Page 73 of Mr. Fixer Upper
“It is for tonight.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
She wasn’t a coward, Paige told herself as she dragged her suitcase down the hallway to her apartment. She had just avoided an unnecessarily messy scene.
Filming the morning of reveal day had been so tense that when Andy took her aside she actually thought he was going to fire her. But in a shining moment of heroics, Andy had offered her an out.
“I’m not going to pretend to know what’s going on. The network didn’t tell me they were sending Meeghan here, and I don’t want to know what they hoped to accomplish. But I think you could use a break. So Mel’s got a plane ticket with your name on it. I told her you had a family emergency. Go home and promise me you’ll be back next season,” he’d told her.
She’d hugged him hard and pretended she didn’t see Gannon watching them. Under normal circumstances, she would never have left the set. Not on reveal day and certainly not when the family was a sweetheart of a military couple who was finalizing the adoption of two kids out of foster care.
But it was impossible for her to be aroundhim. He hadn’t explained anything. Certainly not why, if he wasn’t dating Meeghan, she felt so comfortable just showing up on a shoot across the country to lay a kiss on him. A kiss that he hadn’t exactly fought off. And then he had taken her back to his hotel room. That couldn’t be misconstrued. But then why had she spent the entire flight from Albuquerque to New York trying to come up with alternatives to the facts?
Was she that desperate to be with him that she was willing to sweep all of his lies under the rug?
Pathetic.
Her mother would be horrified.
She let herself into the apartment and was immediately accosted by five feet of Latina fire.
“What are you doing home so early?” Becca launched herself off the couch and covered the eight feet to the door in record time, wrapping Paige in a suffocating hug. “Oh my God, you didn’t get fired did you?”
She almost wished. Home now, Paige just stood in the doorway. She didn’t want to go back out into the world, but she didn’t want to face her sad mattress in her sad room either.
“Okaaaaay,” Becca said, picking up on the cues loud and clear. “I’m just going to take this bag from you, and you’re going to go sit on the couch, and we don’t have to talk.”
Becca hefted the suitcase with one hand and shoved Paige toward the couch with her other. “Go. Sit.”
Paige did as she was told, slumping down on the worn cushions that Becca had hidden under a gold slipcover. She pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes.
When she dropped her hands and opened her eyes, a glass of red wine floated before her.
“Take your medicine, babe,” Becca said, wiggling the glass.
“Thanks, Bec.”
“Okay, I know I said you didn’t have to talk about it, but I’m revising. Does this have anything to do with Gannon?”
Paige shot Becca a look over the rim of her wineglass. “Maybe.”
“Does it also have anything to do with a vapid vampire blonde named Meeghan?”
Paige thumped her head back against the low cushion of the couch. “Ugh. Does the entire world know?”
“Of course not. I, being your caring and protective roommate, have been stalking Meeghan—stupid fucking name, by the way—on social media since you and Gannon started…”
“Having incredible, mind-blowing, cheater-y sex?” Paige suggested.
Becca patted her on the shoulder. “We’ve all been there through the divorce that was never finalized or the long distance relationship that ‘just ended.’”
“I asked him straight up on multiple occasions, and he said they weren’t together. He said it had been a publicity thing set up by the network to help launch Kings.”
“I saw her post on Instagram. ‘Surprising my man at work!’” Becca mimicked in her very best valley girl voice. “Does she get her lips injected with car tires? Because that’s some serious perma duck face going on there.”
“She showed up on set, after I had decided to talk to Gannon about maybe continuing things in the off-season, and laid a porn star kiss on him.”
“What did he do?”
