Chapter Twenty-Three
Congrats, babe,” Robb says with a warm smile, tapping her champagne glass against mine with a crystalline clink.
“Thank you.” I flush. The restaurant we’re in is incredibly swanky, and I’m underdressed in spliced plaid pants, a frayed sweater, and Docs.
Thankfully, Robb is equally as casual in her simple cotton dress and plaid jacket.
They definitely tucked us away in the corner of the bar on purpose.
“This is… We could’ve just gone to a brewery. ”
Robb waves this away. “Work expense,” she says with a smirk.
Should I have been saving my receipts? Then I realize that’s probably a staff perk, not a freelance perk.
“How are you feeling?” Robb asks before taking a sip of her drink.
I ferret around the cheese board between us, stalling. The waiter explained what pairs best together, but I forgot the instant they walked away, so I grab two random items and hope for the best. “Great,” I say, popping the cheese and dried fruit into my mouth.
Robb raises her brows from behind her cat-eye glasses. Then she shakes her head. “Sorry—yes. You should feel great. You wrote a great fucking article.”
“But?” I ask suspiciously.
Robb hems and haws for half a second. “Are you happy?” she blurts. “At AP?”
I nod eagerly. “Yeah,” I reassure her. “All I’ve wanted since graduating was someone I could learn from. After The Offbeat—” I shake my head. “Thank you so much for believing in me. I couldn’t have done it without you, and I hope we get to work on more things together.”
Robb smiles softly. “I hope so, too. But that’s not really what I asked.”
Something heavy settles in my gut, like I ate all the cheese on the table in one gulp.
“Am I happy at AP,” I repeat, trying to riddle out what she’s really getting at.
“I mean, obviously I would like to not be freelance anymore,” I hedge.
I got the interview of the year. It feels classless to complain, but I would really like to have a steady paycheck, benefits, health insurance, a 401(k).
“Has John offered you anything?”
I open my mouth to say yes, then close it.
When this publishes and all the big names start trying to poach you, don’t make any decisions without talking to me first.
“Not an offer, exactly,” I realize. The hopeful balloon that I’ve carried in my chest since that meeting with John deflates like a whoopee cushion. “Just not to accept any offers without coming to him first.”
Robb snorts, sinking against the back of her chair. “Of course he said that.”
I lean forward. “What do you mean?”
“I mean it lets him off the hook, doesn’t it? For actually having to pay you. Are you looking elsewhere?”
My skin goes clammy. “Should I be?”
Robb’s eyes bug. “Yes, Sloane. You just wrote what will become part of scene history. You shouldn’t be getting paid scraps.”
The neck of my sweater is suddenly too tight, and I tug at it. “I mean, yeah, but I finally found someone I like working with,” I say meaningfully.
Robb smiles sadly at me from across the table. “I’ve really enjoyed working with you, too, watching you grow.”
“But?” I say again, the word left hanging unspoken at the end of her sentence.
“But…” she begins again. “I’m putting in my notice tomorrow.”
My spine hits the chair as I rear back. “What?”
“All the guys on the writing staff make way more than me, which I could stomach if I were still growing as a writer, but—” She exhales heavily.
“Everything I pitch beyond the same beat I’ve been doing the past ten years John shoots down.
” I nod in understanding. “I applied to Rolling Stone as a way to get a competing offer, to force John’s hand to pay up, but the counteroffer he made—” She shakes her head.
“The Stone offer stopped looking like a bargaining chip after a while.”
I nod again, unsure what to do, what to say, feeling selfish that my predominant thought is grief over losing my mentor so soon. “I get it—I hate it, but I get it. I’m really going to miss working with you.”
“What if… what if you don’t have to?” Taking a deep breath, she bends over, retrieving something from her bag. Flicking open a manila envelope, she hands me a heavy piece of card stock. I can’t make anything out other than the Rolling Stone header.
“Come with me.” She taps the paper in front of me, and I really see it for the first time. My name at the top, my title—staff writer. My eyes bulge at the number next to the word salary.
“They need writers based on the West Coast and they’re letting me build my own team in San Fran.
When they asked me who I wanted, I told them all about you,” she begins.
“They want you—bad. They know you’ll be able to go anywhere you want after the Final piece goes live, so this is a very competitive offer to lock you in before it goes out. ”
I don’t know what to say. Rolling Stone has always been my dream job. I thought Mike was my in, and when that internship went sour, I put my dream on hold. Working with Robb is all I want, the mentorship I’ve waited years for, and I’m losing her—unless I follow her.
“Think about it,” she pleads. “And just—” She grimaces. “I love Dax, I do, but don’t stay here for a guy.”
I scoff on autopilot, because the idea of giving up my dreams for another person is antithetical to my very being.
I spilled my own blood on a rooftop promising that I wouldn’t.
While I may have been too young to fully understand it in the moment, over time, it became a cornerstone I built my life around.
But… what if he’s the guy? I can’t say it out loud, can barely think it inside my own head.
It feels like tugging at a thread that’s kept me stitched together for years.
I’ve spent my entire adult life working toward an offer like this.
But… I want the community I’ve begun cultivating here.
