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Dawson glanced down at my sandwich before meeting my eyes. “I hate pickles.”
“I know,” I said, enjoying the hell out of my pickle-full sandwich.
“I also don’t like cucumbers.”
“I know that too,” I said. “I thought you were going to faint when you accidentally bit into one in the salad Cindy brought last month. It concerns me you abhor phallic-shaped delicacies.”
After barking out a laugh, he studied me while he ate his plain cheese sandwich. “You don’t like purple foods.”
I stared at him in surprise. “That’s not true.”
The edge of his lip turned up in that sexy way of his. “Name one. Go on, I’ll wait.”
I racked my brain. “Life Savers. Gummy worms. Grape lollipops.”
“Try again with real food,” he said before taking a swig out of his water bottle.
“There aren’t real foods that are purple,” I argued.
“Eggplant.”
“Ew,” I said, shuddering.
“Purple cabbage,” he suggested.
“When would I ever have an opportunity to eat purple cabbage?”
“It’s in the ginger salad mix from the Japanese place.”
I flared my nostrils at the reminder of those skeevy purple shreds. “Those are too hard relative to the lettuce texture. I don’t like a surprise crunch.”
“Purple grapes,” he said, nodding down at a small bunch of them on his plate.
“Green ones are better, so there’s no point in eating the purple ones.”
He smiled down at his grapes before plucking one and popping it in his mouth. “You’re fucking adorable, and I want to kiss your face off,” he said under his breath.
His words made my breathing speed up.
“I thought we didn’t know each other that well,” I said a little breathlessly.
He looked at me while he finished chewing. “I know you,” he said in a low voice. “I made it a point to know you. I’ve listened to every answer you’ve ever given in this game. It’s you who doesn’t know me.”
“Not true,” I said before I could chicken out. “Your first car was a skateboard.”
His soft snort of laughter was sweetly familiar. “My dad was a stingy ass.”
“Your brother outed you to your parents in church.”
“Matthew is a mega ass,” he said with a laugh. “Thankfully, he didn’t realize he’d been the last to find out. Everyone already knew.”
I ran a finger along a thin scar on his forearm. “But he also came to your defense when your first boyfriend pushed you into a fence,” I said softly. “Beat the shit out of the guy.”
Our eyes met. His eyes were soft and sweet. He was happy. “And then he poured grain alcohol over the cuts from his flask. Like I said, mega ass.”
We shared a laugh before turning our attention back to the game. After a few minutes, he shifted a little closer to me, and I realized he wasn’t sitting in his regular place in the green room. He usually sat in a metal folding chair across the room from where I sat on the floor in front of the blue sofa. Tonight, he was sitting next to me on the floor where Kota normally sat.
I glanced up and saw Kota sitting in Dawson’s chair. When he saw me notice him, he winked at me with a knowing look on his face. I ducked my head and heard him snicker.
“This okay?” Dawson whispered. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to—”
“No, no. It’s fine. I… I like… it’s, um. Good.”
Dawson slid one of his two sugar cookies onto my plate before taking a bite of a baby carrot from a small stack next to his sandwich. I looked down at the cookie.
It was my favorite kind, the puffy ones from the grocery store bakery.
Except it was covered in purple frosting.
I stared at it before clearing my throat. “No, thanks. You can have it.”
He bit his top and reached for it before swapping the purple one out for the yellow cookie on his plate. He leaned over to whisper in my ear. “Bluff called. Admit that purple is the devil.”
I elbowed him in the ribs before enjoying my yellow cookie. Before long, it was time to get into costume again and get ready for the curtain to go up for the evening show.
Just like the matinee, the evening show went by in a blink. Dawson’s kiss this time was accompanied by a possessive hold with one of his hands on the back of my head and another obscenely low on my back. Thankfully, I was sitting back at the table before my dick realized how hot it had been.
Once again, I took a separate bow holding Dawson’s hand and relished the extra attention from the audience.
Afterward, the stage manager told us to stick around. We cleaned up and changed before meeting in the green room again. The director introduced us to the celebrity who’d been in the audience.
To say that I was shocked to find out that it actually was Finn Heller in the audience was an understatement. Chris and I exchanged a wide-eyed look.
