CHAPTER FOURTEEN – HE WROTE ME A BOOK!
KAT
Six months after my interlude in the woods, and I’m technically thriving. At least, that’s how an outside person would see it.
The world is in living color again, full of barista steam and the hiss of espresso machines, full of the shouts of skateboarders bombing down campus walkways, full of the nervous, caffeinated hum of human hope.
Century College is exactly as I left it: pale brick buildings, vintage ivy crawling up the admin facade, kids sprawled on the quad with laptops and weed pens and too-loud music leaking from their headphones.
I am another body among them, faded jeans, cardigan, ponytail, my tote bag slung across my chest as I stroll like any other college co-ed.
My phone is chiming with Simone’s texts: WE STILL ON FOR CROSSWORD NIGHT, GIRLFRIEND?
and the slightly more earnest HEARD FROM HIM?
every couple of weeks. I never reply about Talon.
I deleted his number; I blocked his emails; I burned every photo we ever took together except for one, and that’s buried deep in my hidden folder, next to my tax returns and a single tasteful nude.
I haven’t told Simone a word about the last week in the cabin, or about what happened after, and she’s too good a friend to ask if she knows I won’t talk.
Today is a Tuesday, the best day of the week: no classes until three, just time to drink cold brew and haunt the bookstore before heading to Literary Theory.
The campus has that spring fever buzz—midterms are over, finals weeks away, every puddle glittering with promise and cherry blossoms. I dodge a couple holding hands in the main path, a retriever doing his business on a bike rack, three film students in matching combat boots arguing about Scorsese versus Tarantino.
The bookstore, Century Pages, is an old converted Victorian a block off campus, three stories of creaking floors and staff who all look like they’re prepping for a John Green movie.
I pull open the brass-handled door and instantly inhale the scent of newsprint, ancient wood, and the faintest trace of patchouli.
It’s comfort food for my brain, better than therapy, better than Ativan, almost better than sex.
The new releases table is a battlefield—authors fighting for space, covers screaming for attention in every hue of desperation.
I do a slow lap, fingers trailing the spines, reading back copy like it’s poetry: a dystopia about climate refugees, a memoir by a former Instagram influencer, a middle-grade novel about a kid with a haunted dog.
Nothing moves me. I pause at the edge of the display, ready to head for the poetry shelf, when my brain registers a familiar set of letters, a name that trips every wire in my body at once.
There it is, in embossed gold at the bottom of a thick matte hardcover:
TALON MCKNIGHT
For a second, I think I’m hallucinating.
There’s a rush in my ears like I’ve just stood up too fast. But it’s real: the cover is a watercolor of a cabin, the kind you’d see on the side of a whiskey bottle, all rustic logs and snowy roof and pine trees that look hand-drawn by a skilled artist. Is this a thriller?
It certainly doesn’t look like it. It resembles a romance, with glossy gold lettering as well as a swoop to the font.
The title is captivatingly feminine as well: ANGEL’S SHARE, just above his name.
I am a living cliché, paralyzed in front of the stack like a Victorian heroine who’s seen her dead fiancé’s ghost.
I grab the book, hands shaking. The pages are heavy, silky, and my thumb automatically fans them open to the first line.
“A woman like her didn’t belong in the woods, not unless she wanted to meet a man who elevated all her senses.”
I slam it shut, pulse thundering in my wrists.
It’s definitely him. The author photo is on the inside jacket—Talon, looking even more wolfish than I remember, hair a little longer, face a little leaner, the smile small and private, like he’s laughing at the photographer and at you and at himself, all at once.
I press my thumb into the photo, half-expecting it to bite.
I consider leaving the book on the table and running, but the damage is done.
I clutch the copy to my chest and sidestep toward the window, planting my ass in the battered leather chair that faces the street.
I drop my bag to the floor, turn the book over in my hands like it’s going to explode, and flip to a random chapter.
The page falls open on a scene that is word-for-word my first roleplay at the cabin.
