Chapter Fifteen
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Stab, stab, stab.
Amber
My male lead is behaving poorly. His punishment is a stab wound. Yes, perfect. Love that. He deserves nothing less after the stunt he just pulled, kissing my female lead’s throat .
That kind of thing…it does stuff to people.
Stuff like haunting every waking moment and every nightmare.
My female lead may never recover—not even after nearly an entire business week filled with Valentine activities and innocent cheer.
My throat burns. Liam’s soft lips have imprinted themselves in my skin, stinging like a brand this long after. The brief scratch of his stubble when he pulled away and acted like nothing had happened replays in my dreams. He could not meet my eyes after he did what he did. I watched the redness in his face filter away. I watched the elevator doors open. I watched him stride ahead, toward his office with his love potion full of mother flippin’ lemon LUST . And I heard him say, “Get back to work.”
His office door closed. The elevator doors almost closed on me before I stumbled out, stunned, blazing.
I joked with Ruby that Liam’s actions Friday were hot . And is he attractive? Sure. In the same way that Loki is. Evil has an allure to it. Basic human condition and all that. But, consider, his pajamas lately have been silk, pink, and covered in tiny hearts.
Hot in theory.
Cutie patootie in practice.
Thoroughly evil .
Which is probably why he did what he did. As a joke. To mess with me.
So…
Where was I…?
Right.
Stab, stab, stab.
Ah yes. I love dark romance. Nothing like a genre that says the female lead’s allowed to put cold steel in a man. It fulfills the dream without sacrificing the happily ever after. Can’t have repercussions for your own egregious actions if your guy is about five thousand times worse.
No consequences.
Banter that ends with tears and kisses and hissed, romantically-charged I hate you ’s instead of squabbles that culminate in tense silence, or slammed doors, or children wondering if whoever decided to leave this time was coming back.
I don’t know.
It fixes something in my brain, soothes some neglected piece of me. It’s the caress and stillness of night. The procrastination of a dreaded tomorrow with more battles, more fear, more effort put toward becoming numb to the tension.
I have never before been able to mourn my commitment to losing a piece of myself in the attempt to survive, but here—in these pages—I find the grief, and I set it free.
Aw, and look at my male lead now, bleeding, hoarse, whispering, Twist the knife, love, but please, please…don’t pull away.
Ehehe.
My heart lunges up into my throat when Liam knocks on my door. I swear, swivel in my chair, and stare at him as he enters. Heat explodes in my face; the brand on my neck ignites.
His gaze scans me, scans my computer, narrows. And, bless, the man is in his pink pj’s when he deadpans, “Are you in the middle of an erotic moment?”
“Absolutely not!” I blurt. I strictly sanction those to the ninety percent mark, if not later. Slow burn all the way, baby. I’ve barely reached my thirty percent mark. My characters still hate each other. One is stabbing the other right this second! Do ignore that he’s enjoying it. Please, please ignore his opinion of all things at all times. His brain does not work correctly.
Liam strides into my room, drawing my attention for the first time to the folder in his hands. “I’ve arranged a checklist for you. I wanted to review it, if you have a moment.” His lips—lips that have touched my bare neck and clothed thigh—tip, smug. “It’s color-coded.” He opens the folder, shows me, taps a finger to the corner of an elaborate spreadsheet. “I added a little inky heart right here, for you. In the spirit of Valentine’s.”
That he did.
He also seems to have added about seventy-five tasks.
“I said I was focusing on writing right now.”
He nods, turning the list to himself. “I know. However, it’s never too soon to start marketing, and there are some time-sensitive things involved in starting a new pen name.”
My brows crash low. “Excuse me?”
“BookBub, Goodreads, Author Central on Amazon, Facebook page…the less abrupt you are in establishing your accounts and posting on them, the better. Facebook especially seems known for being tricky about confirming identities. Offloading a ton of content immediately after creation doesn’t look good to the platform. Not having a history of existence looks bad to readers. Steady and consistent is the goal.”
“ Back up, Liam ,” I state.
He pulls his attention up off his list. “Where did I lose you?”
“You didn’t lose me. Why are you talking about a new pen name ? Why would I start a new pen name? My pen name is my name.”
“I know. It is. But you currently have five different books in five different genres uploaded on the same account. Your audience is muddy. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with you. Your covers are decent, but they aren’t branded to you or their genre properly. You need to start fresh if you want to see optimal results.”
My fist clenches, and it’s a great thing I am nowhere near my dagger. “They’re all romance, Liam. That’s one genre.”
He puffs a laugh. “Um. No.” His attention snaps back to this checklist of his. “A lot of these steps are reliant on you telling me more about the book you’re writing. I’ll need to determine your target audience and niche, the tropes, any marketable points, all before I look into brand colors, a logo, banners.” He flips a page. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to identify any of this on your own.” He pulls out a worksheet.
A worksheet .
With blank spaces and questions and Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree scales.
Then, staring right at my forehead, he says, “Fill this out as soon as possible. Ideally, can you also email me a sample of your current work in progress? You might be too close to the product to accurately assess it.”
