Felix was almost back to his shop when he heard Belle calling wait! from behind him. He stopped and turned just as she skidded to a stop so fast that she almost toppled over onto him. He wasn't sure what to make of this, it was a peculiar sort of masochism to get turned down and then wait for her to catch up to him so he could hear her apologize further or make up some other excuse or yell at him for presuming. All he really wanted to do was lock himself up and hide, but here he was waiting for her to catch her breath not two feet away.
"Did you mean it?" she asked at last, and he hadn't been prepared for that particular question and all he could do was nod stiffly. Of course he'd meant it, why wouldn't he?
Belle seemed to mull this over for a little bit and he was sure he was going to die of embarrassment there in the middle of the street before she spoke again.
"Why couldn't you have asked me five days ago?" she said, sounding somewhere between exasperated and something else he couldn't quite put his finger on, but instinct told him to just see where she was going with this. "This would have all been so much less complicated if you had."
He couldn't swallow and he was about eighty-five percent sure he was actually having a stroke, but he finally managed to get himself under control enough to reply to her.
"How so?"
"Do you have a Twitter account?"
It was a complete non sequitur, and he shook his head prompting her to take out her phone and pull something up to show him. She held the phone in front of his face for a few seconds before she wiggled it and he took the hint to take it and start looking at what she was showing him. He didn't understand some of the abbreviations or the rather liberal use of emojis, but he knew enough to recognize it as a collection of Tweets by people calling her a slut and picking apart her appearance.
"I didn't know about this," he said at last. "I'm sorry."
"It's not like it's your fault, but things are obviously kind of complicated right now."
"Still. It's not right. Can't he do anything about it?"
"I wouldn't ask if I even knew how. It would just be adding fuel to the fire at this point to even acknowledge it. I'm not even responding."
"So, this is why…" he couldn't even bring himself to finish that thought. Being turned down was awful, but being turned down because she was currently a tabloid sensation was something he could deal with.
"Yeah," she said. "Like I said, it's really complicated."
"Is this the only reason?" he asked, handing her the phone back.
"I'd have said yes last week."
"Well, I knew you had that other date…"
"It wasn't a publicity stunt, not a proposal," she said with a little shrug. "Anyway, a girl can have two dates with two different men in two weeks."
"Well, now I wish I'd asked."
He hadn't meant to blurt it out like that, but it was the absolute, unvarnished truth. He liked her and he wanted to get to know her. Knowing that he'd had a chance and waited too long was in some way just as bad as being turned down flat.
"I do, too," she said with a shy smile. "Maybe…" her voice trailed off, but he was not about to leave it at that. He could almost certainly work with maybe.
"Maybe?"
"Maybe we could arrange to be in the same place sometime?"
"So, not a date?"
"No, just two people having coffee in proximity to each other or at the same theater to see the same movie?"
"In a town this small it's almost bound to happen eventually."
"Exactly," she said with a bright smile. "I usually like to get coffee at Granny's before work, so I'm usually there around eight?"
"Eight," he repeated. "I might be stopping by around then on my way in."
She smiled and he just felt so relieved that he wasn't a total idiot that he couldn't help but smile back.
"I should go back," she said at last. "I left Ruby watching the desk and there's a really big crowd."
"Right. I'm sorry I kept you."
She waved as she retreated back to the library, and his heart felt lighter as she left. Maybe it wasn't as hopeless as he'd feared after all.
True to her word, Belle was sitting quietly at the counter in the diner when he walked in the next morning. He could see people pointedly not looking at her. Her friend Ruby was bouncing around from customer to customer, leaving Belle alone with a mug. She was fidgeting with her necklace while she waited, but she smiled when she saw him and he almost tripped on his own feet at how relieved she looked – as though she'd half expected him to go home and look her up on the Internet to see what people were saying about her. Which he had actually done, and somewhere around the Buzzfeed article called "People Are Really Pissed This Fan Kissed Sage Gaston" he was starting to get cold feet, but the more he thought about it the more he wanted to be there. It wasn't fair for her to be in this situation, and it was doubly unfair that she was doing it alone.
He sat on the stool next to her, drawing a little bit of attention (everyone else had been giving her a wide berth as they observed) but it was one of the few empty seats in the diner and after a few moments everyone stopped staring.
"Good morning," she said quietly, turning toward him just enough that he was the only one who could see she smiled at him.
"Good morning," he replied. "How was your day yesterday?"
"Oh, you know. The usual – people stalking me, a few calls from E! and People asking for interviews, and my dad called to ask why my nana thinks I'm a groupie."
"Oh God…"
"Yeah...apparently, Nana really likes the supermarket tabloids."
