Chapter 6 — First Date
The restaurant Ethan had chosen turned out to be the kind of place that didn't bother with a sign out front — a private room, low lighting, the sort of discretion that only made sense once Alex remembered exactly who she was sitting across from.
"What would my girlfriend like to eat?" Ethan asked, watching her over the menu with the small, deliberate smile she was starting to recognize as his default setting.
The word girlfriend landed somewhere it shouldn't have. She covered it with a smile of her own. "Hotpot. I've been craving one since I landed."
He signaled the waiter without needing to look at a menu himself ; clearly a regular here — and Alex watched the young man's composure slip the second his eyes landed on her. Ethan noticed too, his expression flattening for half a second before he caught himself and looked, briefly, almost annoyed at his own reaction.
"So," he said, once the waiter had retreated, "what changed your mind so fast? This morning you looked ready to walk out of that meeting rather than film the scene."
Alex considered deflecting. Something about the stillness of the room, or maybe just him, made her choose honesty instead. "It's a good opportunity. I need the recognition here in Florelia."
"Why here, specifically?" He asked it lightly, though something in his posture suggested he already regretted caring enough to ask.
"I have a score to settle," she said, flat enough that it wasn't an invitation to dig further.
"I see. So this is something you're willing to do in service of revenge."
The words came out sharper than she expected, and she felt the need to correct the record before it settled into something ugly. "It's not about being intimate with a stranger or selling myself for a contract, if that's what you're implying. I've worked for every opportunity I've had. This one's just bigger than most."
"I wasn't implying that." He studied her for a moment, something calculating behind his eyes. "I'm only asking because your reaction to that scene wasn't the reaction of someone worried about a career risk. It looked like something else."
She didn't answer right away, and for a while the silence sat between them, neither uncomfortable nor entirely easy. Something about him made it hard to keep the usual distance she kept with everyone else — she couldn't have explained it if he'd asked her to.
"Something happened to me when I was twelve," she said finally, quietly, watching her own hands rather than his face. "Since then, I can't stand being touched by men I don't know. On shoots that need any kind of intimacy, I take medication just to get through it."
Whatever warmth had been in his expression a moment earlier disappeared. His jaw tightened, and for a few seconds the temperature of the room seemed to drop several degrees, though his voice stayed perfectly level when he finally spoke.
"Certain events shape a person more than others," he said. "It sounds like this was one of them."
He didn't ask anything further, and something about his restraint disappointed her more than she wanted to admit — as if some part of her had wanted him to push, to want to know more. She caught herself in the thought and pushed it away just as quickly. Why would I want that. It's not as if he actually cares.
Beneath the table, out of her line of sight, Ethan had already pulled out his phone and sent a short message to his assistant: a request for everything that could be found on Alex Michell, discreetly, by morning. He wasn't in the habit of looking into the people the company paired him with for publicity. He told himself this was different, that a man ought to know the basic facts about someone he was supposedly dating, even for show, and left it at that rather than examine the reasoning any further.
The food arrived not long after, and Alex threw herself into it with the kind of enthusiasm that always surprised people who assumed a model survived on nothing but lettuce and self-control. She'd built a metabolism and a training schedule specifically so she never had to choose between eating properly and looking the part — two hours in the gym most nights, discipline that had nothing to do with vanity and everything to do with refusing to let anyone tell her what she couldn't have.
Ethan watched her work through the bowl with something like fascination. "You really can eat."
"Don't sound so surprised." She didn't look up from the broth. "Some of us actually enjoy food instead of just photographing it."
"Duly noted." There was something almost soft in the way he said it, watching her the way a person watches something they don't fully understand yet but have decided they like anyway.
He let a beat pass before asking, more careful this time, "How bad is it, exactly? The aversion."
She set her chopsticks down, considering how much of the truth to hand him. Most people who asked that question were fishing for a story to repeat later. Something about the stillness of his face told her he wasn't one of them.
"It makes me sick. Physically. I feel dirty, my chest tightens, sometimes I can't breathe properly and I have to sit down before I fall over. Doctors call it psychological." She said it plainly, the way she'd learned to say it after years of practice turning something ugly into something clinical, something she could hand over without it costing her anything.
Ethan absorbed that for a moment, then said, almost too casually, "Then I suppose it doesn't apply to me."
She looked up, confused, until she followed his gaze down to where his hand rested over hers on the table. She hadn't noticed him move it there. She hadn't noticed it at all, and that alone was enough to make her pulse pick up.
"Either you can't feel my hand right now," he said, "which seems unlikely, or you're simply not reacting to it the way you should. Interesting, isn't it?"
Alex stared down at his hand like it belonged to someone else entirely, waiting for the familiar wave of nausea that never came. She pressed her fingers experimentally around his, just to be certain, and found nothing but the ordinary warmth of skin against skin — no tightness in her chest, no urge to pull away and scrub her hand clean under the nearest tap.
Her heart was racing anyway, just for an entirely different reason than she was used to. She was sitting across from her favorite actor, his hand actually in hers, and for once her own body wasn't working against her. It felt less like relief and more like standing at the edge of something she hadn't given herself permission to want yet.
"Interesting," she echoed back at him, mostly because she couldn't think of anything smarter to say, and Ethan's smile widened just slightly, like he'd won something he hadn't been entirely sure he was playing for.
Neither of them moved their hands for a while after that. The waiter came and went twice more, refilling water glasses neither of them had touched, and eventually the broth in front of Alex went from steaming to merely warm without either of them seeming to notice. It was, Alex thought distantly, the strangest first date of her life — fake, staged for an audience neither of them could see yet, and somehow the most honest conversation she'd had with anyone outside of Fidelia in years.
"For what it's worth," Ethan said eventually, pulling his hand back at last, almost reluctantly, "I don't think less of you. For any of it."
She hadn't realized how much she needed to hear that until he'd said it.