Chapter 3 The Writing Class #7
Grayson thinks about it for a long moment, stroking his chin thoughtfully as he stares at his laptop, once again a judge in a courtroom—only this time, he’s deciding the fate of his characters.
“I also had another thought, but you won’t like it.” I turn back to my own laptop with a cryptic smile, opening up my first chapter and pretending to make minor edits.
“What is it?”
“Nope, not saying. You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t laugh, I promise. Tell me. I need your creative genius to summon my soul from the depths of literary despair.”
I roll my eyes. “You have read too much Keats.”
“What. Is. The idea?”
I turn to face him, propping my chin on my fist. “Make it a love story.”
He lets out a sigh, which gives way to a laugh as he sinks his face into his hands.
“What if instead of Peter you had… Patricia?”
“Patricia?”
“Yeah. What if the patient was a woman? Who lost her husband? And the whole story could unfold the same way, except the psychiatrist falls in love with Patricia, but he can’t have her—and maybe he’s already married so he feels like a terrible person for even wanting her… but he can’t help himself.”
Grayson’s expression of doubt melts into something more serious and dreamy. He falls into a reflective trance as his gaze roams over my face, stalling on my lips for a second.
“He can’t help himself,” he whispers.
I turn back to my keyboard, a prickle of unease breathing down my neck. “Just a thought.”
“It’s a good thought,” he assures me with a half-smile. “It’s a thought worth thinking about.”
WESTON
Over the course of the next two weeks, I watch the monarch butterfly slowly lose her strength to fly. It’s not that she can’t fly—her wings are just as capable as they were before. But something is weighing her down.
I first notice it on the drives home from Tessa’s writing class.
When this thing first started, she’d be all bubbly and talkative when she’d hop in my truck—telling me everything her professor lectured about, then starting to think up new ways to apply it to her story—and I would just listen because I couldn’t get excited about creative writing any more than she could get excited about MMA knockouts.
Still, I loved listening to her talk—even if most of the lingo went over my head. I loved seeing her light up over something that was all her own. I loved watching her fly.
Now, she doesn’t say much on the drives home. When I ask her what she’s thinking about, she replies, “The book.” If I urge her to tell me, “What about the book?” she shakes her head and says, “It’s too hard to explain.”
On the nights that I hang out at her place to watch movies and snuggle on the couch with her, I always wake up at some point to find her sitting on the floor with her laptop, typing away. Sometimes she’s working on her own book. Other times she’s working on his.
Grayson Rhodes. The smart-ass college student with the glasses and the fifty-cent words. I’d be lying if I said I don’t bristle inside every time I catch Tessa reading his work.
“Stop taking it so personally,” she says one night when we’re supposed to be hanging out together, but she’s got a pile of his stupid writing in her lap and a red pen to mark up errors.
I do take it personally. I want to snatch that red pen of hers and slash it through every line on the page. I don’t like Tessa reading that crap about suicide and psychiatrists and death. It’s not her. She hates it; I know she does. But she’s reading it anyway, willingly—happily. Why?
What the hell is so special about this guy?
“Well, I hope he doesn’t have that many edits for your writing,” I say in response, nodding toward the papers in her lap. “Because if he does, I’m going to have to wring his neck.”
“Pfft. Stop. Grayson does have suggestions for me and some edits, yeah. He can see things in my writing that you can’t.”
“Because he’s smarter? More intellectual? Has a bigger vocabulary?”
Tessa rolls her eyes. “I never said that, Wes. He’s just… a writer, okay? You’re not. So he can see errors in my writing that you can’t see.”
“Is that why you’ve been sad?”
“Sad?”
“Yeah, gloomy. Glum. Whatever the hell the right word is.”
“I haven’t been gloomy or glum,” Tessa objects, but the way she turns back to her laptop and lets a curtain of hair fall into her face is proof she wants to hide from my words—because they’re true. “I just… I want to improve my writing, that’s all. I want my book to be perfect.”
That’s not unusual for Tessa. She always wants everything to be perfect. But I’ve watched the way her perfectionism makes her spiral into a hole of self-doubt and anxiety.
“You’re a really good writer, Tessa,” I assure her, sitting upright on the couch and gently running my fingers through her long hair.
“I know I’m biased when it comes to you, and my word might not count for much because I’m not some literary scholar…
but I suspect you’re more of a writer than any of those other students are. ”
Tessa caps her red pen and sets the pile of papers aside.
