Chapter 2 — The Girl Who Already Hates Him

Isabella

The athletics office had a wall of photographs decades of championship teams, all teeth and trophies and Isabella stood in front of it for a full minute before her name was called, trying to memorize the exits.

“Miss Rossi.” Marlene Suarez appeared in a doorway like she’d been assembled specifically to intimidate literature majors. “Thank you for coming. Right this way.”

The conference room had a long table, a tray of coffee no one had touched, and a man Isabella recognized instantly from the video bigger in person, which she hadn’t thought was possible, with the kind of easy, athletic posture that made even sitting look like a performance. He didn’t stand when she walked in. He just looked up, and something in his expression flickered recognition, maybe, or surprise before it smoothed back into practiced charm.

“You’re the girl from my Intro to Lit section,” he said. “Sophomore year. You told the TA my paper on The Odyssey read like ‘a Wikipedia summary with more confidence than accuracy.’”

Isabella sat down across from him without being invited to. “I remember. You didn’t do the reading.”

“I did some of the reading.”

“You did the SparkNotes.”

“The SparkNotes are also reading, technically”

“Mr. De Santis,” Suarez said, in the flat voice of someone who had clearly already regretted this meeting once today, “perhaps we could establish ground rules before the insults start.”

Luca held up both hands, unbothered, almost amused. Isabella hated that he looked amused. She’d spent two years successfully avoiding this exact category of person handsome, confident, allergic to consequences and here he was sitting across a conference table from her like the universe had a sense of humor.

“Isabella,” Suarez continued, sliding a folder toward her, “I’ll be direct, because I think you appreciate direct. Mr. De Santis needs to rehabilitate his public image, quickly, and our research indicates a grounded romantic narrative is the fastest way to do that. You’d be presented as his girlfriend for the run of the docuseries approximately one semester. Public appearances, filmed dates, the occasional interview. In exchange, the university offers a scholarship stipend covering the remainder of your tuition, plus a stipend for your time.”

Isabella made herself keep her face still, even though her pulse had picked up at the word tuition in a way that embarrassed her. “Why me?”

It was an ordinary question. She watched it land like it wasn’t.

Suarez’s eyes cut, just briefly, toward Luca. “The narrative team identified several candidates based on public profile and”

“I asked for you.” Luca said it fast, like ripping tape off skin, before Suarez could finish the sentence for him. “Specifically.”

The room went very quiet.

“You asked for me.”

“I told Marlene I needed someone believable. Someone who wouldn’t just go along with whatever the cameras wanted.” He wasn’t quite looking at her now, which she noticed, filed away. “You’re the only person on this campus who’s ever told me I was wrong to my face and clearly didn’t care what it cost her socially. That’s not something you can fake with a stranger.”

“That’s not an answer, that’s a compliment shaped like an explanation.”

“Isabella”

“You don’t get to know my name from a sophomore lit class and then act like this is a coincidence, Luca.” She could hear her own voice sharpening, and let it. “How long have you known you wanted me specifically? Before the scandal? After?”

Suarez cleared her throat. “This is a conversation you’re welcome to continue privately. For now, the terms”

“Before,” Luca said, ignoring her, still looking at Isabella like the answer mattered more than the room around them. “Weeks before. There was a mixer, athletics and honors college, you probably don’t even remember it”

“I remember it. You spilled a drink on my copy of Middlemarch and called it, and I quote, ‘a big book about nothing.’”

“and I remembered you,” he said, like that settled something. “That’s it. That’s the whole scandalous truth. I remembered you being unimpressed with me in a room full of people who usually aren’t. When Marlene needed a name, I gave her yours. I didn’t know any of this was going to happen when I said it.”

Isabella sat back, arms crossed, turning that over. It didn’t feel like nothing. It felt, uncomfortably, like the opposite of nothing.

“Fine,” she said. “Prove it, then. Prove this isn’t some setup where I find out in week six that you and Marlene picked me because I’m easy to embarrass.”

“Prove it how?”

“You think I can’t act like I like you?” She nodded at the folder without looking down. “Fine. Then we’re filming this conversation, or we’re not signing anything, because I want it on record that I walked into this with my eyes open.”

Suarez’s expression did something complicated caught, for a moment, off guard. “The room is already being filmed, Miss Rossi. Standard practice for all intake meetings. It was disclosed in your release.”

Isabella’s stomach dropped. She looked up really looked, this time and found the small camera mounted near the ceiling in the corner, red light blinking, patient, already recording everything: the argument, the confession, all of it.

“You’ve been filming this the entire time.”

“Since you walked in,” Suarez confirmed, entirely unbothered. “Think of it as your screen test.”

Isabella’s mind raced the stipend, Nico’s fees, her mother’s dead sewing machine, the version of this she could still walk away from if she stood up right now and left the folder on the table. And underneath all of it, quieter and more dangerous: the fact that Luca De Santis had just told four million future viewers, on camera, that he’d asked for her by name weeks before any of this began and she still didn’t fully believe it was the whole story.

She looked at him. He looked, for the first time since she’d walked in, genuinely uncertain of what she’d do next.

So she reached across the table and closed her hand over his.

His whole body went visibly, comically still.

“There,” she said sweetly, for the camera, for Suarez, for the four million strangers who would eventually watch this footage back. “See? I’m very convincing.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, when he found his voice again. “Okay. Maybe you are.”

Suarez smiled the first real smile of the meeting. “I’ll have the contracts sent over by tomorrow morning. Welcome to Northridge Confidential, Miss Rossi.”

Isabella pulled her hand back like she’d touched a stove and stood, folder against her chest, already regretting nearly everything about the last twenty minutes.

She made it as far as the hallway before her phone buzzed an email, already, subject line Filming Schedule: Week 1, sent at 10:41 a.m., four minutes before their meeting had even ended.

Someone had scheduled her first filmed date with Luca De Santis before she’d said a single official yes.

She hadn’t signed anything yet. And they were already moving.