Chapter 27
Scarlett
The next week is a whirlwind of Ryan, edits, writing, publicity emails, rinse, and repeat.
The draft for my cover comes in, and I have to check the calendar to make sure it’s not April first, because there’s no way it’s not a joke. It’s just a blue bicycle on a black background with BECOMING in big, bold letters at the top and S.J. FALMOUTH in smaller, bold letters at the bottom. Before my brain can even process the email, my phone rings. It’s Trina, thank god.
“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” I say by way of greeting.
“It’s not good.”
“‘Not good’ is an understatement,” I correct her. “Please tell me this is concept art and not the real thing.”
Trina makes a little ehh noise that tells me I’m not going to like what she’s about to say. “They labeled this as final.”
“The bike in the book isn’t even blue! You cannot possibly be serious.”
“Listen, this is your boyfriend’s doing, not mine. He’s the one who handed the info off to design.”
She keeps talking, but my mind snags on the word boyfriend . Is he my boyfriend? Do I want him to be? We’ve been spending time together, but we haven’t been together again that long. Or do we count the time before? Between? Never mind that it’s been the week of my life, with publishing updates and Ryan almost finished with this round of edits and him coming here or me going to his place most nights to read and talk and touch like we’ve both been starving without one another.
At least, it was the best week of my life until this disaster landed in my inbox.
“Hello? Earth to Scarlett?” Trina’s tinny voice cuts through my thoughts.
“What? Sorry. I was distracted.”
“You don’t say,” she deadpans. “I was just saying I’ll call who I can, but you might have better luck going straight to Ryan. Unless you want me to contact him for you?”
I can tell from her tone that she’s fishing for information. I haven’t told her we’ve been spending time together again, but she knew he brought me food, so she probably has an idea.
Groaning, I rest my forehead on my palm. I do not need an existential crisis on top of a design one today.
“I’ll call him,” I say simply.
“Uh-huh,” Trina intones.
“I don’t know what that means, but I’m hanging up now.” Even though I can hear her spewing off a string of words, I end the call. I’ll deal with that later.
There’s still a giddy feeling about seeing Ryan’s name in my phone. I never deleted his contact information even though I blocked him, but I didn’t go looking for it, either. Honestly, I hardly even touched my phone after everything happened. There was no one calling me anyway, and every time I logged into my social media accounts, there were more and more angry messages from fans who had tickets to meet me and wanted their money back, as if I had anything to do with their ticket purchase. Once I deleted those accounts, blocked Ryan, and lost most of my friends, there wasn’t much for me to look at on there, so I just…didn’t. After a year or so, I noticed messages disappearing. One by one, they all vanished into technological oblivion. Not that I had been pining over old messages or anything.
Sighing, I push Ryan’s name and put him on speaker so I can wring my hands as I stare at the blue bicycle on my computer screen. He answers on the third ring.
“Hey, beautiful.” There is such tenderness in those two words that I almost do an about-face on the spot. They can have whatever cover they want if it means I get to be greeted like that when I call my editor.
No. Nope. This cover is bad, and I have to deal with it. “Did you see it?”
“See what? I’ve been knee-deep in your gorgeous book all morning. I should be sending it back to you tomorrow at the latest.”
“Well, this gorgeous book has a cover…” I trail off, hoping he can put two and two together.
“Oh no,” he groans. “Hang on.”
There’s some clicking and then silence.
Out of nowhere, he practically growls. “I will fix this.”
The sound is so out of character for him that I devolve into a fit of giggles. I’m laughing so hard that I fold in half at the waist, and my head hits the table.
“This isn’t funny, Scarlett. This is awful,” he says, but I can hear the edge of laughter in his voice. It’s so easy, the way we fall in sync. The way he knows exactly why I’m calling without me having to say it. The way we make each other laugh.
He always could make even the most serious problems seem lighter. It occurs to me that he could maybe make sense of everything that has been circling in my head since my last therapy session. I want him to.
But…one disaster at a time.
