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Now Becca was pouting.
“You know I only like James.” Despite their disastrous first moment on camera, he’d been stopping by Everly’s desk even more than usual. And when they ran into each other in the skincare aisle of the pharmacy after work on Monday, she’d managed not to knock everything off the shelves. She would have sworn Logan looked disappointed.
Though she wouldn’t admit it to Becca, Everly had bought the face mask James recommended. It was sitting on the vanity in her bathroom.
She didn’t even use face masks.God,she was a mess. The last thing she needed to do was add a crush on a second guy to this mayhem.
“Then maybe it’s time to do something about that,” Becca said.
Everly’s palms snapped up as if to ward off a punch. “I can embarrass myself fine on my own. I don’t need to go chasing rejection on television.”
Becca grabbed the remote from the coffee table and aimed it at the TV. Everly’s last minutes of peace were dwindling. “I don’t mean during the show. But think about it. All that confidence you’ll have afterward. Use it. Take the bull by the balls.”
Everly choked on a laugh. “That’s definitely not how that saying goes.”
Becca waved the remote at her. “You get the point.”
Swallowing hard, Everly buried her face in Bagel’s neck. “Even if I was to buy into your very flawed theory that James likes me—”
“How is it flawed?” Becca squawked.
“You have never seen us interact.”
“And you’ve always been completely clueless about guys. Remember Adam in high school? He basically had to give you a notarized testimony of his feelings before you believed that he was into you.”
Everly grumbled, chastised. Flirting was confusing. The line between being nice and “it’d be nice to kiss you” could get very blurry, and the repercussions of crossing it were often mortifying. Best to stay on the safe side. Color within the lines.
Besides, even on the off chance that Becca was right about James, dating a coworker was complicated and uncomfortable. Either you had to hide it, or everyone knew and was watching you and speculating, and there was paperwork to file with HR, and then if you broke up, you had to filemorepaperwork. It was like work divorce.
It was easier to be work single. To leave James safely in her daydreams. She got everything she needed from him there.
Everly breathed a sigh of relief when the theme song forOn the Plus Sidesang out from the TV’s speaker bar.
Suddenly, watching herself on camera seemed far less torturous than this line of conversation.
Twenty minutes later, Becca was holding a pillow over her face to smother her laughter.
A clear shot of Everly and James slamming their heads together had just flashed across the screen.
Damn Logan and his excellent zoom lens straight to hell.
Her friend’s laugh was contagious enough that Everly had to fight one off herself, even as her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “I was nervous! Being recorded talking to someone you like is not fun byanystretch of the imagination.”
Becca’s eyes scrunched up in sympathy, though she couldn’t stop laughing. Not that Everly blamed her. She was basically a walking fail video.
It didn’t help that this moment between James and Everly was the climactic ending to a series of clips focused entirely on him. There’d been shots from the hosts’ ambush where he’d aimed a set of finger guns at her from across the room, causing her face to go red as a tomato. A few of her bumbling her way through a conversation during one of his trips to the break room. And the time he tried to lob a jelly bean in her mouth only for it to bounce off her forehead instead.
The worst, though, were the seemingly endless clips of her following James with her gaze like a lovesick puppy. She hadn’t realized she watched him that much, and it was not pleasant to learn this via a TV show.
Logan hadn’t missed a thing.
And Sady had stacked it all together in a way that made Everly’s crush so obvious it hurt. It had to be some kind of trick of reality TV storytelling.
Right?
Everly had to have at least a modicum of self-preservation in real life.
Thankfully, the show transitioned back to Jazzy and Stanton, and the premiere special’s host—Stella Gabriel, fashion designer extraordinaire— asking them to sum up their season-three guests for the viewers.