There’s a girl—he calls her Kit, which is so transparent that I gasp aloud—dressed in a plaid skirt, no panties, her blonde hair falling over one eye as she sits across from the “professor.” He describes her in such detail that for a moment I think he’s invented a surveillance camera for my memories: her thighs, the nervous tick in her left cheek, the way she looks everywhere but his face until he tells her to.
I scan down the page, and it’s all there—the dialogue, the way he leans in, the way he lifts her onto his lap, the exact words he whispers just before pushing his hand up her skirt.
It’s not just the specifics. It’s the way Talon gets the feelings right: the shame and the thrill and the sense of being the only two people on earth.
My stomach flips, and I keep reading, even though I want to throw the book across the room.
The scene ends with “Kit” coming—my god, the man even describes it as “a sudden, helpless flood, as if her body were built to overflow at his command”—and then there’s a cut to black, a section break, the next chapter titled “Whiskey and Honey.”
I close my eyes, breathing through my nose until the dizziness fades. Every cell in my body is trying to decide if I’m angry or turned on, or both. I flip to the back, searching for something worse, some proof that I’m not just a character in his not-so-fictional narrative.
In the third act, I find it: a scene where the heroine tries to leave.
She discovers the man’s betrayal—he’s been using her as “research,” he’s paid for her companionship, he never meant to keep her.
But in this version, he chases after her, confesses his love in the rain, offers to burn every manuscript if she’ll stay.
I feel the tears welling in my eyes, stupid and involuntary.
In real life, Talon let me go without a word, his expression cold.
I slap the book shut, feeling my cheeks flare with heat.
“Everything alright, hun?” says the bookstore clerk, a girl with blue hair and cat-eye glasses, who is maybe two years younger than me but already exudes the weary confidence of a middle-aged therapist.
“Fine,” I say, trying to sound normal. I set the book on the checkout counter, my hands leaving sweaty prints on the jacket.
She rings it up without comment. “You want a bag, or are you gonna read on the go?”
“Bag, please.” I keep my eyes down. The card machine beeps. I jab my pin so hard I nearly crack the screen.
“Have a good one,” the girl says, but there’s a glint in her voice. I realize I am still visibly shaking.
I walk out, the book in a brown paper sack under my arm, and duck around the corner of the building before I let myself breathe again. The wind is cool and sweet and full of pollen, and I stand there for a second, letting the noise of traffic and the distant shouts from the quad wash over me.
I think about throwing the book in the nearest trash can. I think about lighting it on fire in said trash can as a performance piece. Instead, I clutch it tight and make my way home, every step an argument between what I want and what I can never have again.
When I get back to my apartment, I lock the door behind me, toss my bag on the futon, and drop the book onto my tiny kitchen table. For a moment I just stare at it, daring it to blink first.
I don’t know what’s worse: that Talon wrote me so perfectly, or that he changed the ending for the requisite romantic happily ever after.
I pour myself a shot of whiskey from the bottle I bought for “special occasions” and set the glass next to the book.
Tomorrow, I will read it cover to cover.
Tonight, I let myself imagine that I am still in the cabin, that the story could still end any way I want.
I devour the book in one sitting.
It starts innocently enough: I curl up on my unmade bed, the brown paper bag discarded on the carpet, my laptop already powered off and face-down on the pillow beside me.
The lamplight is cheap and yellow and bathes everything in a light flicker.
I wear a hoodie and flannel pants, feet digging into the threadbare quilt Simone gifted me when I moved in.
On the nightstand is a mug of cold, bitter coffee, half a bagel with a bite taken out, and a stick of cherry ChapStick, which I use every few chapters as if it’s going to keep my lips from dissolving into nothing.
I tell myself it’s just research, that I’m reading the book as an anthropologist, a scientist, a writer dissecting the enemy’s tactics.
I even grab a highlighter, pink, and a sticky note pad to mark anything particularly galling.
But by page ten my hands are shaking so hard I nearly highlight my own damn thumb.