“It’s pretty bad.” I wipe at the corners of my eyes where tears have started to leak out.
“Pretty bad? The bike in the story isn’t even blue!”
I take a few calming breaths to stop myself from cracking up again. “I guess I should feel vindicated about fighting for the bike to stay in if they thought it important enough to put on the cover.”
“Yeah, well, it’s the only thing they thought to put on the cover,” Ryan grumbles, which draws a snort out of me. My shoulders shake with restrained humor.
“Okay. I’ll leave you to take care of it.” I close out of the image on my computer so I don’t have to look at it anymore as I try to get ahold of myself again. “You said you’re almost done with edits?”
“Yes.” His voice softens. “Scarlett, I don’t have words for how wonderful this book is. You have captured something so important—so universal. I know Meri’s publicity is targeted to a mostly female demographic because of the subject matter, but…damn.” He sounds almost reverent.
“So I won’t have much to do?” I tease.
He chuckles. “I didn’t say that. There are definitely a few passages that could use some work. A few things I’d like to see added, too, just to flesh out some of your themes a bit. Now that we’ve kept that godforsaken bicycle, we should do even more with it.”
I pause for a moment as his excitement becomes mine. I know a lot of authors get nervous about the editing process, but that has never been me. Even before Ryan was my editor, I always thought there was something magical about taking raw words that I had written just for me and polishing them, refining them, into something beautiful for the world to see. But now that Ryan is working on it, it’s even more special. It’s something beautiful we’ve made together.
“We?” I ask through a new emotion rising inside me. I can’t name it, but it feels close to fear. Trepidation. Everything unsaid between us is staring me in the face, telling me it could ruin this tenuous happiness we’ve started building again.
He goes quiet again, as if realizing what he’s said. “Sorry,” he says finally. “I got carried away.”
I clear my throat. Now is not the time. But soon. It has to be soon.
“No, not at all,” I reassure him. “It’s ours. I like that.”
He goes quiet for a minute again before cursing quietly. “Listen, I have to get going. I’ve been putting out fires all day, and another one just landed in my inbox. Dinner tonight?”
“I’d like that.”
We say our goodbyes. I sit cross-legged at my kitchen table with my laptop in front of me, staring at a blank screen for a long time. I should be writing. I want to write. But I can’t concentrate.
Maybe it’s having Ryan back in my life. Our banter, his kiss, the way his body feels against mine—it’s all so familiar. When he calls me beautiful with such ease, it’s almost as if he hasn’t missed a beat. Like there aren’t five years and a whole lot of heartbreak between us. And the way he talked about “we” and “us” and “our book” just now—that’s familiar, too. My words have always been his and his mine to the point where I’ve never been exactly sure who suggested what.
The familiarity is comforting. But it also wakes something else up inside me as I stare at the blinking cursor on my screen. The memories of what this all felt like five years ago when I was burnt out keep pestering me, almost like they’re trying to tell me not to get too comfortable. You were happy last time, too , they seem to whisper. You had everything you thought you wanted, until you realized that wasn’t what you wanted at all.
That was it, wasn’t it? It wasn’t that I couldn’t handle the fame or the work that came along with it but that I simply didn’t want it. I wanted something else. The rustling of pages, the click of a keyboard, the scratch of Ryan’s pen. Not the squeals of excited readers or the voices in my head screaming that I’d never be good enough.
A quieter life. A life with Ryan.
And when I closed the book on us, I put it on the shelf and told myself I wasn’t enough for that story, either.
I truly did think I had dealt with this. That it was done, and the only thing I had left to do was conquer my fear of publishing again, and I’d be healed. All that therapy, unraveling the story piece by piece. It was almost like editing, the way it happened. Dianne would listen to my first draft, then she’d poke at it, unearthing layer after layer. She’d ask me questions and make me think. It helped, obviously, but I’ve been alone with it for so long. Like she said the other day, the true test is letting someone in.
There’s no question about what I want now. I still want that quiet life with Ryan. But there’s only one path to it. We can’t have our second chance if he doesn’t know what happened with our first.