter I’d only been with them for a few months.” She playfully rolled her eyes. “He’s the worst. I hate him.”
“Yeah,” Lucky agreed, fully aboard the sarcasm train. “It’s kind of annoying how much he believes in people. How dare he.”
Georgia snorted, grinning now. “When he practiced pitchingShortcaketo me, I immediately volunteered. If Stephen had said no, we would’ve found a way to do it ourselves. We’re planning to strike out on our own as partners.”
So, that was what Maverick meant when he asked if Georgia’s uncle wanted to invest in a new company. Lucky had thought he meant NQP.
Georgia continued, “For now, though, NQP is great. Rebel needs stability and health care, which Maverick gets from working there, and it still aligns with my current goals.” She continued talking about how she started filming makeup tutorials and school vlogs in high school. She was a self-taught editor, majoredin film and TV in college, and transitioned to working full-time after interning at NQP.
Lucky asked, “Did you leave your videos up?”
She snorted. “Hell no. I privatedeverythingafter I got hired. I’m not trying to be judged by work I did as a teenager. Fortunately, my channel never took off. Those videos were for me. They’re cringy as hell, but I’m proud of them. They’re how I found myself.” The waitress returned, smiling and setting down their drinks with practiced hands before flitting away. Lucky checked her phone during the interruption—three missed calls, all from the unknown number. She raised her drink to toast. “To new opportunities.”
“New opportunities.” They clinked glasses. Lucky was in mid-drink when Georgia asked, “So how long have you and Maverick been fucking?”
Half of Lucky’s drink sprayed out of her mouth and the other went down the wrong pipe. She stared at Georgia in disbelief while gasping and forcefully coughing against the burn of her whiskey sour. “Why would you ask me that? Are you trying to kill me?”
“What? We all know you are. I just want to know when you started because I haven’t been able to figure it out. It’s been driving me up a wall.”
“You don’t know anything.” She continued coughing as she cleaned the table.
“I’ll get you another one.” Georgia gestured for the waitress’s attention and pointed to Lucky’s drink. “It’s fine if you don’t want to tell me. No need to be dramatic about it.”
“I’m not being dramatic. We’re…not. I don’t really date.” That seemed like the safer word.
“I wouldn’t have guessed that.” She eyed Lucky, a curious expression on her face as she sipped her martini. “But you’re obviously into each other. At first, I couldn’t tell if you were genuinely flirting or being overly friendly. I knew a girl like that once. Confused the hell out of everybody.”
“I, um, I see it more as me actively trying to be…charming. That doesn’t have anything to do with Maverick specifically. I want people to like me. I also want to get my way. The details of how that’s interpreted are for the devil, not me.”
