Jolene still couldn’t believe she’d actually done it. Like—actually done it.
She’d gone to the meet-and-greet, waited in that endless line surrounded by screaming people and cameras flashing like lightning, smiled for one single picture—and somehow walked out with Riley Jean Carson’s phone number written across the back of her wrist in black ink.
The numbers were still there. Smudged at the corners, the first digit blurred where she’d brushed her thumb against it too many times on the drive home. She could’ve washed it off hours ago. She hadn’t.
She was sitting on the marble counter of her kitchen now, barefoot, oversized T-shirt, hair still pinned half-up from earlier. The city glittered below her through the wide glass windows like it was mocking her—“you seriously think this is real?” kind of glitter. Her cat, Blooper, was a lump of black fur on the couch, one paw twitching in some dream.
Jolene stared at her wrist again. “What the fuck,” she muttered out loud, because the silence needed breaking.
Her voice sounded ridiculous in the big apartment. Too soft for the echo.
She’d planned to say something normal when she got to the front of the line—thank you for your music, your acting changed my life, the generic fangirl starter pack. But then RJ had smiled. That smile. The one that broke the internet like twice last year. It was the kind of smile that made your brain short-circuit and forget you had a mouth.
And now? Now she had RJ’s number, because apparently life just decides things sometimes.
She kept replaying the exact moment it happened, like some masochistic habit. The handler saying “next,” her stepping forward, RJ’s head lifting, their eyes meeting for the first time—those freaky beautiful eyes, yellow and blue like something out of a sci-fi movie—and the way Jolene’s stomach had just dropped. Then RJ laughing at something she said, scribbling her name on a calendar, leaning in to take the picture, all effortless charm and perfume and perfect posture.
Then later—the two guys by the parking lot, the uncomfortable glance, her own cigarette halfway to her mouth before she realized one of them had started walking toward the girl she’d just met. The same girl now texting her “thank you again. you really didn’t have to step in.”
Jolene pressed her palm over her mouth, grinning like an idiot even though no one was there to see it.
Blooper jumped onto the counter beside her, tail flicking. Jolene absently scratched behind her ear. “You’ll keep my secret, right?”
Blooper blinked slowly. Non-committal.
Good enough.
Because there was no way—no way—she could tell her friends. Skylar would faint. Harley would film her fainting. Tessa would call her a liar. And honestly, she didn’t even blame them. If someone told her they got the number of the most famous singer-actress alive because they stopped a sketchy parking-lot situation, she’d think they were delusional too.
Still, it was killing her not to talk about it. Her group chat was already spamming clips from RJ’s concert last night, analyzing her outfit like it was a religious artifact. Jolene had typed “she was even prettier in person” twice and deleted it both times.
The screen of her phone lit up again. The chat kept scrolling. Her thumb hovered over RJ’s contact—the one she’d saved under R. J. (don’t freak out).
She hadn’t answered the thank-you text. She’d stared at it for an hour, typed ten different versions of “no problem :)” and “lol np” and “anytime!” and deleted them all.
How do you talk to someone whose voice has its own Wikipedia page?
She exhaled, flopping backward so her head bumped the cabinet behind her. The city lights threw reflections across the glass—her, sitting on her counter in a penthouse she still didn’t know how she afforded, holding a phone like it was a live grenade.
Somewhere down below, traffic hummed, faint and steady. A siren wailed and faded. The world felt normal.