Chapter 44
NOVA
It had been three weeks since the hunt, and I had spent all my waking hours either writing, editing, walking around the city, or cramming as many comedy podcasts and live shows into my veins as possible, like laughter was the only thing that could keep me alive.
I sat at my desk, two chapters away from finishing my first draft. I pulled out my phone to take a break.
The Circle had infected and ruined my social media feeds like a cancer, the effects remaining even after I’d blocked them.
No matter how many times I scrolled past, I received videos and posts from pseudo-spiritual trad wives about embracing feminine energy, letting men be providers and leaders, and all manner of content about sexuality and mysticism.
Exhausted? Burnt out? Lonely? Depressed? the women asked. We weren’t meant to live this way…
I closed the apps, and I got back to writing. These psyops campaigns would never convince me that a man was the solution to my problems.
Men had directly caused all my current problems, in fact.
After Wes shattered my heart, my first thought was that I would never be able to look at the book I was writing ever again.
I could admit it now. This novel was about a woman falling in love for the first time. Though the details were different, the spirit was the same. I was writing a love story; I was writing our love story.
That was why I couldn’t let him read it. I knew it would reveal something I couldn’t even admit to myself.
Instead, what happened in the wreckage of my real first love surprised me.
I didn’t abandon the novel. I lost myself in it.
Every tear, every scream into my pillow, every nightmare in which I confronted Wes and all he did was stare at me coldly as I fell apart—I used it all as fuel.
I still could barely taste food. I ghosted the agent and the publisher, knowing that because of Roman Graves, I lost the biggest dream I’d chased since I was a child.
I’d lost almost everything that had mattered to me for the past two and a half decades in the blink of an eye. Lorelei. My author aspirations. My deepest, best hidden fantasy of being saved by a white knight, loved for all parts of myself, even the darkness.
It was all gone, and only my words remained.
Perhaps it was a twisted form of masochism, but in this one-hundred-and-forty-thousand-word document, I’d written myself falling in love.
I’d written myself getting my heart broken.
Every drop of my pain, I bled onto the pages.
When I wrote my characters reconciling, I cried myself to sleep that night.
I was glad they could have a happy ending, even if I couldn’t.
By the time I finished the last page, I was wrecked and broken all over again. I imagined Wes’s smile, his soft lips on my temple, his infectious laugh. Every time my phone buzzed, I wondered if it was him. I hadn’t found the strength to block him.
But it never was. He didn’t fight for me. He let me go. That was all the closure I needed.
The next week and a half, I self-edited.
I’d found an alpha reader among my current cozy romance readers who also read darker, smuttier novels.
I decided to send the draft to her before it went to an editor or an agent.
If it sucked, I needed to know now so I could look for another job.
Because if this book wasn’t the one to change my career, I didn’t have it in me to keep going.
I’d still write, but it would become more of a hobby. I would need to just let it go.
My heart clenched, imagining the final nail in the coffin, my last shred of hope taking its final breath. This book was the only thing keeping me sane. I couldn’t fathom the grief of falling out of love with my characters too.
I wouldn’t know who I was if I could no longer dream at all.
I hit send. A breath left my lungs. My phone buzzed.
Hudson
Get your ass out here. It’s trick or treat time, bitch!
After I read the text, I closed out of my phone and turned the ringer off so I could try to enjoy the first holiday of the season without Wes haunting me like a ghost.
The alpha reader’s first email two weeks later was an apology. She’d had a death in the family, so she couldn’t get to my book yet. She promised to dig in over Thanksgiving, and I’d of course told her there was no rush and to take care of herself.
I started babysitting again over the weekends, something I hadn’t done since college. But I needed to save enough for professional editing and a book cover.
Unless, of course, I queried this book to agents instead of indie publishing.
But every time I sat down to write a synopsis, I thought of Roman and Jayne.
Were they connected enough to sabotage my efforts of ever working with a traditional publisher?
