Page 18 of The Rom-Commers

“Has she seen the original?”

“Only a million times. Seen it, read it, studied it.”

“Then there’s no way she loves what I just wrote. She’s either a liar… or she doesn’t know shit from a shoelace.”

Harsh.

Harsh, but well-said.

She doesn’t know shit from a shoelace.Did he just make up a new aphorism?

Logan was still trying to take the ego route. “I’m telling you. She’s a Charlie Yates superfan. She’s so excited to work with you.”

That, at least, was true.

Next Charlie said, “Of course she is. Who wouldn’t be?”

“You’re being such an ass right now. I’m telling you, she’s good.”

“And I’m telling you to get her out of here.”

A pause, where I had to assume they were staring each other down.

Then Charlie said, “Wait. Hold on. Is this the same girl from the video you texted?”

The video? He texted?

I looked down at Logan’s phone in my hand. I’d known his passcode in high school. I tried it, and it still worked. Triple O Seven. Guess some things never change. The screen opened to a text he’d just sent to Charlie saying,There in 5.

Above it, I could see the bottom section of the last thing he’d sent before that.

A video.

Standing on Charlie Yates’s front steps, I tried to process the domino-fall of realizations their conversation had just set off in my mind: Charlie Yates had no idea I was coming. He had not consented to work with me—nor did he want to work with anyone. The job opportunity of a lifetime that I had abandoned my sick father for and robbed my sister of her future for and dismantled my entire life fordid not actually exist.

To top it all off, my ex-boyfriend from high school had just both lied about me and told mortifying truths… and, apparently, sent Charlie Yates some mysterious video.

I stared down at the phone screen with dread, afraid to know for sure.What video?

From the format, I could guess that it wasn’t the YouTube video of the writing talk I’d given for the library that now had almost three hundred views. Nor, clearly, was it the sample freshman English class that lived on our community college’s home page.

No, this video was vertical.

This video was personal.

This video had come from Logan’s phone.

And here I faced a choice that was really no choice at all. Iwantedto stay and continue eavesdropping—since I no longer trusted Logan’s relationship with the truth. But Ineededto know which video Logan had sent.

Please, please, please don’t let it be the bikini video, I begged silently as I snuck with my bags away from the door, out into the yard, creating enough distance to watch it without being heard.

The bikini video—that I’d regretted a thousand times. The bikini video from ten years ago that Logan had sworn he’d erased—but I never 100 percent believed him. The bikini video I’d recorded for him when he’d asked me to send him “something sexy” and so I’d gotten Sylvie to record me crawling through the surf and growling like a panther at the beach in my first—and last—bikini.

The bikini video that topped my list of Most Embarrassing Things I’d Ever Done on Purpose.

He wouldn’t have. Right?

He couldn’t have.

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