Ethan finally slips into the photo-op booth. He hesitates, then looks at me, as if seeing that I’m still in one piece and not, you know, torn apart by fans. No, I’m still intact. I’m still playing Jessica Stone.

“Is everything all right?” he asks.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” I clip in reply, but instantly regret it.

He nods quietly and sits on a stool in the corner, pulling out his phone to ignore me, or to pretend as though I don’t matter. I know he’s only here for Jess’s sake, but I wish he wasn’t.

The air is thick with tension. Like Jabba the Hut thick, so thick I’d have to wrap my chains around its neck and strangle it just to make it go away—and I’m not even wearing a metal bikini to do that in.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see a guy saunter into the booth. He doesn’t even glance at Ethan, who just got a text and is replying with furious punches. Ethan doesn’t notice him either.

He isn’t supposed to be here, this guy. That much I can tell.

And when he looks at me, my blood freezes.

It’s Jasper.

I would notice him from a football field away, the way he holds himself when he walks, and he grins as we make eye contact. Brown hair and green eyes. Oh how I wish he had looked at me when we dated the way he looks at Me-as-Jessica-Stone now. Then I might not have ended up bawling on the curb at last year’s con.

I instantly get a bad feeling in my gut.

“Amaraaaaah!” Jasper cries, arms wide. He’s wearing a Joker and Harley Quinn T-shirt and jeans, and one of his YouTube filming lackeys is somewhere close by, I’m sure of it. “You broke the internet today!”

I did…?

How?

When I don’t rush to embrace him, his smile falters.

“What, too good for a hug?” He says it jokingly, but my skin prickles.

He doesn’t recognize me?

No—he thinks I’m Jess.

I smile thinly. “Of course not.”

I’m just being paranoid. We hug. His hands slip low.

I push away from him so fast, it takes him by surprise and he stumbles backward.

“What the heck?” he yelps, and then breaks into another laugh. “What’s wrong, Jessica?”

Jessica. He has the nerve to call me by my first name—well, by Jessica’s first name—when he doesn’t even know her. When he just touched my butt like it was absolutely nothing?

I don’t remember Jasper ever doing that to me.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that I only knew the Jasper in my head—the Jasper I wanted to know—not the one who ghosted me at the ExcelsiCon ball last year and broke up with me over text messages.