Nine
Noa
This day.
I dropped my purse onto the counter, but that was as far as I got.
Since I’d woken up this morning and found the ring missing, the world had felt like it had been in a tailspin that wouldn’t slow down.
My gut told me that something bad had happened to make him just drop his life and take off.
But he’d handled his lease in advance and had the landlord handling the sublease that would take effect in three months.
He had only left a note in his apartment and emailed Dawson his resignation.
What could have driven him to act so rashly? He loved his job. The book he was editing for Opal was his next big thing.
My gaze dropped to the counter. He’d taken the ring.
I’d not even heard him come inside last night.
Unlike Ransom I had given Arden a key so it would be easy for him to enter but I should have heard something.
I hadn’t told anyone that since no one had known about the ring but Jellie and now Ransom.
Maybe I should have. Dawson had said his parents weren’t accepting his reason for leaving so abruptly and they were demanding an investigation.
However, with him leaving a letter, emailing his boss, and even handling his lease, he didn’t think that would happen.
Arden was an adult, and he didn’t have to check in with his parents.
The belief that he was in trouble with something illegal had been tossed out there.
But really? Could I have not known something like that about him? It was hard to wrap my head around.
Everyone at Wilson Roe was in an upheaval.
I was the only one of his authors who knew he was gone since I was the only one that I knew was questioned.
Our dating hadn’t been a secret. They were trying to decide how to tell the others and reassign his current manuscripts to other editors.
I’d personally made sure Opal was handed over to Rebekah Kahn.
She was one on the rise, and in my opinion, she was better than Arden.
But he’d been determined to hold Rebekah back.
She wanted to prove herself, and she’d make sure Opal’s book was perfect.
I had to call Jellie and tell her about all this.
Swinging my gaze to the clock on the oven, I realized she’d still be at work.
I’d call her later. Right now, I thought I needed to open a bottle of wine.
I did not care that it was only four in the afternoon.
Slipping off my shoes, I went to get the corkscrew from the cabinet where I kept the bar items displayed.
The ding of my phone, alerting me of a text, however, had me turning back to pick it up.
Ransom: You follow the distillery’s Instagram account.
I bit my bottom lip and leaned a hip against the counter.
How had he figured that out? They had over two hundred thousand followers.
Had he looked me up on Instagram? Deciding not to be weird about it, I’d respond the way I would have before he came waltzing into my apartment last weekend.
We were the same now as we had always been.
Me: I’m worried about all the spare time you have.
I smirked, then hit Send. There. That was the me he expected.
Not the one who was slightly giddy over the idea that he had looked me up on social media.
And not Juliette Romeo, the author. But me, Noa Raines.
My personal Instagram had about twenty followers, and I had shared maybe fifteen pictures since opening the account five years ago.
My author account was run by me, but also by the marketing team at Wilson Roe. They posted way more than I did. I’d not used it to follow anyone in my personal life. I kept the two separate.
Ransom: Are you accusing me of slacking?
Me: How else would you know something so trivial?
Sure, I’d caught his gaze a few times when he looked at me while we sat across from each other at lunch, and the interest in them had sent my heart racing.
But he did not once flirt. He’d been very blunt about what he thought about my body, but after that, he had kept everything friendly.
It was clear that he wasn’t going to change things.
And I understood. If we began to flirt, it would threaten the friendship we had. I could lose him.
Ransom didn’t keep women he slept with. I was the only one he had kept in his life because I was the one he hadn’t slept with.
But, ugh, it was unfair too. The one man I’d fantasized about since I had been a teenager was the one I could never experience.
And it would be good. No, it would be mind-blowing.
This was Ransom. Girls had talked about how hot he was and panted after him like dogs in heat when he was in high school.
Apparently, he had a big dick with a piercing.
I’d hung on every word in class one day when two girls were whispering about it.
One had given him a blow job in the locker room and made sure everyone knew.
Ransom: Just doing a little research.
Me: Is that what we are calling stalking these days?
Ransom: Ah, if I were to stalk you, you’d never know. This is just curiosity.
I let out a laugh at the thought of Ransom actually stalking anyone, then took my phone and went to continue my quest to open a bottle of wine. Although, like it seemed to always do, just hearing from him and going back and forth made things seem better.
“Oh, the power you wield over me, Ransom Carver,” I mumbled to myself.
Ransom: Have you thought about hairless cats?
Me: No, but I know because I had to research it for a book once that hairless cats are not an answer for those with cat allergies. It’s not just the air people are allergic to. The allergens are still found in their saliva, skin, and dander.
Ransom: Damn. What about birds? You could get birds.
I pulled out the cork, then set it down beside the bottle.
Me: Why would I get birds?
Taking down a glass, I filled it up, then carried the wine and my phone over to the sofa.
Ransom: I’m working on my mental image of you. Bringing it back to where it was, but it’s a struggle. I thought if you got a bird obsession and started wearing a stained terry-cloth robe, it might help.
Giggling, I took a drink, then set my glass down so I could respond.
Me: I hate to let you down, but I won’t be doing either of those things. Birds actually terrify me.
I hit Send, then caught a glimpse of myself grinning in the mirror across the room. There were butterflies in my stomach too, I realized.
Ransom: Could you just lie to me about it then? You had no problem lying about your career and relationship status.
Me: Hey! We talked about why I did those things.
I knew he was teasing, but this was fun.
Ransom: Speaking of relationship status, how are things with editor douchebag?
The high I’d been on sank instantly at the reminder of Arden.
Me: He left. As in left the country. Just upped and poofed.
Ransom: What, is he in trouble with the mob?
Normally, I’d roll my eyes, but this had run through my mind today. That and drugs. Both seemed so bizarre, but I was grasping for something that made sense.
Me: I honestly don’t know.
