Chapter 4
Tyler
I called Selma that afternoon, sweat still dripping down my neck, blood still caked onto my cracked-raw, chalk-covered knuckles.
I was home now, but I’d spent the past four hours at my gym across town, pummeling the shit out of a punching bag, trying
to breathe. Trying to turn the past eleven years—the past twenty-four hours—inside out. Trying to pretend I’d never opened
that email, stepped foot in that coffee shop, or seen that look on Katie’s face.
“You’re not quitting,” Selma said.
“What?” I’d been pacing around my shoebox of a bedroom—exactly what you’re picturing: a twin-size mess with a cluttered desk
and paper-thin, probably unpermitted walls—but with that, I came to a halt. A door swung open on her end of the line. A whoosh
of air. Wind chimes. Rustling.
“You’re not quitting,” she said again. Something clucked in the background. A chicken? A rooster? “You signed a contract.
It’s binding. I have a deadline.”
“I understand. But it’s complicated. It’s—”
Selma cursed then. Not at me, not directly, anyway. There was more clucking, more profanity. A moment later, she exhaled.
“Do you know,” she said, “how many copies of a new Meredith Bradford novel sell on publication day?”
“No, I—”
“A million,” she said. “A whole goddamn million.”
I nodded but said nothing. She could not see me, and it did not matter. It was, somehow, an audible nod.
“Do you know how I get paid, Tyler?”
Another nod. Literary agents took a standard 15 percent cut of whatever their clients brought in. In other words, they only
made money when their talent made money.
“I do not,” she said, “have the luxury of finding Katie anyone else. I have a publisher breathing down my neck. I have fourteen
weeks to get them a clean manuscript. I’ve got projects going to auction. I’ve got a partner who bought a hundred-acre working
ranch that’s costing me an arm and a leg. I’ve got three authors in breach of contract and two others whose manuscripts I
promised to have read yesterday. I need you to make my life the slightest bit less impossible. I need you and Katie to write
this book.”
I did not say what I was thinking: that there must have been thousands of more qualified authors who could spin together a
solid romance in a month or two, tops. I did not say anything. I didn’t get a chance to. Because Selma was still talking.
“I thought you wanted this, Tyler. I thought you were serious about your career.”
“I . . . I am.”
“Are you? Because publishing is a small world. And I wouldn’t want your reputation to take another hit. I wouldn’t want—”
“No, no. I’m serious. I’m so serious.” Through the stretch of afternoon light sneaking between the iron bars of my barely
there, garden-level window was today’s freeze-frame: Katie’s puffed-up chest, at war with her fallen face. Her voice, firm
but failing, and so, so clear: Go, quit, leave. If she just would’ve listened. If she just would’ve let me explain. “I can do this. I swear, I can do this.”
Selma sighed. “I’ll tell you what. Write me this book, and I’ll take yours back to market. Just clean it up, all right? It’s
a little too weird. Make it thirty percent less disorienting and fifty pages shorter, and I’ll find a way to sell it.”
“You will? You mean it?”
She was quiet for a moment. Another chicken clucked.
“I mean it,” she said. “Do me this favor, and I’ll sell your book.”
Later that night, I texted Katie very carefully. My new number to her old one.
Selma said no.
She responded at once.
Then don’t show up. Disappear.
I winced, then wrote, Katie, come on. Let’s talk. I can meet you wherever. I can try to explain what happened, okay?
A blink later, this: Tell her you have to go to rehab or something.
I clenched my jaw and typed out, What the fuck is your problem? but did not send it. After all, I knew what her problem was. Me.
Instead, I replied, Please, just meet me somewhere. Hear me out. I never meant to hurt you.
Just as fast, she wrote, Sounds like you’re really torn up about the consequences of your own actions, Tyler. Why don’t you repeat your senior year of high
school, write an essay about your coming-of-age experience, and magically get into Brown?
Suddenly, my fists were hot, my throat was dry, and my pulse was pummeling. My fingers flew across the keys so quickly I did
not know what they’d decided to say until I’d already sent the message.
You know what, Katie? It’s genre fiction, not a mission to Mars.
Selma does not have time to find anyone else.
I’ll write the boy. You write the girl. We’ve practically done this twice already anyway, and I cannot go back to her and have this conversation again.
I’m going to end up blacklisted, and so are you.
So, in the interest of making rent, just deal with it. It’s three months.
For a minute, bubbles. For a minute, dots. And then, she sent this:
Fine.
I stared at it, then closed my eyes. Softness. Quiet. Here it was: a chance, a window. But as soon as my heart rate had begun
to calm, another ding.
I don’t want to see you, though.
I grimaced and then wrote, I realize there’s not much reading between the lines in romance novels, Katie, but rest assured: I know how to interpret subtext.
And then I threw my phone across the room, slammed the door to my apartment, and paced around Central Park until the navy
night turned pink, trying to quiet the noise. Trying to convince myself that I’d changed when, all of a sudden, it was pretty
clear that I had not.