SHE FINALLY LEAVES A FEW HOURS LATER, probably still without having reached those books on the top shelf. I really hope she didn’t use the antique table. I don’t want to imagine her footprints all over…whatever sort of old wood that is. I’m rich, not versed in old stuff. There’s a difference. I watch through my bedroom window as she walks down the driveway to the main road, where she always parks her car. She glances at me up in the window and waves goodbye with her middle finger again, then leaves before I can retaliate.

That—she—her—!!

I’ve never met someone else half as stubborn; it really is breathtaking. I’ve acted awfully beastly toward her every day she’s been here and still she stays. Not even my LA friends stayed when I acted like a wanker.

If I’d known she was this infuriating back at ExcelsiCon, I would’ve—I wouldn’t have—

Argh!

I scrub my face with my hands, because she was right. I ruined my life, that’s why my parents sent me to this place, and now I’m stuck here, same as her.

There is a knock on my door and Elias pokes his head in. “Dinner’s about ready. Potato soup tonight—it’s the recipe from that show we watched the other night! I found it online and—”

“Not hungry.”

He sighs. “Ah, you’re still angry.”

“Tired, really.”

Elias leans on the side of the doorway. “Why do you want me to get rid of her so badly?”

Because she’s infuriating, and she’s stubborn, and if she knew who I was—

I grab my jacket from the back of the computer chair and shove my arms into it as I squeeze past him into the hallway. “I’m going for a walk.”

“But dinner—”

“I’m not hungry,” I repeat, and leave though the garage door. I didn’t bring my car—my Tesla was still waterlogged by the time they sent me here—so I start walking down the road toward town. There’s nothing but farms and fields of…some sort of crop. I don’t know what they grow here. Some leafy green things. There aren’t many cars on the road as the sun sinks below the tree line and the sky turns a dark blue, reminding me of the color of Carmindor’s uniform.

It might surprise people, but I was actually ecstatic when I was cast as Sond in the Starfield sequel. When I was little I didn’t have a whole lot of friends. Didn’t realize yet that money could sort of buy you them for a while. I played alone a lot. With action figures. Video games. Things of the like.

And I watched Starfield.

My nanny put it on, actually. She was a girl from university and going through medical school, so she didn’t have much time to entertain me. She’d turn on the telly every day when it came on, and I reckon that was that. My best memories were back then, sitting in that huge living room alone with a bowl of popcorn, and I reckon I should’ve felt alone, at least—but I never did. I was off in space with Carmindor and Amara and Euci.

Sounds stupid, I know. They weren’t real.

But seven-year-old me didn’t know the difference.

Ten years later, I’m still alone, but I’m smart enough to know that Carmindor hates salads and complains about high stunts, and Amara has never even seen the television show, and Euci runs an Etsy shop selling his face on T-shirts.

I wrap my jacket tighter around myself, wondering whether I’m heading into town or away from it, when a neon sign comes into view over the hill—a diner. There aren’t many cars in the parking lot, and my stomach grumbles because I lied to Elias. So I pull my hood up and walk into the restaurant. The seats are all old and faded red, the tiles checkered, polished silver chrome on the walls. Most of the booths are taken, surprisingly, so I sink down onto a barstool at the counter.

An older woman with blondish-white hair pulled up in a bun comes up to me. She wears garishly pink lipstick and smiles so wide I can see some of it on her teeth. “What can I get you, darlin’?”

I glance at the menu, and then tap my finger on the cheese fries. “And a cup of tea please.”

“Lovely choice. I’ll order it right up,” she says with a smile, and brings back a glass of water.

My phone dings, and at first I think it might be Elias, so I don’t answer, but when it dings again, I think better of it.

IMOGEN (6:31 PM)

—Ethan wants to know who you chose to date in that new fast-food dating sim.

—[LINK TO GAME]

—(Also hi there nerd)

I snort, and send a quick reply:

VANCE (6:32 PM)

—I don’t play EVERY dating sim.

—…But Colonel Sanders was the easiest to romance.

IMOGEN (6:32 PM)

—I KNEW IT.

—It’s because he looks like Ron Swanson, isn’t it.

I say that I like Ron Swanson’s mustache one time in an interview and suddenly everyone thinks I have a type. Well, I do, but that’s beside the point.

By the right order of the universe, I should not be on friendly terms with Imogen Lovelace. I shouldn’t even know her—she isn’t a model, she isn’t an actress, she isn’t the son or daughter of Hollywood royalty. Through a series of unfortunate events, I went out on a date with Imogen thinking she was my costar, Jessica Stone. To be fair, they were impersonating each other at the time.

It wasn’t until I was on the set of Starfield: Resonance that I actually met Imogen—I mean, really met her as herself, and not masquerading as a famous actress. She was visiting the set in Atlanta, Georgia, to bring lunch to Ethan—her boyfriend—and Jessica Stone.

“Are you always impossibly glum or is your face just stuck that way?” were the first words she said to me.

I glanced up from a dating sim (they’re the weirdest sort of guilty pleasure, but this one was…odd. It was a Japanese sim about dating a horse guy? I much preferred the one with the pigeons—or Dream Daddy), and there she was sitting in Jess’s chair beside me.

