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“Um… I… I’m busy?” It comes out as a question because I am obviously not busy. “Also, why?”
“You need a dress for the party we’re going to together,” he says vaguely, since Sally is still lingering in the room checking him out.
Behind him and off to the side, she wiggles her eyebrows at me, and I make a shooing gesture at her.
Yes, the crazy ones are always hot. This isn’t my first rodeo.
“I have dresses.”
“You need a nice dress,” he specifies. “There’s also a certain look I’m going for, and I don’t want you wearing a dress he bought you. I do want you in black lace, but… I’ll pick out your dress.”
I swallow. “Um, I guess I could get dressed.”
“Make it quick,” he says, and it annoys me a little bit, but I move Toast and go to my bedroom to change anyway.
I feel nervous as I’m getting dressed and trying to do something with my hair without showering. Rude of him to just show up. He could have texted first. I did give him my number since I agreed to go to the thing with him, and he hasn’t used it once.
Killian still does.
Every day.
I catch sight of myself getting ready to go out with someone else in the mirror and feel a heavy sense of guilt.
I sit down on my bed and open my text chain with Killian. I have to fight the urge to type something, just a check-in text…
But I know there’s no checking in with him.
It will always lead somewhere with him.
The only thing I can do is stay away.
And eventually, even if it’s not Aiden, that will mean dating someone else, so maybe I should suck it up and go practice.
I leave with him, but I feel weird about it.
I keep my phone out and in my lap because there’s also at least a ten percent chance this entire masquerade thing is a total ruse and the lunatic is planning to kidnap me or something.
I have got to stop dating kidnappers.
It occurs to me when we get to the department store that we probably should have talked on the way, but we didn’t. He seemed content to sit in the quiet and I was busy watching landmarks to make sure we really were going where he said we were—and to text my rescuers about where he took me, if not.
It’s not a kidnapping, though, it really is a shopping excursion.
He follows behind me while I look at dresses, but he doesn’t ask what I like. He picks dresses he likes, and once he’s found a few, he leads me to the fitting room to try them on.
I feel weird about trying on clothes for him the way I did Killian, but I guess he wants to match his outfit to mine.
My memory stirs, something strangely familiar about this whole interaction.
Even the way he gave me his number.
My stomach lightens a little when I have a nearly identical memory of Kyle at the coffee shop what feels like a million years ago, charming me with glints of a personality I never saw in him again.
It hits me when I’m in the dressing room, so when I pick up the skirt of the first dress and go out to see him, I’m not focused on the dress.
“When we exchanged numbers,” I say, and he looks up from his phone, “you… you handed me your phone and told me to put my number in it.”
He watches me, but doesn’t say anything.
