Chapter 16
Senior Year, Second Semester
Amber was relentless, and West was game, so we spent our sophomore and junior years seeing art-house movies at the Loft, getting high and hiking in Sabino Canyon, sneaking into apartment complex swimming pools after dark, and driving all the way to the café at the top of Mount Lemmon for overpriced slices of pie.
I studied just enough to pass my classes, and by the time senior year rolled around, I’d done everything there was to do in Tucson.
You can only get drunk in the desert so many times before the city starts to close in around you.
“There’s nothing to do in this fucking town” was our new motto. In every class, the conversations revolved around making plans to get out. And since I’d only ever had one plan, my nights were once again spent alone, tangled in crumb-filled bedsheets, with an overheated laptop perched on my thighs.
And then, on a random Tuesday afternoon outside Modern Languages, I type the words The End and feel the world shift.
(I later hit backspace seven times; novels don’t announce their conclusion.) This book is different from all the ones I’ve written before—I know it in my bones.
Fox Caldwell and Juniper Devereaux feel more real than my own life.
I give it a title (Torched) and start the email-driven search for a literary agent.
After months of obsessing over this book, my obsession reroutes to my inbox.
Who needs TV—hell, who needs books or a social life or a boyfriend—when you have the thrill of watching the clock and refreshing your inbox each time the second hand hits twelve?
It’s entertainment that doubles as torture, and the fun part is the stakes.
At any time, an agent could email me to say that they want to make all my dreams come true.
Or—and this is where the true mind fuck happens—they could send a rejection detailing all the ways in which my book is unsellable garbage. It’s a toss-up!
I don’t see West as often as I used to. His grandma was diagnosed with dementia in July, and his family needs help with the medical bills, so before the fall semester started, West withdrew from his classes and gave his tuition money to his family.
I panicked when he told me, afraid it meant he was leaving Tucson, a thought that filled me with dread that I didn’t know how to express.
But instead of moving home, he quit his job at the soft-serve counter and took one with a pest control company in Tucson that doubled his pay and gave him triple the hours.
It’s a warm day in February when I refresh my inbox again with a sigh.
Nothing. Typical for a Sunday evening. Typical for most days, but I can’t break the habit, even on weekends and holidays and while I’m asleep.
I once woke up with my phone in my hand and my thumb on the Gmail icon. My sanity is slipping.
I slide off the bed that doubles as my desk and walk to the kitchen, only to stop short when I see Amber and her new boyfriend, Patrick, cooking spaghetti with horny music playing in the background.
She dumped Kyle in a loud blaze of glory one morning in September, throwing him out of the house after she discovered another girl in his DMs. This was followed by a month of crying and long runs, and then one day around Thanksgiving she told me about a cute guy from her nursing program named Patrick. I’ve never seen her happier.
“Don’t worry, I’m leaving.” I skirt around them to the pantry and grab a bag of popcorn.
“We have extra!” Amber says as she prods meatballs with a wooden spoon. Patrick stands behind her with his chin on her shoulder and his arms around her waist. The simple intimacy of it makes me ache for something I’ve never had.
“Thanks, but I’m going to my room. I haven’t tried sweet-talking my inbox yet—maybe if I give it compliments it will repay me with good news.”
“It’ll happen! I haven’t read a book in five years, and I read yours in a day. That should tell you something,” she says.
“That you should read more?” I call over my shoulder as I leave them to their honeymoon-stage date night and crawl back under my covers, knocking three books to the floor in the process.
I don’t know why I bothered; I’m in the reading slump from hell.
I’ve been too anxious to do anything but daydream about seeing Fox and Juniper on the shelves of a Barnes my email has refreshed itself, and there’s an unread message sitting in my inbox.
I love the sample pages…your voice jumps off the page…hooked from the very beginning…already in love with Fox…dying to find out what happens…please send the full manuscript…
My body goes numb with shock.
I reply with my full manuscript attached. The send time between her email and mine? One minute. Hopefully she doesn’t think I’m at home on my bed refreshing my email like the obsessed weirdo that I am. My fingers shake as I slide my feet into sandals and grab my keys. “I’m going out!”
Amber takes one look at my stunned expression and my day-five unwashed hair and frowns. “Everything okay?”