And was this book even good enough to make it without Roman’s help?
I needed feedback before I made a move in either direction. All I could do was wait.
“I hate that you’re not coming with me,” Hudson said as I lay on the couch, in and out of a restless nap. “I’m worried about you.”
He rolled his suitcase across the living room before stopping to face me.
“I’ll be okay. We have a pet cam pointed at the front door. And so far, no one has even attempted to get in touch with me. I think they all lost interest, honestly.”
“The thirty-dollar pet cam is not going to call the police if assassins break into our apartment.” Hudson sighed. “But I didn’t even mean it like that. I’m worried about your mental health, Noves. I’ve never seen you like this before.”
“Well, I’m not sure the police would even be helpful in an assassin situation. I think the Graves family owns them too.”
Hudson looked at me pointedly.
“I promise, I’ll be fine. I have Inara,” I gestured to the sleeping calico in her cat tree by the window.
“And I’m going to rake in money cat sitting for all you transplants flying home.
And I’m going to a comedy show with Ella on Saturday.
She’s Canadian, so no Thanksgiving celebrations for her either—we’ve agreed to send brain rot VidWaves back and forth all day long. ”
Hudson parsed through my plan of action, as if assessing my current state of emotional wellness. The conclusion he came to made him frown. “Can you call me Thursday, at least? And tell me how grateful you are to have me in your life?”
I nodded. “Yes, grateful for you and all your gay labor on my behalf.”
Hudson smiled. “I’m glad that’s going recognized this year.”
Delilah had already taken a train back home to Boston. When Hudson left, I’d have the entire apartment to myself for the first time in… forever, maybe, at least for this stretch of time.
“I can’t wait to walk around naked and free.”
Hudson rolled his eyes. “Please reach out if you need anything.” He studied me again, his concern failing to drain from his features no matter how many jokes I cracked.
“I will. I am fiiine. Now, go.” The words seemed to echo through the space after Hudson left to get in his car.
I was not fine.
As I drifted in and out of much-needed sleep, Wes continued to haunt me. He promised me the holidays would be better this year, but I knew this was about to be my worst season yet.
Balls deep in Chinese takeout and four hours of VidWave brain rot content, I’d finally reached a flow state of comfortable numbness.
It was Thanksgiving. The apartment was dark and eerily quiet, not even a creak from upstairs neighbors. I might’ve been the only person in our building tonight.
Our crooked lamp and the blue light of my phone were the only sources of light illuminating the buffet of food littering the coffee table.
It was eerily quiet, of course, when the radiator wasn’t spitting and hissing like a demon rising from the pits of hell. But I couldn’t complain, because at least our negligent slumlord had finally turned on the heat.
Inara had grown bored of laying on my chest, as she was now perched on a couch cushion, slowly blinking at me with extreme and undue judgment.
I thought that after almost two months, the heartbreak would’ve felt lighter. I’d never experienced a breakup like this before. Maybe the recovery time was different when you’d been in love with someone.
When I was still in love, no matter how much I prayed to be cured of the affliction.
Yes, I was praying again. I wasn’t sure to what or to whom. But like I used to beg to be made normal, I now begged for my higher power to take away my love for Wes, to make me hate him instead.
I so badly wanted to hate him.
He’d told me he worried he’d become addicted to me, but I thought I was the one who’d ended up hopelessly addicted instead.
I replayed us over and over, imagining how things could have gone differently. Every time I wondered if I should’ve stayed and heard him out, I remembered he still wasn’t blocked. He had my number.
And he’d never once reached out.
I closed my eyes as the current VidWave video played in a loop. I hadn’t been listening, but a single word snagged in my mind.
Nihilistic.
I frowned.
You’re a nihilistic black hole, just like the rest of our hopeless, useless generation.
That was what Lorelei had said the day she packed up her things. But that wasn’t the last time I’d heard that strange, specific phrase.
