Chapter 11 #3
“My mother,” she finally says. “Sort of. I don’t know. It was there before I talked to her, but … I’m just frustrated today. Sorry.”
Emerson doesn’t laugh, and she doesn’t let Sage deflect. She leans in, incredulity coating her voice as she demands, “Val thinks this is a vacation?”
“She was joking,” Sage says sardonically, a little swoop of guilt following because so was Emerson, and Sage is rubbing it in a bit, and it’s shitty, because Emerson really was joking, and she had no idea the land mine she was about to step on. “Sorry,” Sage mutters again. “It’s a sore spot today.”
“Clearly,” Emerson teases in a way that only she could get away with before shifting back into the type of tone that means business.
“S, you’re not out there frolicking through the fields.
And hell, even if you were … you’re there because a change of scenery helps with blocks like these.
I know, because you and Margot have sent me eight hundred articles about it. ”
Sage’s laugh is weak. “It’s real. Except Margot’s research is decidedly fitness focused.”
“That’s because Margot is part of a pyramid scheme for some secret health empire we don’t know about yet,” Emerson says dismissively.
“The point is, I know it’s real. And you know it’s real.
So whatever stick Val has up her ass, it’s her stick.
Leave her to deal with it. You have enough on your plate.
And before you say it,” Emerson continues, as if she knows Sage is primed to argue, “I’m not even talking about Theo.
I’m talking about work. You’re stuck. You’re doing what you need to do to get out of it.
“You’re not lazy, you’re not broken, you’re not whatever other negative thing your busy, brilliant little brain is trying to sell you on. Okay?”
Sage’s eyes burn. “Okay,” she whispers, even though she doesn’t fully believe it.
She wipes at her nose before she remembers she’s wearing Theo’s sweatshirt.
It’s enough to startle her out of her emotions, enough for her to shake her head and let out a wet laugh. “I just got snot on Theo’s sweatshirt.”
“Kinky.”
“Gross, Emerson.”
“What?” Emerson laughs. “You’re the one wiping bodily fluids on his clothes.”
Sage joins in, and she’s really laughing now, the type that makes her stomach ache in a good way. When it fades, it does so into a long, steady silence that comes with years of knowing someone and being content to simply share their space, even if it’s from thousands of miles away.
“You know what’s wild?” Emerson finally muses.
“Hmm?”
“He chased you out into the rain.”
“He did,” Sage confirms on an exhale. They let that settle, a sort of awe expanding across the five thousand miles between them. “But,” Sage adds, “he was just desperate to get it off his chest.”
“Oh, I think he’s desperate to get off, all right,” Emerson drawls.
Sage snorts as she’s sipping her wine, the liquid burning in her nose as she tries to swallow. “God, don’t you have work to get back to? A pressing case? Emails? Anything?”
“That call-end button works both ways, S.”
“Thanks for the reminder. I’m hanging up now.”
“Wait!” Emerson exclaims. There’s a long, dramatic pause, and then, “He looooves you.”
“Goodbye, Emerson!”
“Fine, fine. I can only milk this salad for so many minutes, anyway. The last thing I need is for Randolph to get on me for not tracking enough billables.”
Sage’s nose scrunches. She’s heard this particular partner’s name a lot in the last two months. “He still has a stick up his ass, huh?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” Emerson sighs.
“Somehow, I’m responsible for the nightmare of a client he brought in.
Never mind the fact that they’re a train wreck in their own right and anyone who has a single brain cell could have seen that.
” Emerson pauses. Huffs. “Whatever. I shouldn’t be talking to you about this.
It makes the firm look bad,” she adds with mock sincerity.
“Friend hat is on,” Sage reminds hers. “I’m only your client in the hours it takes to review a contract. And even that can’t revoke your best friend privileges.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Emerson chides, but Sage can hear the reluctant smile in her voice.
“What’s that? Sorry I can’t hear you over the client always being right, or whatever.”
Emerson giggles. “I really should go.”
“Okay. Tell Randolph I hate him and his porn-star stache.”
“Tell your friend if I were into guys, he’s probably the guy I’d be into.”
Sage’s laugh bursts from her chest, her head tilting back with the force of it. “You’re ridiculous.”
