“Harper,” I said, screwing the cap on tightly and setting the polish aside before running my fingers through the hair at the nape of her skull. I tugged back, lifting her face from my shoulder to a breath away from my own and teased: “You’re going to have to be patient.”
My patio doors clicked, then hummed as they slid open.
I looked up, just as Ruchi appeared in their widening gap, her gaze darting from Harper to me.
I let my sunglasses fall a little farther down my nose and regarded her from above them.
“So,” I said. “We’re fucking.”
Ruchi looked at me for a long hard moment before barking: “Oh, for god’s sake.”
She turned on her heel and stalked off, and I wondered if I was supposed to follow her, but I wasn’t in much of a hurry to detangle myself from Harper’s limbs.
Ruchi returned a second later, a familiar-looking man behind her.
Harper screeched and scrambled up. “What are you doing here?”
It clicked: Adrian Navarro. Or in Ruchi’s incessant words:Harper’s fucking PR.
Ruchi cocked her head to the side and arched a mocking brow. “So, we’re fucking.”
Adrian looked between us all and cleared his throat. “How do we want to play this?”
———
Two years—two years!—apparently.
And no, it wasn’t a conflict of interest because no, Harper and I weren’t the center of everyone’s life. “Believe me, the last thing either of us want to do when we get home”—home!— “is discuss the two of you.”
“She’s scrupulous,” Adrian said. “Locks everything up and bans us from talking about work.”
“If I didn’t have that rule I wouldn’t be able to stop bragging about all the times I come out on top,” Ruchi said simply. “Now, back to the two of you. How long?”
“Three weeks,” Harper said quietly, like we were in trouble.
“Three weeks and we caught you already?” Ruchi smirked.
Adrian waved a hand in defeat. “That right there is the bragging I’m normally trying to avoid.”
———
How we wanted to play this was soap-opera slapstick. Loud, messy hatred that kept the print news focused on us. And it didn’t hurt to frame ourselves as too silly to ever do such a serious thing as try to get away with murder.
In public, we were volatile in our abhorrence.
In private, our passion swung to right the scales.
———
“Did you lose your husband beneath the folds of that dress?” I sneered on the carpet of the Met Gala that April.
“Did you lose your head up your ass?” Harper countered. “Want me to send another of my exes digging for it for you?”
In the hotel room that night, her tugging my hair back to expose my neck, her teeth against it before she growled: “I think I want an apology for that one.”
So I pushed her back onto the bed and said: “Work for it then.”
———
