Chapter 14
I won’t be in until after four. I texted to Montrose Sunday morning.
I’d received a call from the people at the admin building.
They wanted to do some last minute testing before the new system went live at midnight and asked if I could come in.
I initially said I couldn’t, but they must have been desperate because they offered triple-time pay, which I couldn’t pass up.
No problem. Except, I’ll miss you by an hour.
I need to leave by three. Montrose replied to my text.
I was already at the admin building, in my little cubicle, going through the list of data that needed to be entered.
It was a long list, and I’d be hard-pressed to make it to Snyder Hall by four, but I’d wanted to give Montrose some time to expect me.
My disappointment that I wouldn’t see him at all threatened to pull me under. But then I remembered it was just the beginning of the semester, and we would have a lot of time together.
I knew I needed to be careful with Montrose and not let the intensity of my feelings show through or I was sure he’d be scared off. I also couldn’t let him know that I’d basically been in love with him (at least from afar) for five years.
I definitely needed to follow his lead on this—showing only as much commitment and emotion as he did.
It was kind of like making sure I bought the right kind of boots. I wanted to fit in to Montrose’s life as much as I wanted to look like the Bribury girls.
So of course I didn’t text back asking where he was going this afternoon. That’s too bad. But lots there to keep me busy. I replied. Cool. Casual. All business. I had to physically put the phone down so I wouldn’t keep texting.
I have to meet with the rest of the department to learn the new grading system. Though I suppose you could probably show me that.
I probably could. I was tasked with ways of breaking the system, so probably not the best person to show you how to use it correctly.
Is that what you’re doing today? Breaking the system I’m taking the time to learn?
Kind of. I’ll be careful not to take down anything you might need later.
Big of ya.
All for the greater good of my fellow Bribury students.
There was a pause, and I put my phone down again, thinking that if the conversation was over, I wasn’t going to be the one typing over and over “Are you still there?”
Sorry. He finally typed. You just reminded me you’re a student. As if the faculty event last night wasn’t reminder enough.
I wanted to deflect and distract him from the fact that I was a student, but really, there was no deflecting it. It was a fact. Instead I texted How was the event last night?
Good, actually. Much as I would have liked to stay exactly where I was. Which was on his office couch, kissing the crap out of me. I really enjoyed it. Of course, with that group, the subject of books we’ve read recently came up and so that was a good conversation.
Anybody read the new John Irving and have anything to say? I finished it over break.
You worked two jobs AND had time to read Irving’s latest? He’s not exactly a quick read.
I TOLD you I could handle two jobs and classes.
Yeah, if you can handle Irving, what’s a little Advanced Chem?
Haha.
Actually, yeah, I heard someone talking about the new Irving book. It wasn’t in the group I was sitting with, though, so I didn’t catch what they were saying.
Too bad. I’d like to hear someone in the literary world’s thoughts on it.
What are YOUR thoughts on it?
He’d spent the evening amongst Bribury’s strongest literary minds and wanted my opinion? Umm…no. I wasn’t going to open myself up like that. I wasn’t about to make him question my suitability for this job by trying to sum up a very complex author’s newest masterpiece.
I probably should get back to work here. Systems to break, after all.
Sure. Of course. But one more thing about last night.
Yes?
There were a bunch of times when I thought to myself, “Syd should be here with me, she’d love this.” And then I would remember that you couldn’t be with me. Not as my plus one or anything. But…well…I thought about you.
That’s nice. It was more than “nice” to me, but again, I wasn’t going to show my cards this early into the hand.
Did you think about me?
So much for showing my cards. Before I could stop my fingers, I texted back. I think about you all the time.
A moment of inactivity. I willed the dots showing he was typing to start growing, but nothing.
Then, after what seemed like an eternity, a simple, Me too.
* * *
I foolishly hoped that Montrose had blown off his training session, or that maybe it had been cancelled and he’d still be in his office when I arrived around four-thirty, but no.
It was obvious he’d been there, though, and also obvious—at least to me—that he’d spent a fair amount of time going through the Esme/Rachel pile. The stack was still neat and tidy, but in a different order than I’d originally organized it.
I wondered if there was a reason he’d reordered the pieces of paper, and decided to work on a different stack tonight in case he wanted to clarify something with me first.
I took the pile I’d named One Mile Trot with me to the desk, where I saw a note he’d left for me on top of his laptop.
I won’t need my laptop tonight, so if you’d rather work on it, go ahead. At the very least, transfer over the work that you’ve got transcribed to my machine when you’re done. I might get a chance to go over it tomorrow before my first class.
I liked working on my machine, so I pushed his laptop to the side of the desk, pulled the One Mile Trot pile to just within reach and began typing.
After I finished transcribing the stack of papers, I spent a fair amount of time cutting and pasting and moving passages about to try and create some kind of cohesiveness to his various trains of thought.
When I was pleased with the results, I transferred the files I’d created onto a flash drive that Montrose had left on top of his laptop.
Booting up his laptop, I packed mine away in my backpack. I was a little uncomfortable with poking around on his computer, but I supposed that many literary assistants had this kind of access to the machines of the authors they worked for.