“You love me. Hugs!”
And with that, she hangs up.
If Sage has learned anything about writing professionally, it’s that every word counts, and when you’re this deep in a block, you’ll take whatever you can get. If she has to claw her way to 150,000 words by writing 200,000 horrible ones just to be able to draft something decent, she’ll do it.
She’ll do anything.
Which is perhaps why she finally stops suffocating the panic that’s been simmering beneath the surface.
She can, on occasion, wield urgency like a weapon, using it to slice through her to-do list faster than she ever thought possible.
So she lets the panic rise and mix with the remnants of frustration from her call with her mom, that lifetime need to prove herself spurring her to type away at her keyboard come hell or high water.
She redoes her drafting calculations, gives herself a new daily word-count goal, and spends two days drill-sergeanting herself through writing sprints, only to end up deleting 80 percent of what she gets down.
When she wakes on the third morning post Mom Attack, that panic is no longer a carefully controlled motivator. It’s a thickness in her throat and a fluttering of her pulse and a mind that races in the most unproductive of ways.
Sage forces herself to pack up her things—and brave the snow Greta correctly predicted—to go into town and write somewhere new.
It’s been falling off and on for hours, but instead of coating the hills in beautiful blankets of white, it’s become the type of slushy mix that makes her bones cold.
She waits until the afternoon in the hopes that the sun and rising temperatures will get rid of any ice, then says screw it.
Years of driving through the slick suburbs of Chicago in the winter were not all for naught.
Even still, the drive into Portree takes twice the amount of time because she’s not a maniac and is hell-bent on proving to herself that she still remembers how to drive in such conditions.
On the opposite side of the road.
That only has one lane.
She makes it into town in one piece. It’s fairly empty, the only people out and about those who are hanging the holiday lights and setting up the Christmas tree in the center of the square.
It’s easy to find parking to accommodate Hank, and Sage makes quick work of darting across the street and ducking into the pub where she’d fled at the mere sight of Theo.
They haven’t spoken since the Fairy Glen. It’s fine, she keeps reminding herself. Being friendly doesn’t require constant communication. It doesn’t require communication at all, actually.
The pub is blissfully empty aside from an older gentleman at the far end of the bar with a book.
The only sounds in the space are the clink of glasses as the barkeep puts them away and the low hum of some song Sage doesn’t recognize on the radio.
She slides into a space at the bar and nods a greeting to the keep.
“Okay if I work here for a bit?” she asks the woman as she tugs out her laptop.
“As long as you’re ordering, you can work here all day, lass.”
“In that case, I’ll take a pint of the cider.”
The crisp drink warms her from the inside, and her fingers tingle with nervous anticipation as she looks at her draft.
She refuses to sink into a wordless hole. She refuses.
Sage spends two hours hunched over her laptop, but … the words won’t come. It’s worse than the other days, because this time, instead of typing only to delete her work, she can barely even get a sentence down.
She tries rereading what she has, tries skipping ahead to another scene, tries picking at her outline.
Nothing.
She tangles a hand in her hair, that pressure in her chest spreading to her limbs.
Writing isn’t like any other job Sage has had before. She has always—always—been able to white-knuckle her way through, her whirling mind be damned.
She’s been stuck before, sure, but never like this.
And perhaps it’s worse because before, she’d write. She doesn’t know what to do now that her outlet has become blocked. When that thing that was a hobby before it was a career—that was another form of therapy for her too-fast mind and her too-big emotions—becomes a brick wall.
The panic rises.
And rises.
And rises.
She calls it quits after another half hour, her neck aching as she drags her laptop off the bar and slips it into her bag. She trudges out of the pub, her mind tripping over itself as she tries to figure out where she’s going wrong.
Is it the story itself?
Does she need to start over completely? Does she even have time to do that? God, the words she would need to clock daily to reach her deadline if she did that would be … unattainable.
What if—
For a moment, Sage attributes the lurch in her stomach with the anxiety that’s clawing up her throat.
But then her arms are pinwheeling as her feet try to get their purchase beneath her, and it’s too late, and her brain rapidly registers ice and falling and fuck.
The blue of the sky is the last thing she sees as she lands on her back, her head whacking against the ice-slicked cobblestones and knocking her out.