Truly, Madly, Like Me - Jo Watson Page 0,29
I know what a TV is. I don’t have one myself. We watch everything on our phones.”
His lips twitched into a tiny smile and our eyes locked for a moment and that feeling rose up inside me again . . .
Familiar. Something about him was familiar.
Very familiar.
CHAPTER 13
I tilted my head to the side and looked at him from a different angle. But the brief moment of familiarity I’d just experienced disappeared quickly when he too tilted his head to the side and his glasses slipped down his nose. I looked around the store again.
“Okay, fine. What do you have?” I walked up to one of the shelves, careful not to slip on the still wet floor.
“What movies do you like?” He came up to me; it was the closest we’d been until now, and I noticed his smell immediately. He smelled minty, as if he’d been chewing gum. And also spicy and woody and . . . Oh my God, he smelled bloody amazing. Like the best smell I’d smelled in a while. I leaned in a little and took a deep (subtle) breath. It felt terribly wrong to go around smelling strangers, but I couldn’t help it, the guy really smelled good.
“So?” he asked.
“So what?”
“What movies do you like?”
“Oh, yes, that.” I’d almost forgotten what we were talking about. “The Kissing Booth, To All the Boys . . ., The Princess Swap, you know.”
“Sorry, never heard of any of those. Who directed them?” he returned quickly.
“I don’t know, they’re on Netflix.”
“Aaaah,” he said and then tutted.
“What does ‘aaah’ mean?”
“We don’t have those here. We have real movies.”
“Those aren’t real?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“I like TV series too?” I added.
“Like what?”
“YOU, Stranger Things, The Witcher, but mainly only for Henry Cavill, you know?”
“Not really.” He looked at me blankly over the rim of his glasses. They did give him quite an intellectual look. Young, sexy-professor vibes.
“Are those all Netflix shows too?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Before Netflix, what kind of movies and series did you watch?” he asked.
“Before?” It was hard to imagine a time before Netflix. A time where you had to wait to watch the next episode or something archaic like that. Or where you actually had to leave your house to watch a movie.
“I watched Pretty Woman once,” I remembered. “It was sweet. I like Julia Roberts.”
“So, classic romance?”
“Yes. I like romance, well . . .” I tailed off as an image of Kyle came into my head. Bastard! Breaking up with me like that. Maybe romance wasn’t such a great idea right now.
Video Store Guy leaned in and seemed to inspect my face. “Not romance then?”
“I don’t know. Should you watch romance if you’ve just been broken up with?” I asked.
He seemed to consider my question. As if he was really taking the time to think it over. “Watching romance after a break-up is probably the best time to do it.”
“Why?”
“Well, isn’t that when you need to believe in love again the most?” he asked.
His question caught me off guard because . . . Something about the word “love” struck me as odd and I couldn’t really connect with it. Wait . . . A semi-thought started bobbing about in my brain. Had Kyle and I ever actually said we loved each other? We had said it online, on our platforms.
Hanging out with my #love.
Love my #bae
Happy #valentinesday love
But had we actually ever said it to each other IRL? With our mouths? Words and vocal cords? I wracked my brain. I wasn’t actually sure, now that I thought about it. Was it weird to not know if you’d told your boyfriend you loved him, and vice versa? My sister had certainly thought so. She was always implying that our relationship wasn’t real, despite all my assurances to her that it was. Despite me telling her that just because we were public figures, that we had a carefully constructed personal brand and that we worked hard on it together . . . it didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
“So?” Video Store Guy pressed, and snapped me back to reality.
“Sure. Romance. Why not?” I shrugged.
He nodded and then graced me with another smile. Small smile. Tiny even. But it made his nose wrinkle a little, which made his glasses creep down and, soon enough, he was pushing them back up his nose again. He walked over to a shelf and I followed close behind him, walking in the invisible train of his intoxicating scent. I waited and watched as