“Your word does count, Weston. I value your opinion. And besides…” She smiles, crawling over the couch cushions and sinking into my lap, her soft hands latching behind my head—pulling me close to her lips.
“A big vocabulary is not what I look for in a man.”
I can’t help the smile that breaks onto my face. “That… sounds kinda dirty.”
She rolls her eyes. “It wasn’t meant to sound dirty.”
“Even better.” I kiss her, winding one arm around her back and scooping the other under her knees, drawing her in closer, closer, never close enough. She kisses me hard, hungrily—like she didn’t realize how much she was craving this until now.
The feeling is mutual.
Her skin smells so good, and it tastes even better as I kiss my way down the curve of her jaw, to the hollow beneath her ear. For some reason, this spot always drives her crazy—her fingers turn into claws and her body curls tighter around me like a boa constrictor going in for the kill.
Aaaaand that’s when her cell phone starts ringing.
I loosen my hold, letting her crawl back over the couch to snatch her vibrating phone from the coffee table.
“Who’s rudely interrupting our makeout session?” I ask, still too high on the rush of dopamine and other good feelings to be pissed off at this interruption.
“I don’t know. Probably spam.” She swipes to answer the call, holding it to her ear. “Hello?”
A tinny guy’s voice comes through the speaker, making Tessa jolt upright.
“Oh. Grayson, hi.”
Good feelings gone.
Tessa turns to give me a face, but I can’t tell what kind of face it is—sorry she picked up? Or just sorry that I happened to be here, making out with her, when she picked up?
I sit here for a minute listening to the muffled sound of his voice through the phone. Tessa nods and “mm-hmms,” but she keeps looking at me and parting her lips like she wants to tell Grayson she has to go. Her attempts are useless.
I’m tempted to grab the phone from her ear and tell him to screw off—but something tells me that wouldn’t put Tessa in the mood to continue kissing me.
After a few minutes of sitting here feeling like a spare part, I decide to make it easier for her. I mouth the words It’s okay and reach for my prostheses, which are lying on the floor by the couch. Tessa dives before I can, wrestling my left leg away from me.
Stay, she mouths.
And to ensure I do, she climbs back into my lap—still on the phone with Grayson, whose voice I can hear more clearly now that she’s closer.
“Anyway,” he says, “I was really calling to ask if you want to meet up tomorrow at the Trolley Station, go over a few of these ideas you sent me.”
Tessa glances up at me, hesitation in her eyes. “Oh, um… I didn’t see an email from Shoshanna.”
“No, the next Inklings meeting is on Thursday. I thought you and I could have some one-on-one time. We’d get more done that way.”
Every muscle in my body locks up at his choice of words. One-on-one time? My reaction doesn’t escape Tessa. She feels it in the squeeze of my hands around her hips before she even looks up into my face.
Say no.
It’s not something I tell her or even secretly mouth to her. It’s just a whisper in the back of my mind. A want. A fear. A twist in my gut that I hope she’ll feel too.
“Are you busy tomorrow afternoon?” Grayson presses her, making me want to reach through the phone and pop him one.
“Uh, no, I’m not… I can make time.” Tessa bites her lip, scanning my face and then sliding her hand down to cover mine. “Would it be okay if my boyfriend came along?”
Well, that’s a wild card I wasn’t expecting her to play.
Silence from Grayson while he thinks about it. “Uh, yeah, sure. That’d be fine. I’d like to meet him, actually. Sounds great. Three o’clock?”
Tessa’s gaze slides back to me, a slow smile pushing over her lips. God, that look is enough to burn me down like a forest fire. “Three o’clock.”
She hangs up, dropping the phone on the coffee table.
“He doesn’t want to meet me,” I say in a low growl, brushing a strand of hair off her cheek. “He doesn’t even know how much he doesn’t want to meet me.”
Tessa murmurs a laugh, fingers clawing at my neck. I guess animal aggression turns her on?
“Well, I want you to meet him,” she says. “I want you to see that he’s absolutely no threat to us. He’s just a friend.”
I almost laugh—I would if it weren’t so damn frustrating. This is what I love about Tessa. She gives everyone the benefit of the doubt. Trusts them, thinks the best of them, too sweet to see past the masks people wear.
Grayson may not be a threat to us, but I’m sure as hell a threat to Grayson. And there’s no way he’s looking forward to this meeting tomorrow—not now that Tessa invited me to join them.
“Be nice to him, okay?” Tessa traces her fingertip along my jawline, her beautiful eyes glittering in the lamplight. “Don’t get all… proprietorial.”