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My guest tapped her foot on the floor rapidly, restlessly, while trying to compose herself. After a few moments of awkward silence, I extended an olive branch.
“Where are you staying, Juliana?”
She hesitated a few seconds before answering. “The Renaissance. Downtown.”
“Not bad,” I smiled. “Why don’t you head back there, get some rest. I’ll pick you up for lunch tomorrow. You can tell me all about yourself.”
“Tomorrow,” she repeated flatly.
“Sure.”
“Fine,” she sighed. “And if all goes well? We’ll already be in Phoenix. If you catch my drift.”
She smirked at me, and even that was cute. A minute later we’d exchanged phone numbers. Two minutes after that, I was walking her to her car.
“I guess I want to know more about you, too,” she said before getting in. “Who in the worldareyou? And how did you end up all the way out here?”
We looked around together in silence, at the purple desert sky. The stars were just starting to emerge. In just a little while, there would be tens of thousands of them.
“I’m nobody,” I told her plainly. “And this is no place.”
She looked genuinely confused sitting in my driveway, staring back at the house behind me. Everything was silent. The windows glowed from the inside with a warm, orange light.
“Devyn, what exactly—”
“Goodnight Juliana Emerson from New York,” I said, before turning and walking away.
Nine
JULIANA
“Marketing, huh? Tell me about that.”
The man I knew as Devyn Bishop still hadn’t touched his lunch. His piercing eyes — and whole demeanor, really — seemed totally fixated upon me, as if studying or assessing me in silent, secret ways.
“Well I always liked funny commercials,” I explained. “As soon as I was old enough to handle a camera, I started making my own parodies.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed sexily up and down as he sipped his drink. I couldn’t stop staring at his perfect, beautiful mouth.
“So how’d you end up with your own company?”
God, he was so fuckingamazing-looking! I could admit that now. Last night I’d wondered if it were merely my own months-long obsession over his photos that had inflated his obvious good looks to epic proportions. But here in the restaurant of my Phoenix hotel, with the golden afternoon light kissing his handsome, stubbled face?
I could see my infatuation was well-deserved.
“I suffered through two semesters of college before I realized it wasn’t for me,” I went on. “At that point I took the remainder of my savings and student loans and decided to run my own agency instead of working for one. I dumped it into a single project for a fledgling software company who were trying to put out a radical new game.”
Devyn leaned back and smiled. “Sounds chancy.”
“Yeah, you could definitely say that.”
“So what happened?”
“I bought the mother of all zombie flash mobs,” I explained proudly. “Right in the heart of New York City. Full-blown professional makeup artists. No expenses spared. I had zombies bursting out of the dressing rooms at 5th Avenue stores. Zombies stomping through high-profile restaurants…”
“Holy shit, I remember that!” he exclaimed. “That wasyou?”
Tracing the rim of my glass with one finger, I nodded.