I had to do a double take at first. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Alas, it is.” Then she glanced down at my phone, and her eyebrows shot up. “Is that…the horse dating sim?”

“Don’t judge.”

“Oh, I’m super judging,” she replied with a laugh. “Have you played Hatoful Boyfriend? That one is crazy.”

After that, we just kept talking. She would come on-set to visit Ethan, and then she’d swing by my trailer and we’d talk a bit about the games we were playing, and the new dating sims and otome games that were released that week. She’s the only one who knows about my deep, dark secret love of these games.

“The I’m-a-Loner Vance Reigns is a romantic at heart,” she teased once, and I’d just scoffed.

I’m not a romantic at heart. I just like the stories.

As I wait for my food, I pull out my phone and log into the current game I’m dating through. It’s the one with the assistant who gets hired at an agency and falls for the CEO’s daughter, but she can also have an illicit romance with the mailroom guy who looks a little like a twentysomething Ron Swanson.

What can I say? I do have a type.

You find yourself torn between going to lunch with Ridley, the CEO’s daughter, and taking Oliver up on his offer to have lunch with him in the mailroom…

→ I would love to go!

→ Ugh…I’m sorry, I have previous plans.

The waitress brings me a cup of hot tea, and I take the string on the end of the bag and absently begin dunking it into the hot water. Of course I’ll choose the previous plans—young Ron Swanson is waiting for me, and I never go back on a promise.

Even in a video game.

Though every time I try to get into the world of the game, these blokes in the booth beside me keep distracting me. They’re rude, crowding into too small a booth, their plates half-empty, half-strewn across the floor.

When the waitress brings me my plate of cheesy chips—fries, whatever—she gives them a disapproving glare before she refills my glass of water and leaves for the other side of the diner again.

I don’t much blame her.

“And her friends actually think they can beat me,” one of the guys says, lounging back in the booth. He picks up a chip and tosses it back down on his plate. “They’re not even worth my time.”

“Quinn’s buttons are pretty cute, though,” one of his friends, a stout brown-skinned bloke, says as he licks his fingers. He had previously demolished a bacon cheeseburger with excellent technique. Darien would have been proud.

“Yeah, like anyone’ll vote for someone because of buttons.” He scoffs and rolls his eyes. “I’ve got a whole YouTube audience dying to see me dance with Rosie and you know what, I’m going to. Because who better deserves it?”

Rosie? I can’t imagine that there are many people named Rosie in this small town, and not many who are around our age. Well, isn’t this interesting. I never imagined her going to some backwater high-school dance with a bloke like this—

“To be fair,” another one of his friends, a girl with short blond hair, points out, “you never actually asked her.”

…I stand corrected.

He scoffs. “Who else does she have to go with? I’m doing her a favor.”

“She’s ungrateful,” the first friend agrees. They all seem to do nothing but agree. Do any of them have minds of their own, or are they all just robots?

“And you can do so much better,” adds his other friend.

I snort—I can’t help it—and eat another chip.

The one in the snap-back cap must’ve heard me, because he turns to look at me over his shoulder. “You think something’s funny?”

She’s the one who can do better, I want to reply, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. I don’t know this girl, but hearing them talk about her like…like…like she should be grateful for that sort of attention, really makes me uncharacteristically upset.

If they can’t see that she’s beautiful, the way her fringe cuts across her brows, the brush of freckles across her nose, the way she sighs in the library, running her fingers along the bindings of the books, when she thinks no one’s watching—

Stop it.

“Yo,” the guy says, turning around in his booth. “Do I know you? You look familiar.”

Shit.

I adopt my best American accent to reply, “I’ve got that face,” before I put a five on the table for the waitress, abandoning half of my plate of chips—fries—and slide off my barstool. Better I leave before I say anything I’ll regret, which will perhaps be just everything.

The walk back to the house is short, and when I let myself in Sansa is curled up on the couch with Elias. They’re watching that karaoke show again, and Elias doesn’t notice that I’ve returned yet.

So I creep back into the hall and follow it down into the library. I don’t quite understand why I feel so secretive, as if this place is private. As if I’m not supposed to be here.

Perhaps I’m not.

The library is dark, and more than a little unsettling, before I turn on one of the lamps on the end table. Orange-yellow light floods the room. There are stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly in a system I can’t begin to fathom. The wingback chair sits against the bookshelf still, her footprints in the red leather cushions.

She’d only managed to get a few of the books down, it seems.

It really is bad foresight that Elias didn’t even give her a step stool, but then I remember that I’m supposed to be helping her organize the library. I would have been said step stool, apparently.

On the balcony, she had laughed and said she didn’t mind being short. “Besides, it makes reaching upper cabinets a game of parkour.”

“I’d reach them for you, if you’d ask.”

“Would I have to ask?”

“No.”

With a sigh, I push the wingback chair to the side and reach for the books. I take them down, two at a time, and pile them up on the chair where she can see them tomorrow. Then I turn off the lights again and close the door, as if I was never there.