Page 79 of The Pretender

I tip my chin, fighting the urge to say something shitty and ruin the connection. I push the phone toward her. “Take it.”

She places her fingers around the edges, but doesn’t take it. “Will you watch it with me?”

“Yeah.”

The word comes out before I can stop it. I mean, I do want to watch it with her, but then again, I’m drifting into territory that I won’t be able to recover from. Once I win this money, I plan on leaving. Valentina plans on staying here and finishing school. It’ll be like losing her all over again.

But I don’t voice any of this. I simply let her lead me back to her bed of blankets along the edge.

She kneels first and then tugs my hand and I follow while she slides the throw pillow to the center. “Here,” she offers, patting the pillow. “You can take it.”

I ease down and lie on my side. Then, in the most natural way, I tug her down with me. She curls onto her side, sliding her back to my front. Her head rests on my arm while my free arm goes around her, holding the phone. She takes it from me, clicking the streaming app and finding the point she was at in her movie before I disrupted her.

The screen flickers to life and the girl on the screen runs with her boyfriend right behind her. A deranged man is chasing them and when the guy realizes they won’t be able to outrun the killer, he stops.

My grip tightens on Vee as the guy tells his onscreen girlfriend that he loves her and to run and not look back. He’s sacrificing himself to keep his girlfriend safe. And while I would have balked at such a cliché move in the past, right now, with the only girl who’s ever been able to crack through my bullshit exterior, I feel different. I feel protective. I feel loved.

As the girl on the screen cries and kisses her boyfriend, I feel Vee’s hand drift lower, rubbing the flannel of my pajama bottoms.

I don’t need to see her to know she’s smiling. “These are nice,” she says.

I nuzzle her hair. “I thought you might appreciate them.”

She smothers a laugh.

“Why do you like these movies?” I ask her, as the guy gets stabbed for the final time. “Are they not depressing?”

Her shoulders shrug against my arm. “I don’t know. I think I like the fact that there’s always a survivor. That even when the circumstances seem bleak, your instinct and faith in yourself will always get you through.”

“What if the main character dies though?” I’ve seen some movies that don’t end in happily ever afters.

“I guess they can, but at least they go down with a fight.”

“Like you did when I bombed your video?”

She definitely fought back. Not as fast as I expected, but she did, and in the end, she survived me. The problem was, I didn’t survive her.

“No one had ever told me the truth,” she says softly.

I grunt. “I was an asshole,” I admit. “That wasn’t telling you the truth. That was making fun of you. I’m sorry.”

Now that I think back on it, I was a massive dick and deserved everything I had coming to me.

Her body shakes in my arms. “You were right, though. I couldn’t sing.”

“Yeah, but I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“You didn’t. You just started acting out the scene behind me.”

I’ll admit it was not my best moment. Some things you just can’t take back.

“Why were you singing that song fromTitanicanyway?” I ask her.

“My uncle Pe’s birthday was the following month. He owns a nightclub, and every year for his birthday, he hosts a Céline Dion karaoke night with family and friends. I wanted to practice.”

“So you thought singing online was the best way to go about that practice?”

She has bigger balls than I do.

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