“What?” He turned the screen to himself, only to grin. “Oh, sweet. I was having no luck.” As he typed out a reply, I stared at him.
“Do I even want to know why you and your sister talk about chainsaws?”
“Hmm?” He glanced up, only
to say, “Oh,” and shrug. “We’re Viners.”
To me, that explained nothing. So I stared at him longer. “You’re…what-ers?”
“I’m a Viner.” He set the phone down and gave me an odd look. “Don’t you have the Vine app?”
“No. Sorry. What’s the Vine app?”
His mouth fell open. “You don’t…wait, you don’t even know what Vine is? How is that possible?”
“Hey,” I muttered, “you didn’t know what a hair wrap was.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll explain. Vine is just another social media sharing service, this one for short three-to-seven second videos. People use it to post pranks, music, journalism crap, comedy, political stuff and shit like that. My profile is strictly comedy skits. Actually, it’s not just my page. My sister, Caroline, and I share it. She learned a bunch of neat editing tricks in college and taught me some, so a year ago when I got started in it, I asked her for a little help, and…” He rolled his eyes. “You know sisters. She butted her way in until we were splitting the page, fifty-fifty.”
“Wow, you sound…really serious about it.”
“Yeah, well…when we hit two million followers, we picked up a couple sponsors and started making some cash from it.”
“Wait, what?” I lifted my hand to stop him so I could catch up. “Did you say two million followers? How the hell do you have that many followers in something I’ve never even heard of?”
“I don’t know. I’m just that awesome, I guess.” When I only gaped at him, he winked. “Do you want to see some of our Vines?”
“Hell yes.”
As he flipped through his phone and opened an app, I shook my head. “Wait. You’re logging on to YouTube. I thought you said it was on its own Vine site, or whatever.”
“Yeah, but we put compilations of our best Vines on YouTube so you can see more than one together. Here. Just watch.”
He typed in a few search words, then scrolled through a screen until he came to something called No-Colton-No. “That’s our screen name for our profile. Caroline used to read me this book called No, David! when I was little, and it was my favorite because my middle name’s David. Plus, I misunderstand things in a literal way a lot in our Vines, so it just seemed to fit all the way around.”
I nodded, loving the explanation of how he’d come up with their screen name, as he pushed play. What popped up was the strangest mix of mini videos I’d ever seen. Some were just odd, but then others made me crack up until we hit one where his sister told him to grow a pair, and a literal pear started to sprout from his forehead from a branch, and I lost it. I started laughing until tears fell.
Each skit was pure silliness, clean enough for kids to watch, and totally not something I would’ve expected the suave flirt I’d met almost a year ago to take part in. He basically made fun of himself in each Vine. I loved it; I loved learning about this new dimension of my man.
“And you make money from this?” I asked, glancing at him before I settled close enough to rest my chin on his shoulder and continue to watch him do the most bizarre things on the tiny screen of his phone.
“Yep,” he answered, sounding proud of himself.
“How much money?” I hedged.
“Enough to put me through college and let Caroline stay home with her daughter.”
Shit. That was impressive. I grew proud of him. But I murmured, “Weird,” and shook my head as I enjoyed watching his Vine compilation.
JULIANNA’S CHAPTER | 23
I woke the next morning to Colton kissing his way up my shoulder.
Mumbling incoherently over the fact I was now awake and didn’t yet want to be, I rolled toward him and reached blindly until I found his chest, which was covered by the cotton material of his shirt.
Yes, that made waking up better. Except, wait.
My eyes came open. He hadn’t worn a shirt to bed.