Page 91 of Tennessee Trouble

My breath catches, right in time with my heart stopping for a beat. Cherry Luna. Luna.

That’s me.

I think.

Blinking hard, I try to click away, but I can’t. Not just yet. The ingredients list doesn’t matter. It could tell you to mix a glue stick with glitter and Play-Doh for all I care. It’s the name that has me…I don’t even know what this feeling is.

“So, not to make a thing about this,” Rylan whispers behind me, “but isn’t that what he called you?”

It is. Sorta. Luna was my make-believe name. The one he continued to use as a moniker that belonged to him. But there’s no way. He said he made his entry months ago. So there’s no way he named this after me. It’s just a coincidence.

You know, those things I’m not sure I believe in.

“Shut it,” I snap back at my brother.

I need to focus. I need to do what I came to do—vote.

So I do just that. I muster up the fortitude and click away, onto the voting page. Without any kind of hesitation, I select my own drink and hit submit. Boom. Done.

“Now what?” Mikayla asks.

“We hang out ’til the awards are announced.” I glance at my phone, secretly wishing there was a message from Brandt, then kicking myself for such a thought. “Should start in about fifteen minutes.”

“Fine. I’ll be answering emails if you need me.” Turning on her heels, she walks off. Where to, I have no idea, but also don’t care.

“We won’t…” Kyra quips, looping her arm through mine. We walk over to a set of chairs on the side of the stage, parking ourselves in the front row. “Now, tell me how you’re really feeling.”

I lean back, relaxing into the cold metal chair. I try to gather my thoughts, wanting to be able to pinpoint one exact, specific emotion that I can share. Put a name to this knot twisting and turning in my chest.

“Messy.”

“Okay, that’s fair. Do you think that drink was named for you?”

“No, can’t be. He said that he submitted his entry months ago. Which means that it has nothing to do with me.”

Kyra nods, her sympathetic expression unchanged. “Do you wish it was?”

Oh, well, that’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question, isn’t it? Do I wish that the drink I didn’t know about was named for me? Honestly, I don’t know. Worse, I think deep down, I might, kinda sorta, wish it was.

“How lame do I sound if I say yes?”

She shakes her head. “Not at all. You fell in love with him and⁠—”

“I’m not in love with him.”

“Yeah, right.” Kyra rolls her eyes. “Just like I wasn’t in love with Davis when I agreed to marry him.”

I sputter out a laugh. To anyone else, that sentence would sound weird. Because of course you’re in love when you get proposed to. Only, Davis wasn’t proposing out of love. Errr, not only out of love. He also needed to get out of some hot water due to a bad investment. And Kyra agreed, because she loved him.

“That was different.”

“Was it though?”

I nod. Because Davis wasn’t being sneaky. He never lied to her about his reasons. He told her from the get-go that he needed to marry her because of that investment. He wasn’t leading her on. He didn’t spend weeks making her think that he was her champion. That he believed in her.

That he wanted a partnership when he was really after something else entirely.

“So…” Rylan interrupts, crashing into the seat next to me. The metal chair wobbles from the momentum, but Rylan corrects himself before he tumbles. “I was just talking to one of the coordinators…”