I might be too close to the dagger in the closet on the other side of the room. “Liam, I am writing right now. I am not starting a new pen name, I am not filling out your worksheet like I’m in middle school, and there is no way in—” I cuss. “—that I’m sending you any part of my rough draft.”
“I need to make sure you’re meeting genre expectations and using the right tropes.”
A laugh bursts from my chest. “Because you know more about my field than I do? After less than a month of, what? Googling ?”
“Amber, I’m not emotionally connected to the work, so that means—”
“That you don’t care about this even a fraction what I do, Liam. This is my baby, not yours. My thing. You don’t get to just barge in on it and tell me what to do with a step-by-step checklist you got offline.”
“Amber, it is not a child.” His nostrils flare. “And I didn’t get the checklist offline; I made it myself. Please calm down.”
“I am calm,” I state, through gritted teeth.
Liam tucks the worksheet back in the folder, closes it, and kneels in front of me. My heart jumps when he places the folder down and settles his hands on my knees. I’m in a soft black nightshirt. It does not cover my knees. Meeting my eyes, Liam draws circles around my kneecaps with his thumbs, and murmurs, “You’re making a product with your heart and soul thread into it, Bambi. It isn’t your baby, because it’s not a baby. Success or failure depends on what I have been researching in every free moment for the past few weeks.”
My lip curls as my nose wrinkles. “ Weeks ,” I hiss. “Weeks, and you know everything? When I’ve been searching and searching for the magic answers for years ?”
“There aren’t magic answers. I’ve read that time and again. There’s persistence and consistency. The only magic is luck, but we can’t rely on that, because we can’t control it.”
“There is no we here, Liam. I appreciate you incorporating time for me to work on writing while I’m helping you out at work, but this is too far. I know my own process.”
“You don’t.”
“I at least know more about this than you.”
“You don’t,” he says again. “It takes you two years to write a book that you have no idea how to market. Your covers scream passion project , including obscure details that do not in any way appeal to the audience they could be intended for. They aren’t mimicking market trends. They’re floating in this…this abyss of hope that readers will find you and fall in love with you and read a sloppy backlist, but they won’t , Amber. They just won’t. They aren’t me. They are not obsessed with underlining the little phrases that have plagued you for over a decade. They do not care. They are lazy and flighty and searching for something specific. You can’t build a relationship without trust, and when your subgenres are all over the place, your readers cannot trust you. They will look elsewhere to find what they want because they are not going to search you for it.”
Hot air seethes through my chest, and my voice wobbles. “I don’t want cheap readers. I want a foundation of loyalty. Real fans will follow me because they like me no matter what I’m doing. I took a five hundred dollar course that taught me that. I’ve worked so hard to build what I have. I’m not throwing it away because you found some secret sauce on Reddit, assuming you didn’t just glean all this from the search summary.”
His tone hardens. “You do not even have a newsletter, Amber. Your blurbs are a mess, following no template. One is a single paragraph, nearing three hundred words. You lose a reader, on average, around one fifty.”
“Blurbs are hard .”
“ All of it is hard .” His eyes close after I flinch, and he settles his volume. “Eventually, Bambi, even what you’re working on right now will get hard . You’re in the honeymoon phase. You’ve fallen in love with a story, and you’re excited to work on it. But when it gets hard? When you don’t feel the passion for it anymore? When you aren’t inspired ? Do you tell yourself it’s a job and you need to meet quota, or do you wait for a day to come where it’s less difficult to force the words out?”
“Forced words don’t read right, Liam,” I say, so slowly, so softly. He’s not yelling. He’s not lost his cool. So I won’t either. Because I am not my parents.
His eyes open—ink dark. “Forced words can be edited, Bambi. Please. Don’t make me fight you. How many times have you read how important it is to have a newsletter? How many times have you convinced yourself you don’t need one?”
My jaw clenches so tight it begins to ache. “My course told me not to put energy into things I’d hate. Newsletters are a lot of work, and I don’t release enough to make one worthwhile. I wouldn’t have anything to talk about most of the time. It wouldn’t work for me.”
“Your course should have taught you how not to hate the fundamentals. It should have taught you how to make them work for you.”
I mutter, “Oh, suddenly he knows the fundamentals , too. Grand.”
“Bambi,” he mutters back, patient, squeezing my knees. “First, at this point in your career, your production times need to be cut down. Second, I have a list of topics you can rotate through for a newsletter with a release every few months. Third, I think you were scammed.”
So. I was scammed. And he’s an expert.
“Get out of my room,” I say, pushing his hands off me.
“Bambi—”
“ Shut up and get out of my room! ” My breaths funnel through my sticky chest as I shove my chair back under my desk. A hot tear streaks down my cheek. “My production times need to be cut down, don’t they? Well, maybe you should let me write and quit knowing everything so—so effortlessly . Go back to focusing on your stupid billion-dollar business in your stupid office building where you host coloring contests like a four-year-old . Some of us are busy working our—” I swear. “—off because some of us don’t get lucky.”
Oh, beautiful. I forgot. I was stabbing my male lead.
Glaring at the screen, I ignore Liam placing the folder on my desk, turning, and closing my bedroom door behind him.
I ignore everything.
For hours.
And it’s nearly three in the morning before I’m just tired enough to collapse into bed.