Chapter 11
Ryan
“All I’m saying is that she sent it at two in the morning.” I lean forward in my seat facing Casey’s desk, as if that could make him finally understand the gravity of the statement I’ve repeated twice now. The timing of her email bothered me all weekend, so when Monday rolls around, I didn’t waste any time searching out my friend for advice.
Casey twirls a pen between his pointer and middle finger. “And all I’m saying is that you got it at two in the morning. Just because someone is awake before the crack of dawn does not mean that person has made a habit of being awake at that time.” He drops the pen, and it twirls in a circle on the smooth desktop. Disregarding it, he presses his forearms into the desk and clasps his hands. “I know you’re worried about her, Ry, but…” He trails off and presses his lips together, shaking his head slightly.
“What?”
He lets out a slow breath through his nose. “It’s not really your place anymore, is it?”
I open my mouth to respond, but nothing comes out. That old ache returns to my chest, and the best I can manage is a shaky inhale before snapping my jaw shut.
His expression softens, but it’s too late. Like toothpaste out of the tube, he can’t take it back. The damage is done.
“Look,” he says, but I stop him with a shake of my head.
“No. You’re right. My job is to edit this book. Nothing more. She made that clear, too, and I should keep my nose out of it.”
“What do you mean she made that clear? What did you do?”
“I…might have stopped by her apartment with my initial notes.” I lean back in my chair and take my glasses off to rub the bridge of my nose. “In my defense, I didn’t really want to take the time to type them up.” Hopefully my hand hides the grimace I make, because even I can hear that’s a feeble excuse.
“Ryan—”
“I know.” I replace my glasses and drop my hands helplessly to my knees. “I know, okay? I had to see her again. I wanted to know she was okay.”
“And was she?”
It’s not the response I expected. Casey has every right to chew me out, and he probably should. Showing up at her apartment unannounced when she hadn’t given me her address herself was a violation of her privacy, and Anastasios Press could easily terminate me based on that alone. But when I risk a glance at him, his eyebrows are drawn together, and his head is tilted in genuine concern.
Before I respond, I think back to that day, as if it hasn’t been playing on repeat since I left her. But Casey’s question adds a new lens to it. Was she okay? Her toenails were painted, which is something she only ever did when she had surfaced from her work long enough to give herself a little extra attention. The baking show has always been a comfort thing for her, but she had just had a meeting with us where she had seen me again unexpectedly. I suppose it’s not out of the question for her to curl up with her emotional-support baking competition. Her apartment was clean. Her hair has clearly been cut recently. She wasn’t wearing makeup, but she was never one for that kind of thing anyway. Makeup or no, her skin was glowing. She looked healthy. And she filled out her pajamas—also clean—in a way that has lived rent-free in my head since I saw her. But what it tells me now is that, as I had suspected at that first meeting, she’s probably been eating.
I nod slowly. “Yes. I think she was.”
“And was she pissed you stopped by?” He makes a show of looking me up and down. “You have all your limbs, and I don’t see any obvious bruises. Since you walked in here just fine, I’ll assume she didn’t cut off your balls.”
“Okay, asshole.” I narrow my eyes at him. “She was surprised, obviously, but she seemed okay with it.”
If you need to hand-deliver notes, I wouldn’t mind.
She definitely wouldn’t have said that if she didn’t want me to stop by again. She must have been okay with it.
“Then no harm, no foul.” He levels me with a glare. “But I wouldn’t do it again. Boundaries are your friend in this situation. I know you still want to protect her, but the best way to do that is by staying away. She left you—I get that—but my guess is she was just as broken up about it as you were.” He pauses again as if he’s holding back, but this time it doesn’t take any prodding for him to continue. “No one walks away from a million-dollar deal and someone they’re in love with all in the same day without some serious shit going on under the surface. Don’t stir the pot, Ryan. Leave well enough alone.”
Casey’s words roll around in my head for another full week. A week in which I’m so engrossed in Scarlett’s manuscript that I almost feel like she’s with me. Her voice is so clear, so brilliant, so haunting. And reading this time knowing it was her who wrote the words makes it all the more exciting. The changes she’s made to the story based on our emails are even better than what I had originally suggested. The grittiness of the bike elevates everything else in the story and adds realism to her otherwise fragile and airy prose. It incongruously fills the book with even more hope than was there before.
It fills me with hope that Scarlett has found a way to ground herself like she’s grounded the story. That she won’t somehow float away. That she’s filled with optimism, too.
I had planned to do several passes through the manuscript this time, but after I finish my first read-through, I’m itching to discuss it with her about it like we used to—papers strewn about, a light in her eyes as she talked through a particular scene. The way those eyes would go a little wider and she’d gasp just before scrambling off the bed to grab a notebook or her laptop or her phone, whatever was closest to frantically tap out whatever idea had occurred to her.
The way our bodies would tangle with the pages and the sheets, our tongues rolling around words, then around each other. Exploring both until we were spent. Waking up to do it all over again.
I shake my head rapidly. Casey was right. The best way to protect her is to stay away. No matter how much I want to pick up right where we left off, it might bring up too many old wounds. It could stop Scarlett from writing again. And the world needs her words. That, I know for sure.
But when Trina’s name lights up my phone somewhere in the middle of my second pass of page fifteen, I scramble to answer it faster than I probably should.
“Hello?” I press the phone hard into my ear, suddenly and inexplicably breathless.
“Ryan? Are you on a run or something? I can call back—”
“No, no.” I take a deep breath, praying I can get my shit together. “I was focused. You surprised me is all.” The little lie slips easily off my tongue as I remind myself for the hundredth time in the past hour that boundaries are my friend.
