Page 19 of Fate Fiction

I’d have to fight it all. For the next seven days I couldn’t be a fan of Sword of Thorndown. I couldn’t even know it existed.

My mind kept flashing to when I first saw him from the beach. Was I going to be as dumbfounded every time I saw him? Would I ever get used to it? Would I slip up and call him Erwyn on accident and ruin not only the week but my entire life?

Avoidance would be the best course of action here.

I had a clear agenda for the week, and I could very well stick to it without his interference. Running into him every so often would be inevitable, and now there was the forced joint dinner, but I certainly didn’t need to interact with him. It was clear that he didn’t want that anyways. He could do his meditation or training routine or whatever celebrities did, and I could go off on solo hikes and scream into the woods a bit.

Being invisible would be the goal, and I’d work tirelessly to achieve it. If I turned into someone distant and aloof then I wouldn’t need to think about what his impression was of me for the rest of my life.

After the trip ended I could forget him entirely, chalk it up to some crazy coincidence. Maybe even a fever dream forged in isolation. I may not be able to watch another episode of Thorndown without it being weirdly ruined by him breaking the plane between celebrity and regular person. But that was a problem for future me. Present me was focused on self-preservation. Present me would avoid Evan McLeod like the plague.

five

. . .

Sitting at Aunt Sue’s table for dinner was normal. Sitting directly across from Evan McLeod?

The strangest experience I’d had in my life thus far.

I was anxiously chewing pieces of my salad and staring down at the white plate below. When I stood next to Sue in the kitchen chopping the lettuce a half hour earlier I could only think about how Evan was about to be the one eating it. Those plush lips of his would wrap around the leaf and⁠—

I needed to knock it off. It was ridiculous assigning such weight to these little things.

Of course Evan would be eating the lettuce, of course he would be sitting at this table. It was a continued uncanny convergence of worlds. This was the same table I would sit at and help Sue knead masa dough to make pupusas as a late afternoon snack, or write for hours on end as a teenager when I was angry with my mother.

Now Evan was sitting in the chair I’d sit in while Sue gave me French braids that I’d keep in for days until my mother made me take them out.

The problem wasn’t that Evan was some asshole distant untouchable figure. In fact, as dinner went on it was clear he was the exact opposite.

He was deeply engaged with Sue and Randy, he leaned in close as Randy shared stories of his years working on a crab boat in Alaska. It seemed like this experience was heavenly for Evan, three complete strangers who seemingly didn’t give a shit about who he was.

I wasn’t supposed to see him from this close. He was a painting and I could see each individual brush stroke and covered-up mistake.

Sue would ask him questions about his work—not because she was enamored with his celebrity, but because she was polite and genuinely curious about his occupation. She asked about Sword of Thorndown as if it were an accounting firm. I flinched when Sue completely misunderstood the plot of the show or any of the characters. My inner fan was itching to step in and correct her, but I wouldn’t dare blow my cover.

I reminded myself that this cover wouldn’t matter so much since I’d decided that Evan and I would only be seeing one another during dinners and at a distance around camp.

Evan thought otherwise. He’d been studying me for the last twenty minutes. His stupid blue eyes tracked up and down my body as I stiffly sat across from him. As though I was some fascinating anthropological subject and not, statistically, an extremely average person.

“What do you do for work, Dani?” Evan gently directed the questions away from himself and towards the only other person at the table, me.

Fuck.

I almost exclaimed it but caught myself. My name had exited from his mouth completely unprompted, I almost jumped from being startled by it. I looked up from the last bits of salad I was pushing around the plate. It took a few seconds to even process what he was asking after the initial surprise of being acknowledged by him.

What did I do for work? I had managed to wipe my memory completely blank. I write fanfiction about you! my id wanted to scream.

Work. Paycheck. The office I spent forty hours a week in. Remember that?

“Oh,” I squeaked out. “I work in Human Resources…at a tech company in Boston.”

How boring my day job sounded in comparison to his.

Of course I could talk for hours about my job, sometimes I had to when recruiting executive-level candidates, but it’s not like Evan McLeod cared how I spent eight a.m. to five p.m. every day.

Then again, he was looking directly at me right now. I could even say that he appeared—or at least pretended to appear—genuinely interested in what a “normal person” did at work.

“Tell me about it, do you enjoy it?” His soft blue eyes nearly bore into my skull. Heat was creeping up my neck.