Chapter 42 Media Mayhem

Book:FAKING LOVE Published:2024-6-4

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO –
Chris POV
“… of course they’re trying to find any excuse to stir the pot,” Jake drawled around a mouthful of omelette, waggling his smart phone.
I followed his gesture to the brightly lit screen showing yet another gossip rag’s take on yesterday’s innocuous cafe meeting with Megan.
WRITER BEAU SENDS CHAMP’S HEART SOARING read the screaming headline over a grainy photo clearly snapped from outside the window.
It depicted Megan and I sitting at our private table, body language warm if a bit guarded.
“Vultures,” I muttered, unable to suppress an eye roll.
Jake snorted indelicately through his nasal passage. “What’d you expect? You’re the rakish mystery man who’s suddenly all up in boxing’s ‘It Girl’ business.”
He smirked unrepentantly. “Personally, I think the real headline here should be LOVESTRUCK WORDSMITH BRAVES CELEBRITY GLARE FOR SHOT AT GLORY.”
I felt my cheeks instantly feel hot!
“Yea, the rags have finally decided Megan’s shacked up with a new boy toy, huh?” Jake tossed his napkin onto the diner table with a wolfish grin.
I shifted in the sticky vinyl booth, fixing him with a withering look over the rim of my coffee mug. “Lay off, man. You know how those vultures operate.”
“Sure I do,” he drawled, swiping his phone to enlarge the grainy cafe photo splashed across the gossip site. “Gotta get them clicks by fanning any tiny spark into a wildfire these days.”
My gaze dropped to the image – an unmistakable side profile of myself seated across from Megan yesterday.
Her delicate hand was resting atop mine mid-emphatic gesture, body language decidedly intimate despite the innocuous meeting setting.
“It wasn’t like that between us,” I muttered, cheeks flushing despite myself. “We were just -”
“Discussing her super important memoir draft?” Jake finished for me, eyebrow quirked skeptically. “With enough heated eye-contact and suggestive body language to sell the idea you’re balls-deep into plotting the next chapter… of your budding romance?”
I sputtered into my coffee, scalding my tongue. “Jesus, Jake! Keep your goddamn voice down, would you?”
I glanced around the bustling family diner furtively as a peal of his arrogant laughter echoed out.
Thankfully no eavesdroppers seemed to register his crude reference to me and Megan’s apparently torrid imaginary bedroom activities.
“Struck a nerve, did I?” Jake grinned unrepentantly at my discomfort. “What, did you think I wouldn’t rib you endlessly over this whole ‘ghostwriter snagging his subject’ fiasco the second it hit newsstands?”
Gritting my teeth, I fired him a look that could melt plutonium. “For the last time, Megan and I were -”
“Playing an escalating game of ‘Who Can Act More Tantalizingly Flustered’ over cafe salads and pension plans?” he supplied, tone dripping sarcastic provocation.
My fingers clenched around the diner mug, wishing the rattrap of his mouth wasn’t already creaking open for the second salvo.
“What’s got you so twisted up about admitting the obvious, man? Any idiot with eyes can clock the sparks flying off that candid photo.”
Jake angled the incriminating snapshot towards me again, finger tapping the screen with pointed emphasis.
“She’s already thrown the bait out on social media, hinting things got intimate the night you went all white knight on those club creeps. You couldn’t ask for a juicier publicity angle to promote your little book project, honestly.”
I set my jaw harder, silently rebuffing his well-worn trail of needling about my nonexistent romantic endeavors.
Just because I’d clamped down harder than a vise on anything resembling an intimate personal life since… well.
Sinnce everything went to hell… didn’t give him free rein to project his own wild fantasies onto the dynamics with my collaborator, for chrissakes!
Didn’t it?
Furtively, I felt my gaze dragging back towards the photo under silent study.
The carefully angled camera framing hid my face in that classic ‘mystery man’ prop for the more salacious rags, leaving only my jawline and shoulders visible past the cafe’s dangling logo signage.
Yet still, the fossil record of whatever loaded exchange was unfolding between Megan and I in that frozen instant radiated enough raw heat to scorch the screen.
Every subconscious body cue shouted unambiguous intimacy – drinking each other in with heavy-lidded focus, upper bodies angled inward like drawn towards a gravitational pull between us…
My thumb abruptly clicked the phone image closed with a dismissive huff of breath. “Whatever lurid fantasies you’re concocting about me ‘sparking’ up with Megan, filter them out now, yeah?”
I fixed Jake with a steady, no-nonsense look. “We were collaborating. Business as usual with my client – that’s it, no caveats.”
He heaved an exaggerated sigh, raking me up and down with an expression of theatrically overblown pity. “Keep telling yourself whatever lets you sleep at night, man. But from where I’m sitting, you’re fighting one hell of an undeniable undertow here at minimum.”