My cell phone rang.
I never answered calls from numbers I didn’t know. It was always instantly sent to voicemail and ignored.
I also never answered calls from my mother. When I said that there was no communication between us, I meant that I had shut her out of my life the last time she called me, asking for money.
Four years in college, and she’d never called.
I had to call her, and after the first year of trying to occasionally contact her, only to get her voicemail, I stopped.
It took almost a year before she called me.
It was a short conversation, where she asked me if I was still eating too much—which wasn’t something I’d ever really done—and if I had a boyfriend.
Then she told me about herself before ending the call.
Another year passed before she called me right before Christmas to make sure I knew she wouldn’t be home for it. She didn’t want me “showing up” at her place, “expecting anything.” And she and Dick went on a cruise that he’d won from a radio call-in contest.
I hadn’t been home for the holidays since I’d left. Jellie’s family always invited me to their home, included me in their festivities, and for the first time in my life, I’d experienced the holidays.
The most my mom had ever done when I was growing up was to heat up canned chili and make hot dogs for dinner. I thought, once, there was a small tabletop tree she’d put on the coffee table, but I’d been young. It was a very vague memory.
She didn’t inquire about or show up to my graduation from college. There was no I’m proud of you phone call or congratulations. But I hadn’t expected it from her.
Once I moved to New York for my job, it was two years before she called me.
She asked me a few questions about life, then asked me for money.
Dick had run off with some other woman, and the rent on the trailer was due.
She’d had a car accident and hurt her back, so she wasn’t able to work full-time anymore due to the pain.
I sent her the money.
The next month, it happened again.
When the third month rolled around, she needed money for all her bills and groceries. Like an idiot, I sent it to her.
Then, three days later, I got a call. She’d been arrested when cops showed up to bust a meth lab in the trailer park I’d grown up in. My mother had been inside and using.
Maybe it made me a bad daughter, but I didn’t go back there. I didn’t go try and bail her out. She’d drunk too much most of my childhood, but drugs hadn’t been a part of it.
Dayton Anthony was one of the arresting officers, and he was the one who called me. I’d helped him more than once in high school with a Literature paper he had to write. I asked him to keep me updated on her, but that was all I did. Hoping that some time behind bars would end the drug use.
Unfortunately, she was released after thirty days, and the calls started up. The third one I answered because she was my mother.
It took her going from unnaturally sweet, to bitching about my not getting her out of jail, to sweet again several times for me to realize she was messed up on something. The violent outbursts continued until I ended the call. She immediately started calling me back.
I blocked her, and I kept her blocked for over a year. A few months ago, I unblocked her number since there had been no calls from the Madison police station. Her first call came a few weeks later. I sent it to voicemail.
She had asked for money.
Instead of blocking her again, I just began sending her to voicemail, along with all the unknown numbers that called my phone. Sometimes, she left a message. Other times, she didn’t, but I always deleted them without listening. She was a negative in my life that I chose to keep out.
I’d give her credit for one thing though.
I could write one hell of a messed-up childhood in my books.
Drawing emotion from readers through the struggle the heroine had survived was all thanks to the life I’d lived, growing up.
Just like Melinda, Jellie’s mom, had given me inspiration for the positive female influences in my writing.
They said to write what you knew, and my first three books had been just that.
Well, almost. I had no knowledge of the spicy scenes that I wrote.
Arden was my first sexual partner, and he had been nothing like the men in my books.
He was boring, worried about his self-gratification solely, then acted as if he’d given me a gift that I should worship at his altar for when it was over.
He’d even gloated over the sex scenes I’d written, like he was the one who had given me the inspiration.
I often wondered if he was actually in the bed with us when we had sex since nothing I wrote resembled our sex life.
That was all thanks to the hours of porn I’d watched, researching, making mental notes, as well as writing ideas down.
I never got turned on by the live-action sex.
The women weren’t very good actresses, and their fake enthusiasm was obvious.
But if I ignored that and focused on the things they did, the things the guy said, and added my own imagination to it, I could come up with good material.
The phone began to ring again. Swinging my eyes from my computer screen to the phone, I glared at it.
She was insistent today. This had been her sixth call in an hour.
Reaching over, I silenced it and went back to the words on my screen.
I was at forty-two thousand, and I was stuck.
I’d tried deleting a couple of chapters and taking the storyline in another direction, but that hadn’t helped.
My first three books had come pouring out of me.
I’d stayed up all hours of the night, my fingers flying over the keyboard, excited and lost in the story I was telling.
This time, that was not happening. I’d blame it on the stuff with Arden before his disappearance last week and then his vanishing act, but that wasn’t it.
Sure, I thought about him, wondered what he’d been doing that could cause him to flee like that, but it wasn’t as often as one would think.
The majority of the time, I was working through ideas for my storyline or smiling down at my phone while texting with Ransom.
Since his visit here, he had been chattier than he’d ever been. He texted me daily now—or he had since our lunch together. The young girl with a crush wanted to think that this meant something. That he wanted to talk to me. That he liked me as more than his texting pen pal.
The adult who knew better was trying to talk reason into the young girl and keep her levelheaded.
Ransom wasn’t into me that way. He wanted friendship, and since we had rocked the boat, or ripped off the blindfold, or whatever you wanted to call it by seeing each other in person once again, he’d felt more connected.
Maybe? Heck, I didn’t know. I was naive with men.
The first real relationship I’d had was with Arden, and it was a train wreck waiting to happen. I’d just not realized it.
My phone screen lit up again, and I sighed, cutting my eyes at it, expecting another call from my persistent mother.
But Ransom’s name came across the screen, along with his text alert, and the jolt of dopamine in my system that just his name released in me was probably bad, but it couldn’t be helped.
When he texted me, I was that girl in a library with a crush all over again.