15. Violet #2
"She's my favorite," Olivia said. "Which sounds so basic, everyone says that.
But she posted this thing once, it wasn't even part of a book, it was just something she wrote one night about losing somebody.
And I swear it was like she'd been inside my actual head.
Like she went into the worst night I ever had and wrote it down so I'd know it wasn't only me in there.
" She tugged the towel up around her neck.
"I read it so many times I knew parts of it by heart. That was right after my mom."
I kept my eyes on the path and kept my breathing even.
I knew the post. I remembered writing it. The green chair, the kettle gone cold at my elbow, the two in the morning when I gave up trying to make it a chapter and just told the truth into the dark and put it up before I could lose my nerve.
There was a view count under it, like under everything I posted. I'd never once turned that figure into faces. Into a fourteen-year-old down the hall from an uncle who loved her and couldn't find the door, holding onto the only person who'd ever said the thing out loud.
I'd been with her on the worst night of her life. She just didn't know it was me.
"The grief one," I said, before I could stop myself.
"She didn't write that to make anyone feel better.
That's why it works. She wrote it like she'd stopped expecting to feel better herself and only wanted some company in it.
You can feel the difference. A writer leaning over to pat your hand reads nothing like one who's just sitting in the dark beside you. "
Olivia turned her head and looked at me.
"You talk about her like you know her," she said.
My pulse tripped, once, hard.
"I've read a lot of her," I said. "And she answers her readers sometimes, so you start to feel like you do." I made myself shrug. "Read enough of anybody and you think you've met them."
She held my eyes a second longer than I was comfortable with, then let it go and moved on, off into a theory that nobody could write a certain character that well without having lived some piece of it themselves. I told her it was a good theory and left it there.
By the time the porch came into view she was still going, bright and shivering and happy, and my hands had gone from cold into something numb and far off. I was grateful for it. It was the only part of me that matched.
I spent the rest of the day hiding in the guest room.
Not because anything was wrong, at least not on the surface. Simon and Olivia were downstairs, the house was warm, and I could hear them moving through it. But Olivia had spent the walk up telling me what those books had done for her, and I'd had to take every word of it like a stranger.
I couldn't be near her or Simon for a while after that without something showing on my face. So I did the only thing I'd ever known to do with a truth I couldn't say out loud: I carried my laptop to the small desk by the window and made myself write.
I wrote the chapter that had been giving me trouble.
The chapter where the assistant finally makes the first move.
The scene I'd been circling for weeks, coming at it from every angle except the true one, because the true one meant admitting something I'd been performing uncertainty about.
She wants him. She has always wanted him.
She is terrified of what that want costs.
I kept stopping and starting. I deleted three versions.
The problem was the same one it had always been: I couldn't write the romance from the outside anymore.
The scene kept pulling me toward the real shape of it, the texture of standing in a dark kitchen, resting your hand on a man's crisp shirt while the rest of the house slept, and every time I got too close to that, my hands froze.
I wanted to write it. I also didn't, because writing it meant admitting that what I felt wasn't research. It was something that had started up in the kitchen and wouldn't quiet down, getting louder every day since.
I finally forced myself to write it all the way through, then sat back, stared at the words on the screen, and understood that I'd stopped writing about Sandra.
The guest room had gone dark around me without my noticing the sunset. I picked up the laptop and moved to the living room, because the bedroom desk was too small, the lamp was wrong, and I couldn't spend the whole evening trapped in four walls without coming out of my own spiraling head.
I sat cross-legged on the plush couch. I opened the laptop back up and started typing.
His heavy footsteps came from the hallway.
I glanced up. Simon stood in the entrance to the living room in his house clothes, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, just looking at me.
"You've been locked in your room all day. Is something wrong?"
I looked back at him. There was an overwhelming amount I couldn't say.
"No," I lied.
He walked over and sat down beside me on the couch, not at the polite far end of it. Right beside me.
"Did you even eat anything?" he asked, concern in his voice.
I stared at the laptop screen. The cursor blinked in the unfinished document.
I thought about what I was writing. The fictional man on the screen looked like him.
The fictional woman was undeniably me. I didn't know how he kissed.
I didn't know how he'd respond with a hand fisted in his dark hair.
Looking at him sitting so close, asking whether I'd eaten dinner, the weight of not knowing pressed against my chest.
I snapped the laptop shut and set it carefully on the cushion beside me.
"Did you miss me?" I asked.
He froze. He stared at me.
"I was worried about you," he deflected, his voice tight. "I wanted you to come down and have dinner, but you looked like you wanted to be left alone."
"Simon." I looked at him steady, refusing to let him hide. "Did you miss me?"
He let out a short, nervous laugh. "I honestly didn't realize you were so bold."
I reached over and took his warm hand. I looked into his eyes.
"Simon," I repeated. "Did you miss me?"
He stared down at our joined hands, then back up at my face. "Why are you asking me that?"
"I'm just curious," I whispered.
"The last time I acted on curiosity," he reminded me, grim, "you avoided me for days, and I had to apologize for it."
"I remember telling you I wasn't unwilling," I countered.
He stared at me, his eyes dark. "What does that mean, Violet?"
I leaned in. "Find out."
For a single suspended second, neither of us moved.
His gaze dropped to my mouth and lifted again.
He was breathing harder than he meant to let me see, and I could feel it where our faces nearly touched, the whole house gone still around the last unclosed inch between us.
I had written this exact moment more times than I could count: the held breath, the brink no one has crossed yet, the almost I'd always sworn to my readers was the best part of any love story.
I'd been wrong. The best part was him closing it.
He wrapped his big hand around the back of my neck and pulled me in hard, and our lips met in a kiss with nothing careful left in it.
I pulled back, gasping for air. "Does that settle your curiosity?"
He stared at me, a slow, devastating smile settling on his face. "Not even close."
He pulled me back in. This second kiss was different, rougher, hungrier, the careful register gone, and I felt the difference in my grasping hands, in my hammering chest, in the weak back of my knees.
He stood up from the couch, his hands finding my waist, and lifted me into the air before my brain had processed what was happening.
I laughed, surprised, my legs finding their way around his waist.
"Your long days at the gym are really paying off," I gasped.
He smirked and carried me up the stairs.
He pushed open a bedroom door with his shoulder. I didn't bother to check which room it was. I was too caught up in his roaming hands, his demanding mouth, the warmth of being held by someone who'd finally stopped being careful about it. He laid me down gently, his weight braced above me.
"I've been wanting this." His voice was hoarse.
My pulse raced. "What do you mean?"
"This." He kissed me again, soft this time, brief but loaded. "I've always wanted to do this."
He kissed me deep before I could answer, and then he started moving lower, his hands finding the hem of my dress, and I stopped thinking about anything else.
He paused.
I looked down at him, confused. "What happened?"
He looked up at me, his eyes dark. Then his gaze dropped back to what he'd just uncovered, and a slow, wicked smile moved across his face.
"I didn't realize," he murmured, his voice thick, "your secret tattoo was right here."
Heat flashed through me from the chest down. The hidden tattoo was inked high on my inner thigh, the placement its own provocative statement. Two simple words in small, elegant script.
Baby girl.
He looked back up at me, his eyes gleaming. "So you're not my girl." His voice dropped lower, darker. "You're my baby girl."
I bit down hard on my lower lip and pulled him back up to me.
The dark room filled with everything that followed. It was unhurried, and it had no professional distance in it at all.
Afterward, when the bedroom had gone quiet around us and the dark was full and warm, I lay with my head on his bare chest, listening to his fast heartbeat slow back to normal.