Before I could muster a scorching retort, a tinkling eruption of high-pitched giggles temporarily seized the table’s attention. I turned to find a small gaggle of wide-eyed preteen girls shooting blatant looks our way from the adjacent booth, clearly riveted by our exchange.
Red-hot mortification scorched the back of my neck as I replayed the hushed yet undoubtedly audible verbal sparring match over Megan and I’s supposed romantic combustibility.
With effort, I unclenched my white-knuckle grip on the diner mug, forcing my shoulders to relax a fraction.
“We’re done talking about this,” I informed Jake in an undertone.
Wisely showing a rare outbreak of discretion for once, my smartass friend simply quirked his eyebrow again and shrugged like he’d surfaced from a deep plunge into the conversational waters.
“If you insist…” He mused airily, mercifully dropping the subject as our food arrived.
A strained silence blanketed the table momentarily while the brusque waitress unloaded our heaping platters with polished efficiency, evidently long since inured to whatever interpersonal dramas played out in her section each day.
As she retreated back behind the counter to scribble additions on her battered server’s pad, Jake’s attention dropped to contemplating his crammed plate with an exaggerated groan.
“Diners, man – the only places that still pile up enough grease and calories to counter that 80-hour-a-week college metabolism, even a decade later.”
I sensed the deflection tactic a mile away, knew the subject shift was his olive branch for allowing me to avoid further fraught relationship dissections for now. Exhaling a weary breath, I gave an acerbic huff of laughter, tearing into my portion with renewed gusto.
“Says the half-wit who still mostly survives on Red Bull and microwave chimichangas when he’s not mooching my culinary skills,” I retorted, swatting Jake’s wandering fork away from my homefries mound.
“Hey, minor nitpick,” he shot back with faux indignation, “I absolutely crush the nachos category as of late, you judgmental prick.”
The provocatively vulgar culinary claim nearly triggered an unwanted spray of coffee from my nostrils.
I settled for simply narrowing my eyes in a patent look of disgust and pity. “You’re genuinely disordered, dude. Certifiable.”
For a few blessed minutes, we simply breathed in the familiar cadences of every sharply traded insult and wry deflection as old as our friendship itself – two roguish misfits shoving each other’s buttons with acerbic abandon.
My thumbs absently traced the bevelled edge of the phone containing that incendiary cafe photo while Jake pantomimed flagrant sexual moves with a sadly phallic breakfast sausage link.
The background clatter and activity of the bustling diner swirled around us, a cocooning buffer from rehashing the complications regarding my current creative collaboration for now.
Yes, Jake was right about one unavoidable truth – I’d been thrust onto an uncharted emotional trajectory with Megan, one with growing undercurrents I was nowhere near prepared to parse or dissect.
For self-preservation purposes, avoiding that minefield was imperative.
For now.
Still, even in the placid eye of our familiar rapport, I couldn’t entirely evade the storm of wild impulses battering against my inner walls of composure every time Megan crossed my thoughts.
The searing memory of her body arched and trembling, wanton gasps parting those lush, bee-stung lips as I tenderly undressed her on that fateful chaotic night…
The phantom brush of slender fingers gripping my forearm in a silent plea for grounding amidst the alcoholic haze shrouding her senses…..
The flashing reminder of that Instagram hint gifted to all and sundry of intimate doings she herself could barely recall, save for my steadying presence.
I chewed the inside of my cheek, spearing a sausage link with more force than necessary.
No matter how much elusive distance I intentionally placed between us in a professional capacity, glimpses of Megan’s wounded vulnerability kept shearing through the cracks nonetheless – burrowing into my consciousness in ways that echoed all too viscerally from my own unhealed past traumas.
Perhaps, in her, I saw flashes of the once-guarded parts of myself I’d fought like hell to armor off from view to all others long ago.
The same wounded, ravenous parts that no longer knew which was the greater terror – remaining cloistered in safe exile forever, or daring to let that final defensive wall down even an inch.
As if reading my abstracted thoughts, Jake’s gravelly tones broke through my self-absorbed reverie.
” -no word yet on how much dough The Gibby is slapping down for film rights,” he observed almost conversationally, thumb scrolling further down the gossip site on his phone. “But you’d think they’d care to identify the ‘mystery man’ plaguing their headlining starlet before any contracts go out, just for optics’ sake.”
His casual mention of media scrutiny over “the man” in Megan’s life triggered an unexpected frisson of unsettling protectiveness low in my abdomen.
Irrational, unbidden – the surging impulse sliced through me with all the disorienting force of a steel blade, leaving me mentally reeling for a grounding handhold.
I inhaled a slow, steadying breath through my nostrils while wrestling the bizarre, predatory emotion back under restraint.
My stare fell to the obscured profile photo again, throat working in a hard swallow.
In that moment, Megan’s unveiling of the intimate forces binding us together – however obliquely teased to her public sphere at the moment – felt… dangerously premature.
The very notion of serving up our tangled dynamics for dissection under the harsh social media glare sent icy prickles racing down my spine for reasons I couldn’t fully articulate.