Chapter 20
twenty
. . .
Wednesday, Mid September
“I’ll be direct with you, Dani, you’re talented as hell.
But there are a lot of talented people out there.
” Kimberly—not Kim, not Kimmy—was focused on her other monitor as she spoke to me.
Everything about her was sharp angles and lines, her jawline, her red cat eye glasses, the stiletto manicure she kept tapping on her desk.
“Thank you?” I replied, unsure how I was supposed to react.
Was this a compliment? A thinly veiled insult? Some secret third option? Whatever it was stung me right in the center of my chest. I felt childish. It was my first day as a real adult and somehow everyone could tell.
We’d spent the last half hour talking through this book, she asked a few clarifying questions about plot points or other details.
I surprisingly had answers to them. I told her the shaky synopsis I had practiced in the mirror every morning since the day she sent me the calendar invite for this meeting.
The room kept getting hotter and I could see a flush creeping up my neck under my shirt in the tiny version of me in the corner of my screen.
I was sitting in a spare huddle room in my office, my calendar blocked off and my cortisol spiking the longer this conversation went on.
Despite Andrea’s insistence that her boss was “actually really cool,” I was petrified speaking to the woman on this call.
“So,” she pulled her glasses off and tucked her sleek black bob behind her ear.
“Andrea says you’re big with the Sword of Thorndown crowd?
” That name made my heart drop into my stomach.
There was still a weight attached to it all, it was a steel ball shackled to my ankle, something I dragged three feet behind me.
I must have made some sort of face, Kimberly leaned back in her seat and pursed her lips.
I had limited time to get my shit together and formulate an appropriate response.
A hundred thousand words I had written sat open in another tab on her laptop and somehow I managed to have none come to my brain.
“I was,” I clarified after clearing my throat.
“I stepped back from fanfiction. And from the manuscript you can tell that I’d rather focus on writing my own original work.
I know I could have taken the romantasy route, and maybe that would be an easier sell for you, but I really love this new world I’ve created and how different it is from Thorndown. ”
“I can respect that,” her tone gave away nothing. I was amazed at her ability to not show her cards at all. I’d tell her she’d make a great poker player if I wasn’t so terrified of saying the wrong thing and fucking up this opportunity.
“What are your plans for the future?” she asked.
Such a philosophical question asked in such a clinical manner.
I didn’t know what I was having for dinner tonight, let alone the plots of the books I’d write next.
I had begun outlining a few based on side characters in this first book.
I liked the idea of an interconnected series, webs between people woven together through my stories.
“I’d like to stay in this similar genre-less purgatory,” I nervously laughed.
“I like things that don’t fit neatly into one box, which might not be the most marketable kind of book.
I want to write about love, but also other messy human emotions.
Fear, anger, sadness. I want a happy ending, but I know that happy endings aren’t always easy to get to.
I have other ideas for this universe, other places I’ve been inspired by.
Other ghosts that have haunted me. Does that make sense? ”
Kimberly smiled gently at me, the strongest reaction she’d had during this entire call. “It does, thanks, Dani. Have a good afternoon.”
The call promptly ended and I found myself staring at my reflection on my computer screen.
All the nights I’d spent typing until my fingertips were sore, all the mornings I woke up with dry eyes and a headache from too much time at my laptop and not enough water. It all might have ended here.
Someone knocked on the door of the conference room, my time in here was up. I severed the line between the life I desired and the real life I still had to manage and walked back into the hallway with a stiff smile plastered on my face.
Hours later on the train ride home my gaze darted around to anything but that poster.
I asked myself how much I could bribe some teenagers to deface it with permanent marker.
Somehow Evan and Sir Erwyn remained entangled with any other emotional ailment I had.
Sir Erwyn was the reason I wrote “Ice on the Turret,” Evan was the reason I wrote this book.
His taut abs stared me down from the poster as the Red Line passed over the Charles River. They were airbrushed and edited to pop out of the loose linen shirt he had on, but I remembered the way the ridges felt beneath my palm.
This must have been how Evan felt, each of his waking moments surrounded by the very thing he wished to avoid.
