Chapter 3
Present Day
West Emerson looks at me, and for a long, breathless moment, I feel trapped, held in place by gravity or inertia or premonition. He pushes his curls back from his eyes, and it triggers a flood of relief.
Thank god for the strength I had not to give Fox Caldwell curls.
It helped that back then West straightened his locks within an inch of their life. If his hair looked back then like it does now, twenty-one-year-old me wouldn’t have stood a chance.
West’s eyes are wide with horror, matching my own dismay. “Mars?” He takes half a step toward me.
I take half a step back. “West.”
“Mars. I…” He shakes his head, as lost for words as I am.
Good. This is normal. We’ll just keep saying each other’s names, as if we didn’t use to be…
whatever we were. As if I haven’t seen him standing in this exact same spot hundreds of times.
We stare at each other for a beat, and my obnoxious, hyper-fixated brain can’t help but compare him to the skinny kid I knew more than a decade ago.
The multicolored eyes and the crooked nose are the same, but nearly everything else is different.
West’s wild curls now brush his cheekbones and the collar of his button-up, and his face is covered in a dark scruff he could only dream of at nineteen.
He’s always been tall, but now his height seems impossible, and his shoulders have broadened to a stupid degree.
It’s almost suspicious. Writers don’t look like that; writers have bad posture and eye strain from too many hours at the keyboard.
We have sallow skin and mismatched socks and Cheetos dust on our fingers.
If West were a character, he’d be a gravedigger.
A lumberjack. A professor moonlighting as a hit man.
A five-hundred-year-old fae king.
You know all that cringey, hormones-out-of-whack, so-lovesick-you-can’t-see-straight nonsense you did before your prefrontal cortex was fully developed?
Stuff like posting vague attention-seeking lyrics on social media.
Texting the person you have a crush on and pretending you meant it for someone else.
Getting drunk and sobbing his name in front of all his friends.
The things that are so borderline unbearable, the memory of them makes you want to walk into the sea.
Well, imagine that the most revealing, embarrassing thing you ever did was write a three-hundred-page book (with his unwitting fingerprints all over it) that sat on the New York Times Best Seller list for 142 weeks and got made into a movie (plus two more books and their subsequent films).
My cheeks heat with familiar, ancient humiliation.
“How have you been?” West asks. His eyes roam over my face in a way that makes me want to fidget away my discomfort. That kind of searching look was only okay when we didn’t hate each other.
I open my mouth and let a lie fall out. “Busy.” In truth, I’ve done very little in the last few months except daydream about how happy I’ll be when I’ve redeemed myself and I’m back on top.
His eyes narrow as he tries to interpret my answer.
It thrills me that he can’t. He has no idea what I’ve been up to for the last seven years, and I love that for me.
I might not be able to take back what I’ve done, but I can bask in the luxury of having secrets (even boring ones).
For once, West doesn’t know every-fucking-thing.
Blatant curiosity is printed in his expression. “What are you doing here?” He motions around us, and I don’t know if he means Tucson, the festival, or this exact spot.
“I have every right to be here.”
He makes eye contact. Holds on. A sickening ache settles in my stomach. When he finally tears his gaze away, I don’t know if he found the answer he was searching for. “So, you’re good?”
I lift my chin. “Never better.” Another lie. Every day that gets closer to my book release has me vibrating with stomach-churning anxiety.
“Right,” he says, and I’m delighted to see the color on his cheekbones. I’ve flustered him. He can write a sentence that wrings the tears from my body, but I’ve flustered him. My stomach warms with vindictive pride.
He takes a deep breath. “You might have heard by now that my new book came out a few weeks ago, and—”
“I know.” I cut him off, his reminder killing my buzz. He’s now a headlining presenter. With me. Crashing my first panel in years. I don’t need to hear him say the words.
“You do?” He looks momentarily confused, but when I nod, a familiar smirk plays on the corner of his lips.
I’ve seen that look before, in a classroom not that far from here. A cold shock douses me, draining the fire from my belly, and I’m nineteen and twenty-two and twenty-five all over again. Sideswiped by what I should have seen coming from a mile away.
“Did you hear my phone call?” I ask, my voice a calm contrast to the riot happening in my chest. He’s smiling like he knows he just ruined my weekend. My year. My whole entire life.
He hesitates, his brows dipping. “No,” he says slowly.
I nod, sucking in a deep breath. Good. That’s good.
The last thing I need is for West Emerson to hear me snapping at my editor.
I don’t want him to know how much it bothers me that he’s here, although I wonder if this forced collaboration is as baffling to him as it is to me.
It makes no sense why anyone thinks it’s appropriate to put us on a panel together after what he did, but publishers have been known to make interesting choices in the name of selling books (every time a political figure who is deeply rotten inside lands a seven-figure deal for their memoir, for example).
The open secret in the industry is that commercial success can be something of a mystery, even in the hands of booklovers who have all the passion and experience in the world.
