Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 146548 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 733(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146548 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 733(@200wpm)___ 586(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
I lean back, shelves digging in my spine, but my side is up against Farrow’s, our shoulders nearly at equal height. He wraps his arm around my muscular waist and searches the internet with his other hand.
Janie’s cat scratches and meows at the pantry door, slicing into the short silence.
“Try Celebrity Crush first,” I tell him.
He types the tabloid site into the search engine, and as soon as we’re on the homepage, we both read the biggest headline: Popular Male Porn Star Buys Night with Maximoff Hale at Charity Auction.
It’s pretty generic.
Something we both expected.
I swallow the last of the Pop-Tart while Farrow clicks into the article. He scrolls really goddamn fast. Skim-reading, and then he reaches the comments, slowing down…
It’s all a fucking hoax. Their relationship is #FAKE
Ugh. Why would he let a porn star buy him if he’s dating someone? Gross.
They have no chemistry anyway. This just confirms it.
He’s only dating Maximoff to get famous.
My eyes glaze over more of the same, and I do what my parents have always told me to do.
I take a breath.
Remember that they don’t know me, they don’t know us.
Repeat it.
They don’t know us.
Their opinions are just opinions, and they don’t get to live inside my body and make my choices. The world watches my failures, my mistakes, and you criticize me and my relationship, but in the end, you don’t have the full picture. Just whatever narrative you’ve created in your head.
I glance at my boyfriend. He keeps scrolling through the comments, his cool exterior not shaken, but his eyes seem to tighten. So something’s troubling him.
I extend my left arm across his back and hold his shoulder. “They don’t know us,” I tell Farrow. “They’ll never really know us.”
He pauses scrolling. “I don’t understand why they’d say that I’m in it for the fame. I’ve barely been on your social media so far.”
Since I’ve been dealing with the auction, I haven’t posted a lot in the past two weeks. The pictures on my Instagram of him are the lovers like us photo from my parent’s vow renewal and one where he’s cooking breakfast. I haven’t even recorded an Instagram story with Farrow yet.
“They’ll make up anything off nothing,” I say, but I notice how he’s fixated on another fame whore comment. “That’s what’s getting to you?”
Farrow scrolls again. “It’s all eating at me differently, but people questioning my intentions with you is probably my least favorite thing.” He glares at another comment on a different article. “I’m protective of you, wolf scout, and the thought of people believing I’m fucking you over…” His jaw muscle tics.
It’s not sitting well with him.
Before I can reply, Farrow adds, “See, I understand how this works: I appear on your social media more, I only strengthen their ‘he’s in it for the fame’ bullshit, but fuck.” He lets out a deep, aggravated breath.
There is no permanent fix.
After being around my family, he knows this too. People will always believe what they want to believe—and it’ll hurt. With the rumors about my paternity, I felt like I needed to scream and scream for people to hear me.
I still have to talk about the truth. How my dad is Loren Hale. And I’ll occasionally wear red to honor him. Like now, I consciously chose a red sling. But using my voice is the best thing I can do. It’s why We Are Calloway exists.
My sore arm falls to his hip. “I was going to ask you to do an Instagram video with me, but if you’d feel better backing away from social media, I’d understand.”
I’d be okay with whatever he decides since this is new for him and since my world is the thing that’s drastically changing his life.
“I don’t have to post pictures of us—”
“No,” Farrow says, shutting off my phone. He rotates to face me, resting his forearm on the shelf, and he opens his mouth to speak, but I’m already talking.
“Joining me in videos, posting more pictures together, it won’t change public perception in the way you want,” I remind him.
“It’ll most likely make it worse,” Farrow agrees. “I’m ready for that, wolf scout.” He runs his thumb over his lip piercing.
“You sure?” I ask.
Farrow notices me watching his hand, and his lips begin to lift beneath his thumb. He moves that hand to the back of my neck.
His grip feels better than good.
And his gaze plunges into me. “When I love someone,” he says in a rough whisper, “I love them proudly, and you deserve the achingly normal, romantic shit more than anyone. Everything you’ve never had. All the pictures you post, all the videos you do on your own, I want to be in them—and it’d kill me not to give you that. Especially now that we’re public.”
The declaration overwhelms me. I swallow the ball in my throat. And I zero in on how fast that was for Farrow. “Just like that?” I ask, my brows cinching. “You didn’t even think about it.”