"My condolences," he said. "I'd offer to help, but I don't know what I could do."
"I'd rather not talk about it, if it's all the same to you. How was your day?"
He couldn't say he blamed her for wanting to avoid thinking about it, but it still left him with the uncomfortable need to come up with something interesting to tell her, but all he could think about was that she'd agreed to meet him for coffee and then he'd spent most of the rest of the day reading think pieces about her. There was the backlash about the kiss, then the inevitable backlash against the backlash and it went around in circles like that with essays on slutshaming and angry Tweets and before long he'd fallen into a rabbit hole.
"I took possession of an estate," he fibbed. That estate had arrived days ago and most of it was already appraised but she didn't need to know that and it was all he could think to talk about.
"Yeah? Anything nice?"
"There's some jewelry and a full dining set that I'm very pleased with. The rest of it I still have to go through, but I'm hopeful."
"That's good. I'll have to come browse the shop sometime and see it."
Well, that was certainly a nice idea.
"You should," he said. "I'll give you the grand tour."
Belle smiled, and they drank in silence for a little while longer before she finally stood up and paid her tab.
"I've got to get to work," she said. "But this was nice. Just so you know, I'll be back tomorrow."
"That's good to know," he said. "Have a good day."
"You too."
He lingered as she paid her tab and left before he downed the rest of his coffee and headed towards the shop. He was going to have to make sure there was something nice for her to see.
Things were starting to look up for Belle. She'd been meeting up with Felix Gold for about a week, and while she was still getting the occasional phone call from magazines and blogs, but when she'd stopped answering her phone for strange numbers they had tapered off. She hadn't been online or watched television or read the newspaper or any magazines, so for all she knew the planet was overrun by hostile aliens but her life was blissfully free of any drama. Ruby had bought her a copy of her magazine article, but Belle had no intention of reading it until things had calmed down and it was less raw. In the meantime, she was sure her funding was going to go up because of the increase of foot traffic to the library and she had a nice man to meet for dinner on Friday.
She was sort of debating whether or not to kiss him at that date. She kind of wanted to, but the last time she'd kissed a guy it had turned into front page news. Ruby still though that Belle should make a bigger deal of this date to try to at least distract local people from the Sage Gaston issue, but besides the fact that she was pretty sure immediately dating someone would just make people think she was easy, Belle didn't really want to use his affection for her that way. She didn't want to use him, even if it would make this whole thing a lot easier.
By Thursday, though, everything went crazy. The first sign Belle got that her life was going to go to hell was Ruby appearing before the library was even open. She'd banned Ruby from any discussion of The Incident, so the frantic knocking on the library door and the Us Weekly gave Belle pause, but she still let her friend in.
"Sage is coming here!" Ruby blurted out before the door was even closed behind her.
"What?"
"I saw it on E!" Ruby continued. "He wrote an open letter to his fans who were bullying you and told them to knock it off – I'd have told you but you wouldn't let me speak his name – and then he was photographed by reporters getting on a flight to Boston!"
"We're not in Boston," Belle reminded Ruby. "He probably was going for a completely unrelated reason."
"Yeah, except he was only in Boston a couple days before he was sighted at the airport again!"
"That does not mean he's coming here," Belle replied, locking the door behind her friend and returning to shelving books. "It was a publicity stunt. Even if he did defend me online, it doesn't mean he's coming to visit."
"Belle, honey, which one of us works at the one hotel in town?"
Belle froze at that incredibly ominous reminder, and Ruby continued.
"Would you like to guess who just took a reservation for a single room in the name of Jacob Watkins?" Ruby said smugly, her smile fading when Belle didn't immediately figure it out. "Jacob Watkins? You know, Jacob Phelps and Ian Watkins? His characters in The Silver Sphere and Right On the Money? God, how did you even win that contest?"
"Are you serious?"
"Well, I'm serious that apparently you need to watch more movies!"
"Ruby…"
"Yes, I'm serious!"
"Holy shit," Belle said, feeling her legs start to go out from under her and Ruby had to catch her when she wobbled.
"Belle he's coming here!" Ruby shouted excitedly. "He's coming to see you!"
"Holy shit."
"It's just like a movie! Aren't you excited? What are you going to do?"
She had no idea – absolutely no idea. There was a part of her that was halfway convinced that Ruby was wrong, but if she wasn't then that meant he'd come to town. What the hell reason did he have for being there besides seeing her? It was possible he just wanted to apologize, but there was no reason to come here for that. And she had a date tomorrow night with a nice guy who didn't care about any of this so what was she going to tell Felix?
Just when everything had been going so well...
