Page 46 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

Declan set down his wine and cake and hurried over, so obedient you’d think he was the one under contract with these people. Maybe we all were, in a way, considering they were paying for his vacation as much as mine. Rory ordered him to place a hand around the small of my back, and Declan obliged, though I didn’t miss the faint blush tinging his cheeks as he did so. My mind snapped back to last night, how natural everything had felt in the elevator, how readily he’d touched more than just my waist. I still didn’t understand what had gone wrong, but that fact that he had wanted to touch me had to count for something. That level of want couldn’t evaporate into thin air.

Or could it? I’d thought it myself—the perfect storm. Last night, it had felt like everything was falling into place, like we were meant to end up alone together in that elevator. That kiss had stolen my breath away; it was totally different from the other kisses I’d had in the past. And that seemed dangerous. Maybe it had only worked in that moment. Maybe it was the alcohol, and the arcade, and that wistful feeling I’d had as we walked back to the hotel, like maybe, just maybe, if I could learn to think about relationships like everyone else, I’d find that part of me that was missing.

But no. I’d said it myself, just a couple nights ago in the room with Jo. I didn’t need to fill some kind of void in my life, no matter how empty everyone else seemed to think it was. A single word pinged around inside my tired and aching skull: lonely. Because that’s what it came down to. More labels. As though social media hadn’t slapped me with enough of them.

Rory stepped back and peered through the viewfinder on his camera. “Okay, now talk,” he ordered.

I frowned at him. “What?”

“Talk about something. Laugh. I don’t know, tickle each other. Whatever you have to do to look more natural. We’re going for fun. Candid. Try to look like you’re enjoying yourselves.”

I gave Declan a threatening look, because there was no chance in hell I was letting him tickle me. He breathed an uncertain laugh. “You look, um—” He seemed fearful of saying the wrong thing. “Nice. Pretty, I mean.”

“I look hungover,” I said flatly. I indicated his NASA sweatshirt. “I see you’re repping your brand.”

He withheld a smile. “NASA isn’t a brand, it’s a government agency. My sister gave me this for Christmas after I told my family I’d gotten the job.” With the hand that wasn’t at my waist, he tugged at the collar of the sweatshirt, self-conscious. Rory was snapping away in the background. “Jo said it was a casual shoot.”

“Casual doesn’t have to mean just crawled out of bed,” I joked, before remembering with a twinge of guilt that he’d actually crawled out of bed hours ago, despite the long night of drinking and getting trapped in elevators, just to do me a favor. I couldn’t fault him for dressing a bit bummy. “Thank you for taking the maid uniform to the dry cleaners, by the way.”

“No problem.” He shifted and cleared his throat. “Look, about last night—”

Rory heaved a sigh. “All right, this isn’t working. You two.” He got Jo and Peter’s attention and waved them over. “Let’s get you over here for a bit. You”—he pointed an accusing finger at me and Declan in turn—“go drink some wine or something. Try to loosen up.”

I was all too happy to obey. Declan followed me with a glance over his shoulder at Jo and Peter. Already they looked far more natural than we did; Jo had smeared frosting across Peter’s nose and he was laughing and trying to dodge her as she tried to lick it back off. Despite my initial concerns, they really did look happy together.

“This is exhausting,” Declan said in a low voice. “I don’t know how you deal with it.”

My chest tightened. Exhausting. He would be exhausted by my lifestyle—by anything beyond these two weeks. I’d known that for a while now. Should’ve known it from the moment I tried to search his name on Instagram while standing outside that club in Studio City, though there was no reason at the time for me to connect his lack of social media presence to my own complicated relationship with the internet. There was no reason I would’ve connected me to him.

Why was I even thinking about this?

“You didn’t have to come,” I reminded him.

He shrugged. “Jo said Renee wanted to get me in a couple pictures. Though she didn’t mention that they’d be couple-y pictures.”

I didn’t know what he meant by that—maybe that he wouldn’t have shown up, if he’d known he was going to be posing with me. He certainly wouldn’t have shown up if he’d known Jo’s true intentions for the pictures. “Yes, but you’re not under contract,” I pointed out instead.

“Did you guys want to try some of the cake?” Renee had materialized between us, showing absolutely zero interest in why we were standing so close or what we were talking about. I wondered how Jo had managed to convince her to mind her business without compromising the partnership; that was always a fine line to tread. “We’ve got a couple extra pieces here.”

I accepted the plate. “Which flavor is it?”

Renee waved a hand, mumbling something about cream cheese and Funfetti before she scurried off again.

Declan had also taken a plate, and we ate in silence as we watched our best friends pose for photos. Peter had scooped Jo into his arms and she was giggling like a kid while Rory went mad snapping pictures. The cake was actually pretty amazing. It was moist and fluffy, and there was this subtle, homemade taste to it.

“I almost told Jo I wasn’t going to come,” Declan said quietly, reverting to our earlier conversation. “But I wanted to talk to you.”

“You realize you could have just texted me, right? You had already texted to say you wanted to talk.”

The corner of his mouth twisted in a smile. “It didn’t seem like the sort of conversation that should happen over text.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I shoveled cake into my mouth instead. Watched as Jo and Peter wrapped up their shoot, until Rory beckoned us back over. I wasn’t eager to pose for more pictures, but instead of saying no, I cast a glance at Declan, ready to follow his lead. “You have some frosting—” I pointed at the corner of my mouth. Declan nodded through a mouthful of cake, setting his empty cake plate on the table as he bent to grab a few napkins from the holder, and—

And wine spilled over the front of my jeans.

My empty wineglass shattered on the floor, knocked over by Declan’s ill-placed cake plate. “Oh, shit,” he said, voice muffled by the cake. Frazzled, he grabbed a whole stack of napkins and wadded them up to dab at the crotch of my jeans. “I’m so sorry, Margo, I didn’t mean to—”

“Give me those.” I snatched the napkins out of his hands and patted myself down a couple times before deeming it a lost cause. The stolen jeans were a light-wash denim. Or at least they had been, up until a few seconds ago. Now the front of them was more of a dark reddish-purple.