Page 46 of Nothing Like the Movies

I grabbed the tiny jar of Oui and shut the fridge. “Isn’t this a pet-free building?”

“Come on, we all see the dog walkers on the elevators and know it’s just for show,” he said. “I want a fat tabby.”

“Aren’t your raccoons enough?” I grabbed a spoon and climbed onto one of the stools.

“Watching them through a window is far different than snuggling them,” he said.

“True,” I said, shrugging. “And I’m game. I miss my cat.”

“You should send for him,” Leo said, his face breaking into an excited grin. “Fitzpervert can be besties with Bridget.”

“You’re going to name your cat ‘Bridget’?”

“I will if Mr. Fitzpervert is coming to live with us.”

“No cats,” Campbell said, stumbling into the kitchen. Her long curls were sticking up everywhere, and she was wearing a cropped shirt that saidFUCKETand a pair of boxers. “They pee on your stuff, and the apartment will smell like litter.”

“You grinch,” Leo growled. “Butt out.”

“I hate cats,” she said, walking toward the Keurig. “I think I might be allergic.”

“Liar.” I pulled the lid off my yogurt.

“Speaking of liars,” she said, turning to point her finger at me. “I thought you said that you and Wes Bennett just ‘casually dated’ for a couple months in high school.”

“Yeah, so…?” I stuck my spoon into my yogurt. “What about it?”

“AJ Powers is my lab partner, and he assumed that I knew that you and his roommate were ‘madly in love’ your freshman year at UCLA.”

“What?” I didn’t even know what to say—what to think—as she looked at me like I was a sneaky liar. How did he know that—had Wes said something? “What did he say?”

“We were talking about the party and how fun it was at FatSal’s afterward when I totally faced Wade with a map of the United States,” she said, opening the coffee maker and putting a pod inside. “And when I mentioned you, he goes, ‘It’s wild that they were madly in love their freshman year and now they’re like strangers.’?”

My breath got stopped up in my chest. “Why does he think we were ‘madly in love’?”

“Holy crap,” Leo said, hopping off the counter and coming closer. “Was Miss Anti-Romance madly in love?”

“Shhhhhh, what else did he say?” I asked, even as my logical brain screamedit doesn’t matter!

Had Wes told his roommate that we’d been madly in love?

Had he said it recently?

Because I was still a little… unsettled by his interview, by how quickly we’d fallen back into what felt like us. The second I let my guard down and stopped focusing on how much I hated him, there he was, lying back in the grass and making me laugh.

Totally unacceptable. Had I learnednothingfrom everything that happened?

“Well, I didn’t want him to know that he knew more than me,” Campbell said, turning around and shrugging. “So I just kind of said ‘yeah, wild’ and we moved on. But I want the whole story.”

“Yeah, me too,” Leo agreed, nodding. “Tell us the story.”

“We all deserve to know,” I heard from behind me. Apparently Clark was up too, because he said, “Especially me, your boyfriend.”

“Gaaaah, I don’t want to talk about it,” I squealed, no longer hungry for yogurt. Or anything. “The short story is that we datedin high school, went away to college together, but then he almost immediately moved back home because his dad died, and then we broke up. The end.”

“That isn’t a short story,” Clark said, breezing past me on his way to the fridge for his daily morning Red Bull. “That’s a lame-ass run-on sentence. You’re going to allow us each three questions, or Leo will evict you.”

“What in God’s name are you wearing?” I asked offhandedly, because it looked like Clark was wearing an old lady’s purple housecoat.

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