The Couple who Fooled the World
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It was the shock of it that made him want to touch. He was sure of that. He was a man far too jaded by his past to be aroused by a wedge of skin. Far too jaded to allow himself to be aroused at all, unless it was late at night and he needed a sleep aid. And yet, he found that he was. That fascinated him nearly as much as her exposed skin.
“Slow down,” he said, pulling her back to his side.
“Sorry,” she said, a smile still plastered on her face. “Nervous.”
“Don’t be. Just remember, they’re all here to see you. You’re the one in the enviable position. You’re beautiful. Successful. Everyone out there would love to be here. They would trade places with you in a heartbeat.” The words came, easy and without much thought or sincerity. He was good at giving compliments. At giving women exactly what they desired.
At keeping his mind somewhere else entirely, even while he gave all of his body. A perfect disconnect.
Her smile altered subtly, became more genuine. “That was a nice thing to say.”
“It’s true,” he said, without pausing to think if it really was.
“Ferro! Julia!”
Julia’s head whipped around in the direction of her name. She noticed that Ferro kept his movements much less spastic, kept his emotions better hidden. But she was having a much harder time with it. She’d trained herself to keep her reactions and emotions much more veiled than this, but she’d never been to a movie premiere before. And this movie premiere was a fangirl paradise, which, she admittedly was.
Back before she’d decided being herself wasn’t worth the pain, she would have been lining the streets with the crowd. Probably wearing some kind of Space Fleet Academy uniform.
The flashbulbs were directed at them now and she just smiled and hoped, feverishly, that she didn’t have leftovers from lunch in her teeth or a false eyelash stuck to her cheek or anything similarly horrifying.
Ferro, for his part, was immaculate in his dark suit and tie, short hair in perfect order. The man simply never looked anything less than composed and pressed. She’d bet he didn’t go home and put on a gigantic sweater and yoga pants after a long day of work. He probably wore a black silk robe and…nothing underneath.
She nearly choked.
“Are you on a date?” one of the reporters shouted over The din.
Ferro simply smiled and said, “If you have to ask, perhaps I’m doing it wrong.”
Jeez. The man oozed charm. She’d never seen him not at ease. Even when she’d pulled off her great OnePhone caper and messed with his product launch, his public face had remained completely smooth.
“Julia, any comments?”
“We better be. I don’t want to have to pay for my own dinner.” That earned her some laughter and she was gratified that she’d managed a witty response. Especially since half of her brainpower was being used up to focus on the heat that was coursing from her palm, where Ferro was holding her hand, up her arm, to her breasts, making her nipples, of all things, tingle a little bit.
Ferro waved and she did the same, and they walked on, into the ornate theater where they were ushered to their seats. Ferro released her as soon as they were in the dark.
And again, Julia felt like she was in danger of getting whiplash from the recognizable faces surrounding them. “I think that’s—”
“Don’t stare, Julia, it’s rude.”
She shot Ferro a deadly glare he probably couldn’t see in the darkness. “Sorry. I forgot we were being blas'e.” And she shouldn’t have forgotten. Anything else was way too revealing and embarrassing.
“You’ll get to the point where you don’t have to remember. Trust me.”
“You think?” she asked, looking sideways at him in the dark.
“I know. You’re lucky life hasn’t knocked it out of you yet.”
She leaned back in her chair. “You have no idea what life has taken from me,” she said. For the second time in the same day, she thought back to that long-ago prom night. Why was she thinking about it so much? She never thought about it. She’d moved on from it. She was fine. Bruises healed. And the stuff that didn’t? It had helped her realize that you had to be strong. It had been when she’d stopped trying to fit in, when she’d stopped being so afraid to be unusual. She’d just started owning it then. And it had been the key to her success.
She wasn’t sending out any thank-you cards to the jackass who’d assaulted her, but she wasn’t wallowing, either.
“I’d venture to say you know less about mine than you think you do, Julia,” he said, his words darker than the theater.
“I read the bio,” she said.
He chuckled, a sound that lacked humor and warmth. “As I said, you know less about me than you think. Just because it’s in print, doesn’t mean it’s the whole truth.”
The End of the Tech World As We Know It?
The headline screamed up at Julia from the newspaper, just delivered to her tablet. Ferro was already in her office, sitting in the chair in front of her desk like he had every right to be there.
“Not exactly the headline we anticipated,” he said.
“Ya think?” She skimmed the article, her stomach sinking. “Either a sharp blow to progress or a cheap publicity stunt,” she read out loud.
“Because if we’re sleeping together we won’t be competing, and if we aren’t competing, will we be on our game?”
“I have a lot of words rolling around in my head right now and they’re all filthy,” she said, standing up and pacing up and down in front of her office window. “What are we going to do? It’s everywhere. It’s trending on Twitter. There’s a Facebook page, Calvaresi, a freaking Facebook page devoted to…what are they calling us?” She leaned in and skimmed the article again. “JulErro. For the love of Darth.”
“And for everyone rooting for this little enemies-to-lovers tale…”
“There are just as many rooting for us to go down in flames. This…this is a lot bigger than we anticipated, isn’t it?”
Ferro wished he could say he’d anticipated just this, but the simple fact was, social media was hard to anticipate. The press was one thing, the civilian-run news machine? Something else entirely. And the simple truth was, this had gone way outside the tech world, thanks to the internet, which was run by the masses. Who were entirely unpredictable.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
The feeling of claustrophobia he felt now, the feeling of being trapped, he didn’t like it. A trap of his own making. And it wasn’t the first one he’d ever been in. He knew all about this. About going so far down a road there was no way to turn back. That you just had to push through, keep going, because you’d gone too damn far.