I want Dax. I want AP. And yet, I know that wanting alone isn’t enough to make something reality.
Plans make things happen, and I have a very real new plan sitting in front of me.
Not just any plan—my dream, served up on weighty card stock.
I’d be a fool to pass this up without considering it.
If I take it, would I regret it? If I don’t, would I always wonder, What if?
“You have until the December issue to decide. I hope you’ll come with me,” she says. “And if not, there will be an opening at AP. It should be yours. But I can tell you right now, it’s not that.” She taps the paper in front of me.
I nod, easing the paper off the table, the Rolling Stone header like a half-remembered dream. I slide it into my bag carefully, as if I’m handling a bomb. I may as well be, the way this would detonate everything I’ve started to build here.
The rest of our happy hour goes smoothly, a reminder of what I’ll be giving up if I don’t go with Robb.
But I can’t ignore the pit in my stomach at the thought of going back to San Francisco.
It feels like getting back together with a toxic ex and expecting it to go differently.
Except I wouldn’t be working for Mike, but Robb, who was unfailingly patient with me while I struggled my way through this article, even when the article should have been hers all along.
She couldn’t be less like Mike. And while I like John, I don’t know that he’d mentor me in the same way, nor has he made any moves to secure me a permanent place at AP.
My head spins the entire drive home, and I slog my way up the stairs to my apartment, the job offer like a ten-pound weight in my bag. I want Robb. I want Dax. I want a steady paycheck and benefits. Neither option allows me to have all three.
I toe off my boots once I’m inside my apartment, and I can’t ignore the lift in my spirits when I spy Dax on my couch, guitar in hand. He stops playing when he sees me.
“How’s Ro—Whoa, what’s wrong?” he asks, pivoting when he catches my expression.
Fuck, I forgot to school my face. I need to tell him about Robb’s offer, but I want to riddle out how I feel before I discuss it with him.
Including him in making a massive decision about my future—I prefer to dip a toe into the water to test it before cannonballing into the deep end.
It’s a conversation we need to have, but I’m too scared of the answer to force it.
Everything about this situation is a little too familiar, a distorted funhouse mirror of what ended us three years ago.
Him leaving for tour, me fixing my eyes on the Rolling Stone horizon, us at a crossroads.
Dropping my bag by the door, I half expect the offer to leap out and announce its presence. It doesn’t, and I trudge over to Dax, climbing on top of him and wrapping all my limbs around him. We only just uncomplicated things. I want to stay in this bubble as long as possible.
“Robb’s leaving AP,” I whisper into the crook of his neck, his oni tattoo glaring at me like it knows the other half of that statement and is judging me for omitting it.
Dax’s arms wrap around me, rubbing soothingly up and down my back. “I’m sorry,” he breathes. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I shake my head, rolling off him and sideways onto the couch.
“Can I say one thing?” he hedges.
I gesture for him to go ahead.
“Means you should be getting an offer soon, though,” he says around barely restrained excitement.
I smile weakly. “We’ll see.” I turn my attention to my coffee table, strewn with scraps of paper not unlike the chaotic plotting of my article. Only Dax’s chaos isn’t printed interviews; it’s napkins and receipts and ripped papers, all scrawled with his messy handwriting. “What’re you working on?”
“Final song.” He pinches the bridge of his nose.
Their band name makes for multiple meanings, but I know what he means before he clarifies, “Last song on the album. We still need one, but nothing we’ve tried feels right.
It… We’re a bit too in our heads about it, trying to write something, the last something, that will be satisfying for the fans. ”
I hum in understanding, studying the organized chaos on the table. “Can I say one thing?”
He smirks at my echo, mimicking my gesture from before.
“Since when have you written catering to anyone? Do whatever the fuck you want.”
His dimple winks at me, his attention on the papers before him, like they’re a puzzle he doesn’t know how to begin assembling.
“Yeah,” he says noncommittally. “The problem is I want a lot of things. Half of them don’t even sound like Final, but I keep coming back to them anyway. But they make no sense all together.”
I nod. “Can I say one more thing?”
He huffs, grinning. “Yes.”
“No matter what you do, it’ll sound like Final, because you are Final.
” Leaning forward, I plant a kiss on his shoulder.
Sliding my legs off his lap, I plant them on the ground, padding over to my record player and dropping to the floor.
Rifling through the cabinets, I begin piling CDs and vinyls at my feet.
“What are you doing?” he asks.
I pause to hold up one of the albums. “Studying. Records with killer last songs.”
He grunts thoughtfully before pushing up off the couch and coming to join me on the floor. I ease a CD into my player, skipping to the last song.
We go like that for hours, Dax breaking out his iPod at one point, the two of us lying side by side on the floor as we take turns queueing up songs, talking over others, dissecting what makes them work.
As Dax selects another song, I roll onto my side, curling into his, one of his arms coming around me automatically. I’m not paying attention to the song, my mind on the offer in my bag, how accepting it would mean losing this.
I want to stay in this bubble forever, but as our current research session reminds me, good things end, even when you don’t want them to. But that doesn’t make them any less beautiful or perfect.
If this is our swan song, then perhaps I can make peace with it, because this moment is both beautiful and perfect.