And, he probably wouldn’t have left all his downloaded porn, or sensitive love letters to past girlfriends, out on the desktop and then leave a note for me to use it.
Nope. No porn. On his fairly empty desktop was a folder titled “WIP” which I took for Work In Progress. Opening it, I found five more folders named by the past five years.
His notes had all been dated at the top, but I wasn’t sure if the dates he scribbled the note necessarily coincided with the year from his folders. Probably not, as even with Trot there were notes from several different years.
I opened the most distant year’s folder, from five years ago. In it were at least forty Word docs, all named with what looked to be different book titles. And also a corresponding file with the title and “notes.” None of them were titles of the copious piles of notes I’d unpacked and sorted.
Perhaps the notes for these books were in the boxes still at his apartment?
I opened all the years’ folders to find the same thing, only there were progressively more files in the ensuing years.
I matched up the names with the piles of notes I had created.
They were all accounted for, but there had to be at least an extra two hundred files.
Were there that many boxes at Montrose’s apartment?
Suddenly I was extremely grateful that I’d put so much time in during the holidays and got through all the boxes in his office. I was thinking I was over halfway done with the organizing part of this large project.
Now I realized I probably wasn’t even close.
I opened the files for Trot and its notes, intending to see where it would make the most sense to add on the material from the flash drive.
The notes file was empty, but the book file started with the two words every voracious reader loved to see—Chapter One.
Yes, the character introduced on the first page matched the pile of notes I’d just transcribed, and I scrolled down to continue, resigning myself to a long evening ahead, spending time with my favorite author and his next—or possibly his next—book.
Except, there was nothing to page down to, nothing beyond the opening paragraph or two.
Disappointed, I quickly realized that that’s why I was here.
So I could add notes and he’d be able to continue.
Though, looking at it from solely a reader and transcriber’s point of view, his notes were almost too random, too esoteric, to be called an outline or plot points, or anything close to a story structure.
Undeterred, I plugged in the flash drive and transferred my whole folder onto his desktop. I ejected the drive and put it in my bag to have as backup, then returned to his files.
I opened my Trot file from his desktop, copied all, then pasted it into his “One Mile Trot Notes” document.
That way he’d have all the transcribed and organized notes in one place, my transferred folder, but also in the notes doc for each book title.
I wasn’t sure what I would do with the files I had that didn’t match up with a title for which he’d already created a Word doc.
I grabbed some scratch paper from my bag and jotted down the ones that didn’t match, so I could ask Montrose about them later.
I also wrote a note to him, describing the approach I took and that he could find my transcriptions in two spots on his computer.
Then I set about lots and lots of copy and paste.
It was the same for each document that I pasted my work into. The notes doc would be empty and the main doc would have two or three paragraphs of chapter one. No more. Not on one single document of the over forty I had transferred from the flash drive.
Curious, and basically done for now, I selected all of the main Word docs from every year and opened them all at once. The documents flying open on top of each other seemed to go on and on. My eye was not quite fast enough to see if any went beyond a few paragraphs, but it didn’t look like it.
I started reading each of the docs—it didn’t take long—and closing them when done.
Just doing some quick math in my head, it seemed like he had enough different chapter ones of different stories to have started something new each week for the past five years.
It probably wasn’t exactly how it had happened, but that’s what it would have averaged.
I had no idea how authors work, but I would have imagined that no matter how much tinkering with different ideas, at some point they committed and got to at least page two.
Billy Montrose had been literarily paralyzed for five years. No wonder he’d come to Bribury to shake things up.
I thought of our kisses yesterday. Yes, he was definitely shaking things up.
The key in the door made me look up, and also made heat rush through my body. He had come back after his training session.
“I was hoping you might still be here,” he said with a smile when he entered the office. I watched his quiet, graceful movements as he took off his coat and hung it on the hook behind the door, which he then closed. And locked.
Turning to me, he saw how my gaze went from the locked door up to his face and he grinned. Right then I couldn’t have told you one character name from the multitude I’d just read and typed.
The only name I could think of was Montrose. The only plot point I wanted to document was getting beneath him on the old leather couch in the corner.
The only character arc that seemed relevant was mine…and his.
Looking at me like that, his hair slightly wet from the snow outside, his grin both promising and devilish, I wanted to arc his brains out.
He crossed to me, and like he did yesterday, he penned me in with a hand on his desk and one on the back of my chair, which he turned to face him.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” he said, leaning in for a soft, barely-there kiss. My head followed him as he retreated, then fell back against the chair, as if a string had been cut.
I smiled up at him. “Me too. Do you want to go over what I got done? I left you notes on it, but—”
“Later,” he said. He glanced at the desk, seeing his computer open. “As long as it’s all on my machine I can look—” He did a double take at the screen, registering what files were open. “What…what are you doing?”
I briefly explained the whole process, but he wasn’t listening.
He pushed on the arm of my chair, wheeling me a little beyond the well of the desk, which he stepped into.
His arms no longer penned me in, but instead were placed firmly on either side of his laptop as he began clicking through all the different chapter one documents, though, unlike me, he didn’t take the time to read each one.
By the look of his face clouding over, something told me he didn’t need to reread each one, he probably did so all the time.
And I also realized that maybe I’d screwed up.