Harper laughs. She didn’t notice. Good. “Do I ever! Con food is way too pricey, and I’m a poor starving artist so I don’t have money for all the fancy restaurants around here. My friends say I make the best hotel ramen in the world, and I had promised you I’d make it for you if we ever met in person, and here we are.”

“Here we are,” I echo distantly, trying not to feel upset that it wasn’t a promise made to me, but to Imogen. Why am I upset over something like that? I try to wrestle control of my feelings. I am a professional actress. I’m fine. “You know, that’s pretty high praise. I’ve had a lot of good ramen.”

She holds up a finger. “But you’ve never had my ramen. Passed down from coupon-savvy Hart to Hart, we have perfected the art of the ninety-nine-cent ramen. Observe!”

With a flourish, she takes the carafe and pours steaming water into both cups, closes the lids, and puts our chopsticks on top to keep them down. Then she sets her phone timer for seven minutes.

“Seven minutes in heaven,” I murmur aloud. Aloud. I slap my hands over my mouth, mortified. “I didn’t, that wasn’t what I—”

Harper laughs, and her eyes crinkle, and my heart flutters. “It’d definitely kill some time.”

I can feel my ears getting red, heat and mortification rushing to them. “I—I didn’t mean it. That just reminded me, is all.”

She tilts her head. “My first kiss was a seven-minutes-in-heaven thing. I was at a birthday party in middle school. It was…terrible.”

“My first kiss was…” On the set of Huntress Rising, but I can’t tell her that. “He was older and I was, like, fifteen. His stubble was scratchy and it gave me a rash—and he smelled like weed. He’d been smoking all day.”

“Ugh, that sounds awful.”

I look down at my hands, picking at the cuticle on my thumb. “It definitely wasn’t what I had in mind for a first kiss.” But it was my job, and I didn’t have a choice. That I chose not to tell Harper. “It doesn’t really matter. I’ve had a few good kisses since then.” Including Dare. He was one of the better ones, actually.

Harper tilts her head when she looks at me. “You know, Imogen, you’re nothing like how you act online.”

My heart jumps. Oh no. “How so?”

“You’re just not,” she says as she sits down beside me, folding one leg under the other. She smells like lilac body lotion, and I try not to breathe too deep and drown in it. “It’s almost like you’re a different person.”

“Maybe I am.”

And she smiles at that, because she thinks I’m being coy.