Roman’s voice floated up from the caverns of my hazy memories from the day of the hunt.
You’re a nihilistic black hole, Wesley.
I jolted upright. “Oh my God.”
I’d deleted my burner account off PicWave so I couldn’t see it, but I hadn’t deleted the account permanently.
When I logged back in, for the first time since I’d created the account, I had notifications.
@O followed you.
@Siren_Baby followed you.
I cursed and rubbed my chest. Oh, no. Oh, no.
Both had sent me messages in the past forty-eight hours.
@Siren_Baby
Hi, Nova. You left before we had a chance to talk. Can you please meet me at the Winter Wonderland party? I need to see you.
@O
8pm. December 2nd. At the house of the divine, where it all began. Theme: Winter Wonderland. Password: Eyes Wide Open. See you soon, Nova. We miss you. xx
I read and reread both messages until I was dizzy and the letters started to tremble slightly on my screen. Then, I toggled back to Lorelei’s page, staring at each image featuring a man’s hands or a man’s hazy outline.
I was so hyped up on adrenaline, I almost called Wes. I called Hudson instead.
“Nova babyyy,” he chirped. “How are we doing?”
“Hudson. Lorelei messaged me. Roman is Lorelei’s mystery man. And the cult wants me to come to their holiday party at the church.”
“So we are not doing well…” Hudson said slowly. “And this is different than Lorelei crying wolf at the last party how? Are you sure about Roman? Jesus.”
“I don’t know that it’s different. I don’t trust her at all. I don’t trust any of them. And while I don’t know with one-hundred-percent certainty yet, some coincidences are a little too specific to be coincidences.”
I explained everything to him, my fingers nervously tapping on my knee and back hunched over my phone as I did.
“Take a few deep breaths. I’ll be home Tuesday, well before the party. Please keep yourself from any spirals and away from all Joe-from-You situations until you have backup. Promise?”
I rattled and buzzed with energy I hadn’t felt in weeks. “Okay. Promise.”
“And?” Hudson asked.
“I’m grateful for you and your gay labor.”
“Thank you,” Hudson said in a dramatic lilt. “Read a book, please. I haven’t seen you read in months.”
I nodded. He was right. Enough brain rot. Enough rotting in general.
“I’m grateful for you too, Nova. And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I have something I need to confess.”
“Is Thanksgiving recognized as a day of confession?”
“I believe I’m the expert on the matter of Thanksgiving customs, given I’m the only one who has really celebrated the holiday in the past seven years.”
I made an aggrieved scoffing noise before bursting into laughter. Only Hudson and I could joke so darkly about our deepest wounds. I would’ve flown home with him like he’d begged me to in a heartbeat if I hadn’t been so strapped for cash.
“Go on…” I said.
“You of all people know what it’s like to hate where you come from,” he said.
“Believe me when I say it pains me to stick up for a straight man, but it sounds like Wes kept his family from you because he’s estranged from them, and for good reason.
Just like you. And I can’t blame him for not wanting you to associate him with his dickhead family who is accelerating the destruction of our society’s entire sociocultural, economic, and environmental fabric. ”
All the humor drained from my face.
“Maybe I’m off base. Maybe I was right about him from the start, and he has me fooled too.
But if there’s even a small part of you open to hearing what he has to say, I think you should.
I don’t know, Nova. I hate seeing you suffer like this, and something about it all just hasn’t sat right with me.
I don’t want you going back to the cult, or to Lorelei after how she treated you—though I know you still care about her deep down too.
But people can’t help who their parents are, and Wes seems to have done a lot of work building himself into something completely different. Just like you.”
I shook my head. “It’s not the same. We aren’t the same,” I said. “He hasn’t even tried to reach out to me.”
“Didn’t you tell him to never contact you again?”
“Well, yeah, but what man ever listens to an angry woman when she says shit like that!”
“Wes,” Hudson said softly. “Wes does.”