You can throw all the money and marketing and Times Square billboards at a book, but sometimes it doesn’t work.
It’s alchemy, making a bestseller. It requires the right mixture of timing and luck and a bit of magic that’s nearly impossible to capture.
So instead of investing in new voices, fairly paid employees, or innovative marketing strategies, more and more lately, we see publishers crossing their fingers and hoping a book goes viral.
Putting West and me together might be his underpaid and overworked publicist’s way of stirring up controversy to build buzz.
Or maybe this just happened because West is a former student with a book to promote. Maybe it’s because through the amalgam of bad timing and worse luck, West has waltzed back into my life when I least want to see him.
He steps closer and lowers his voice. “Are you okay?” he asks, pity in every syllable.
“I have something to take care of.”
“I’ll walk with you.” His long strides quickly catch up to mine.
“No need!” I want to kick him in the crotch and sprint away, but I force myself to stay calm and even.
When I speed up, he does, too. Any minute now we’ll be competitive racewalkers, vying for a spot in the Olympics’ silliest sport.
His bare forearm brushes against mine, and I swear to Jane Austen, I feel it in the soles of my feet.
I jerk my arm away dramatically, and his eyes slide sideways in a devastating assessment of my sanity.
Fuck. I need to chill out.
“Congratulations on your new book,” West says, as if that’s a thing he’s allowed to say.
I give him a quick look. The book isn’t out for another couple of weeks, and I have no sales numbers or bestseller lists or metrics to measure it with. “For what?”
“For finishing it,” he says, his gaze sharpening on mine. “You should be proud.”
I snort. I can’t remember the last time I felt proud of a personal achievement.
Only relieved. Either way, he’s mocking me.
He must know about all the missed deadlines, the pushed release dates, the years when I couldn’t string together a coherent paragraph.
My expression morphs into an annoyed scowl.
“Save the congratulations for after it comes out. Then we’ll see if there’s anything worth celebrating. ”
He whistles under his breath, and I can’t help but wonder what he’s thinking. I glance up at him and imagine the words head case flashing in a thought bubble.
We both stop short as we reach the white tents on the lawn in the center of the U of A campus.
The tents are filled with stages, signing tables, and books in every category and genre imaginable.
In the grassy space between them, festival attendees weave around performers and food trucks, pausing occasionally to browse handmade merch, including stickers, bookmarks, and tote bags.
(Where there are bookish people, there are tote bags.) I inhale a lungful of orange blossoms. If I concentrate on the festival, I can almost forget the years West and I spent walking across this lawn together.
“Some people would say writing and publishing a book is reason enough to celebrate,” West muses.
“Those people have never received death threats for writing ‘cringey teen romance novels.’ ”
His face pales. “Did you—” He clears his throat. “Did you really?”
“Don’t look so appalled. It’s not like it was your fault.”
I head toward the Old Main building and am aghast when West follows. I glance up in time to see a muscle in his jaw jump. “Did you tell the police?” he asks.
I roll my eyes. “They cared about as much as they care about the dick pics in my inbox.” He looks so disturbed by that, I almost feel bad for him. “My editor doesn’t think there will be backlash this time.”
“I’m sure there won’t be,” he says, and I bristle at his unwarranted confidence. It’s obnoxious the way he thinks he knows my career better than I do.
“You don’t know that.”
“You could write anything, and people would eat it up.”
“You would think that,” I reply, monotone. Leave it to him to say the worst possible thing.
“How are the early reviews?”
I bite my lip, unsure of what to say. I should have invented a million little lies to tell him about all the reading lists I’ve made and awards that I’ve won since we last talked.
One book? Child’s play. I’ll tell him that I’ve written twelve and sold them all at auction. He’ll never bother to double-check.
At the very least, I should have mentally prepared myself to see him again.
The first time after a break is always disorienting.
It makes me feel like I need to book a physical ASAP, because why should a thirty-two-year-old feel like there’s an ice cube in her chest that won’t melt?
If I’d known he’d be here, I’d have looked at his picture every night before bed to desensitize myself.
“The book’s been embargoed. There won’t be any early reviews,” I hear myself admitting out loud.
It was one of the requests (read: demands) I had for my publisher.
They would’ve had to pry that manuscript out of my cold, dead hands if they hadn’t agreed to this stipulation.
My mental health wouldn’t have survived otherwise.
The sun is beating down on my neck as we round Old Main and stop short in front of the large fountain. He exhales a soft huff of air that telegraphs shared memories. His and mine.
“Do you remember—”
“Don’t,” I say before his words unleash a dam of counterfeit nostalgia.
He stuffs his hands in his pockets and rocks on his feet. “There was a time when you would have killed to be in this position: a published author and festival headliner.”
Resentment slices red-hot through my chest. “And there was a time when you weren’t a pretentious asshole, but people change.” I sidestep him with purpose.
My name doesn’t carry the gravitas it once did, but on this campus, I still have some sway, and I’m going to use every ounce of it to get West Emerson kicked off my panel.