The door shuts behind me before I know what to say. I’m jittery the whole mile and a half to West’s apartment. His roommate answers the door with a hand over his gaming mic.
“Is West here?”
“In his room.” He nods for me to step inside.
My stomach flutters with nerves as I knock quietly on West’s door. When he doesn’t answer, I knock again. Unintelligible mumbling filters through the wood.
“It’s me,” I say.
There’s a pause. “Just a sec.” His voice is sharper now. I hear his feet hit the floor, and when he opens the door, he’s shirtless, basketball shorts slung low on his hips. He squints at me.
“Did I wake you up?”
“It’s fine.” He shakes his hair out of his eyes. “What’s up?”
“An agent wants to read my book.”
His lips part in surprise. “What?”
“An agent requested my full manuscript. She might want to represent me.”
“Mars. Holy shit.” He wraps his arms around me and pulls me in to his bare chest. I stiffen, too surprised to react. He tugs me into his room and shuts the door behind us, letting his arms drop away from me. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were looking for an agent?”
I pick up a Rubik’s Cube off his dresser and mindlessly rotate it to avoid having to make eye contact. “You’ve had a lot going on.” The bigger truth is that I wasn’t sure if he’d care. He hasn’t expressed interest in so long.
I glance at him out of the corner of my eye just in time to see his frustrated expression before he blinks it out of existence.
“Can I read it?” he asks.
“Do you want to?”
He winces before taking a deep breath and looking up at me from under his long, dark lashes. “I want to.”
It feels almost like a dare. I use my phone to forward him the manuscript. “Done.”
“Thanks.” He scratches his nose. “I’m working twelve-hour days this week, so it might take me a while to get through it.”
“No pressure.”
He stares at the floor. I put the Rubik’s Cube back on his dresser. We stand in silence for an excruciating moment. “Have you been working on anything?”
“No time.” He shakes his head.
“Yeah. Of course.” I want him to say something—anything—to make this less awkward, but he leaves it up to me to bail us out. “I should go.”
“Okay.”
“Well, see you around, I guess.”
He nods. “Right.”
“Right.” I place my hand on the doorknob.
“Hey, Mars?”
I turn back hopefully. “Yeah?”
“Congratulations.”
Back at the house, Amber and Patrick are watching a movie on the couch. “I was about to send out a search warrant,” she says.
“Am I not allowed to leave the house?”
“You usually don’t,” she counters. “And you look spooked. What happened?”
I fill them in on the request from the agent—stopping every other sentence to explain to Patrick how publishing works.
Amber shrieks in excitement and declares that we need to celebrate immediately.
But because she’s starting her OB rotation in the morning and can’t stay up late or get drunk, she sends Patrick out to pick up fruit slushies from Eegee’s.
When he leaves, she corners me in the kitchen.
“What are you going to tell West?”
“About what?” I spear a leftover meatball with a fork.
“If the book gets published?”
“That’s years away.”
She looks at me like I’m a very simple idiot. “What if he wants to read it?”
“He does. I sent it to him tonight.”
Her eyes widen. “You’re pulling off the Band-Aid. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
I pause with the meatball halfway to my lips. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Amber blinks at me. “Fox is West.”
“What?”
“Fox Caldwell is West Emerson. They’re the same guy.”
“Amber.” I say her name like she’s the very simple idiot. “Fox is immortal. But most importantly…he’s not real.”
“Black hair. Long eyelashes. Jacked-up nose. Those freaky multicolored eyes. The fidgeting. How he’s tall, tall, tall.
So damn tall, it’s mentioned on every other page.
” She ticks the similarities off on her fingers as icy dread slithers up my spine.
“His obsession with loyalty. His protectiveness over his sister. The way his fingers are smudged with charcoal—”
My fork falls to the floor. Marinara sauce splatters like blood on the tile. “Oh no. No, no, no, no.”
“You really didn’t do it on purpose?”
I grip the edge of the counter as my mind jumps back and forth over things I wrote in the book.
Humiliating things about Fox’s lips and his body and the kissing scenes…
oh my god…the scene with the knife against her neck…
and the one where they have to share a bed.
“Do you think he’ll notice?” I wheeze. I’m having trouble breathing.
I might be dying. I’m looking at Amber through a fish-eye lens.