My phone buzzed over and over with texts from Andrea and Caroline asking how the call went.
I don’t know. She’s impossible to read.
Andrea sent another series of texts of empty promises and asking for more details.
I didn’t know what to say. Kimberly asked a question, I answered it—wrong, apparently—and it was all over.
Something about my aura must have been so rancid she could sense it through the screen.
I wondered if there’d be a warning about me sent out to all other agents, “beware,
I swiped out of the group chat and hovered over a different message thread.
I wanted to talk to the one person I wanted to avoid. The brain was a funny thing, indeed. My cursor blinked as I contemplated.
That’s what friends did, right? They asked one another for advice.
How do you handle rejection?
I fired off the text and kept walking. Evan called less than a minute later. I reluctantly answered, ignoring that incessant fluttering in my chest from the sight of “Maybe: Evan” on my screen.
“Are you asking me because of the last time we saw each other?” He didn’t give me a chance to greet him.
His sweet accented voice alone sent a jolt up my spine.
My body had some lingering familiarity that couldn’t be helped.
His tone was easy. Lighthearted. As if that last conversation hadn’t ever happened.
As if things ended between us at camp the way they were supposed to.
I hadn’t put two and two together. Me rejecting him plus the ambiguous pact we made with each other.
The text I sent maybe ninety seconds ago, asking how this whole rejection thing felt. He knew. Of course he knew, he was on the receiving end of it a few weeks ago.
What the fuck was I thinking reaching out to him out of the blue?
He was the one who initiated the feeble friendship blooming between us. Evan sent me a link to a Bigfoot erotica book and asked if it would be my next camp read.
I bought the ebook and read it in a single night, then sent him a few choice highlighted passages. It sparked a long distance game of texting volleyball. Memes. Videos we thought were funny. Dogs we saw on the street.
We didn’t talk about deep real life stuff.
We were casual pen pals at best. Now, I’d sent a verbal scud missile built to blow apart this fragile dance we were doing.
I couldn’t end the conversation now, not when I’d peeled back a layer of my protective armor with him.
What was it about him that made me put my guard down?
“I meant, like, professionally,” I corrected. “You know, failing auditions. Agents not wanting you. Thinking you’re the worst at your craft.”
He laughed. “I didn’t realize you were considering a career change into my industry. I don’t recommend it, if I can sway you.”
“No, no. I…wrote a book. I’m trying to get it published,” I sounded like an imposter saying it. “I wrote a book,” wasn’t something real I had done, it was still a pipedream.
He was quiet. I crossed a line. When he agreed we could be friends he probably meant in the sense that we’d keep things superficial and lighthearted, not consent to random emotional dumping.
I’d kept up my imaginary end of the bargain until now.
Apparently I didn’t know how to maintain normal boundaries with Evan McLeod.
“Is it your tell-all of the week you spent with an extremely clingy actor?” He chuckled. Maybe he made a mental note to make me sign some retroactive NDA.
“No, definitely not.” Because there wasn’t a damn chance I wanted to relive the events of that week over and over again in some version of a literary “Groundhog Day.”
“Is it—”
A frenzied laugh burst out of me. “Fuck, no, it’s not fanfiction.
Or related to fanfiction. It doesn’t even have the word fanfiction in the manuscript.
It’s speculative horror romantic fiction.
A fucking word salad that apparently is unmarketable.
I had a meeting with an agent and it didn’t go according to plan.
I’m bracing for the inevitable ‘thanks but no thanks’ email. ”
“I thought you said you weren’t a writer.” I could hear him smiling through the phone. My brain conjured up the same warm Evan smile that sometimes haunted me late at night. My favorite ghost.
“Still not, just a person who writes sometimes. And who’s trying to convince a literary agent that her writing doesn’t suck.” A far more complicated task than I’d naively anticipated.
“I’m definitely sure it doesn’t,” he replied assuredly.
“Well when this agent officially tells me it sucks I’ll come back and say I told you so.”
He huffed a laugh on the other end. “Then you can join the rejection club. I’ve been rejected. Many times. Not only by you.”