“Sure. Anyway, I’m calling about Scarlett.”
“Is she okay?” I ask a little too quickly.
“Yes,” Trina says slowly. Suspiciously. “She mentioned you’ve had her revisions for a week or so now, and she hasn’t heard from you. She didn’t say so directly, but I think she’s a little nervous. She’s not used to not having…immediate feedback.” There’s definitely laughter in her voice there, and I imagine her bright red lips twisting into an indecent grin.
“Does she want immediate feedback?” The words tumble out of me before I can think better of it. And to make matters worse, I match Trina’s innuendo. I cringe and toss my glasses onto my desk so I can rub at my temples as if that would take all the double meaning out of the conversation.
She snorts. “No. Like I said, she’s nervous. I told her I’d check in.”
“Right. Of course.” I blink my eyes open, the words on my screen blurry without my glasses. “Tell her she has nothing to worry about. I finished my first pass, and her revisions are spot on. My second has been slower because of some other projects I needed to finish up”—another lie—“but I should have it finished soon. Maybe another couple of weeks.”
“Great.” There’s a scraping sound as if Trina is shifting her phone to her other ear, then a car door opening and closing in the background. “She’s started drafting her next book, so this will give her time to make some headway on that.”
At that, another image overtakes the one I had of Scarlett and me tangled in sheets and pages and each other. This one is of her at her desk, sitting cross-legged on her computer chair, her face too close to her monitor and dark circles under her eyes.
“I needed seven thousand words today to stay on track, and I only got thirty-five hundred.” Her voice was weak and small. She didn’t bother looking up from her monitor as she clacked away at her keyboard, then cursed silently and deleted whatever she had just written.
I wiped the bleariness out of my eyes with the back of my hand. “Beautiful, it’s four in the morning. Have you slept at all?”
“I’ll sleep when I finish.”
“When you finish it’ll be tomorrow, with a new word-count goal. Come to bed, just for a few hours.”
She waved me off without sparing me a glance. “It won’t take much longer. Once I got going, the first half went really fast. One more hour, I promise.”
But I had heard that before. “Another hour” would turn into “Why not get ahead?” and “If I write double, maybe I can turn this in early,” which was almost always followed by a frantic “Nothing will ever be as good as In the Time Before ” and ten pages gone with the click of a button.
I scrubbed a hand down my face and padded groggily to the kitchen to put on another pot of coffee. If she was going to pull an all-nighter, the least I could do was make sure she didn’t delete it all when she reread it in the light of day.
“Hello? Ryan? Did I lose you?” Trina’s voice cuts through the memory, scattering it like leaves in a windstorm.
I clear my throat and glance out the floor-to-ceiling window in my office, almost surprised to find the spring sunshine streaming in, casting the room in a bright, happy light. Those darker memories haven’t been as prevalent as the other, softer ones, but this one felt real enough to be an omen. It dissipated, but it’s lingering.
“No, I’m here. I’m sorry,” I say, still blinking in the light from the window.
“I asked what you thought of the premise. Did you hear me?”
“Sorry,” I apologize again. “I didn’t. You were cutting out.”
It’s yet another lie, but this time Trina is onto me. “Mm-hmm,” she hums, unconvinced. Then, after a pregnant pause, she says, “Scarlett is okay. This isn’t like last time.” Her voice is gentle, reassuring, but there’s something underneath it. Agitation? Disquiet?
I run a finger over the edge of my desk to ground myself and take a guess at what she’s upset about. “If it bothered her that much, I won’t see her again unless I have to.”
“Hmm?” she hums again, distracted this time. “Oh, no. She…well, she’s an idiot mostly, as you know, and she actually seemed touched that you went out of your way to drop off those notes.”
A soft smile curls half of my mouth upward, but the relief is short lived. “What aren’t you saying, Trina?”
“I don’t think it’s a great idea for you to see her again. She’s got systems in place now. Lots of therapy, medication…you know?”
There’s an unspoken but at the end of her statement, so I wait her out.
Trina’s sigh turns into a little mewling whine, and I know she’s about to say something she wishes she could hold back. “The late nights aren’t great for her. But I’m on it, okay? There’s nothing to worry about yet.”
I don’t like that “yet” one bit, but Casey and Trina have both told me essentially the same thing, and I know the smart move is to listen to them. “Will you let me know if there is something to worry about?”
“Ryan.” Her tone is a warning one. “I’m telling you; don’t get involved, okay? This is hard enough without revisiting all the heartbreak on top of it. I’ve got her. I promise.”
For a second, I think about protesting. Trina wasn’t there during all those late nights. She wasn’t the one to watch her try to push forward almost immediately after she got off yet another plane ride from yet another city on her press tour. She didn’t see Scarlett start to second-guess every sentence, every word. She didn’t hold Scarlett and listen to her talk about how numb it all felt.
But then the realization that I haven’t been there for the past five years hits me like a ton of bricks. Trina has, and she’s probably right—Scarlett has systems in place now that I know nothing about, and Trina is keeping an eye on her. They don’t need me muddying the waters and causing unnecessary trouble.
My shoulders slump forward as I close my eyes against the sting of this new awareness. “Of course,” I say. “Just…keep me posted, okay? And I’ll have this round back to her as soon as I can.”
When we hang up, I tell myself that the little pocket of dread that opened up when she sent her second draft at two in the morning is just bad memories coming back and nothing more.
I almost believe it.