Page 64 of Happily Never After

He wound pasta around his fork. “Honestly, great. The music is excellent, the editing and photography they helped with turned out great. They didn’t shit all over my vision at all.”

Claire smiled. “So selling your soul to Streamster wasn’t the worst decision of your life?”

“Not yet, anyway.” He shoved a heavily laden fork into his mouth and groaned appreciatively. “We should be completelyfinished in two weeks. Then it’s just up to Streamster to get it on the release schedule. This is fantastic, by the way.”

“Thank you.” Claire flushed. She didn’t often do the cooking at home, and when she did, she sometimes got distracted with work and burned it.

“How was your day?”

“Mostly good,” she said. “Traffic was crazy and I now understand why you shat on my timeline. Brad requested half a dozen changes.”

“As a surprise to no one,” Luke interjected.

“Right. Oh, and Mindy almost freaked out because we kept accidentally stumbling upon vegan restaurants. But we had some amazing tacos and saw the ocean.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “So what was the deal with the guy you sent me the picture of?”

“It was probably nothing,” she said, but a lump formed in her throat. “He just gave me bad vibes when I passed him. I was wearing a wig when I saw him, so I don’t think he recognized me anyway, even if he was ESA.”

“How were you wearing a wig? I thought you stopped carrying those around.” It was true. She had stopped carrying disguises shortly after most of the West Haven ESA members had been arrested the previous summer.

“Old habits die hard. Especially when people burn your office down. Speaking of burning things to the ground, are we going to talk about Olivia?”

He sighed and reached across the table for her wineglass, taking a long sip before putting it back. “I’m impressed it’s taken you this long to bring it up.”

“Come on,” she said gently. “You can’t blame a girl for having some questions when her boyfriend’s ex shows up at our door with a cake and a motive. I saw it in the trash.” A waste of cake if you asked her. “Don’t you want to just tell me and get it overwith? Or do you want me to passive-aggressively hint at it for the next two weeks?”

He folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Fine. Olivia lives two blocks down. We met the day I moved in. I pulled up to the house in my dad’s Porsche and found a girl twenty yards down the road unconscious in the driver’s seat with her car wrapped around a telephone pole. The car caught on fire, and I pulled her out. It’s how I got this,” he said, tugging his collar to the side and showing off the long, thin scar on his neck.

Aha. Mystery solved.

Claire’s mouth dropped open. “That’s the best meet-cute I have ever heard. I can’t believe it was wasted on your ex.” The audacity.

He shrugged. “We dated, things went south, end of story.”

“But you asked her to marry you,” she said in a reverent tone. “You hate proposals. What happened?”

Luke’s mouth hardened into a line. “She turned into a different person. When we met she was sweet, worked in a bakery. She had inherited the house from her grandmother, and she was just trying to make ends meet. When we started dating, I think she got accustomed to my lifestyle and wanted more of that stability for herself. She decided to become an ‘influencer’ and lost a ton of weight and started promoting herself all over the place. Then she leaked her own sex tape.”

Her eyes flew open wide. There was a Luke sex tape out there? She was simultaneously aroused and indignant. That hadn’t come up during the light internet stalking she had done before agreeing to work with him for Kyle and Nicole’s proposal. How would she explain that one to her mother?

“I’m not in it,” he said flatly.

“Oh, wow. I’m sorry.” Something wasn’t adding up. So Olivia had cheated on him and he still proposed to her? That was some wildly poor decision-making.

“Don’t be,” he said, shoveling his fork back into his pile of pasta. “I thought we could get past it. I was making plans to move to Pennsylvania, thought for sure she’d come with me and get away from that toxic LA lifestyle. Bought a ring and everything. But I was an idiot. And thank god she didn’t say yes. We would have been miserable.”

“Just so I’m understanding this correctly,” Claire began, pausing to consider her next words. “Your girlfriend cheated on you and released a sex tape, and your first instinct was to…propose to her.”

“Love makes you weak. And stupid.”

She straightened up like he had slapped her.

“Well, not all the time,” he added hurriedly. “Just when you’re with the wrong person, I guess.” He tore off a hunk of garlic bread and shoved it in his mouth like a caveman.

She pushed her wineglass to him. He drank appreciatively from it.

“No wonder you think what I do is stupid.” She pulled a fresh glass from the cabinet and popped the cork on a new bottle. Luke would never propose to her after everything he’d been through. She may have to take a leaf from Mindy’s book and propose to him…if they ever got to that point in their relationship. Would they? Would he even say yes? Maybe she needed to run herself through the checklist. They would one hundred percent fail the in-laws section.

---