Chapter 24
Montrose
When I got back with breakfast, she was still reading, though she’d moved back to the couch from the desk where I’d left her.
I put a coffee on the floor next to her, noticing the pile of pages she’d already read was considerably higher than when I had left a couple of hours before to go back to my apartment and shower, then pick up some food for us.
Syd had been up all night reading Down in Flames.
I’d tried to distract her with kisses and a neck massage, but she wasn’t having it.
She woke me up when I’d dozed off in my office chair, my eyes tired of looking at my laptop screen.
I thought she was ready for a little round of nooky, or to even go home and get some sleep, but she only told me to move to the couch, then she’d taken up my spot at the desk and kept on reading while I slept.
It was Saturday morning, and though there had been a long line at the diner off campus, Snyder Hall was deserted. There might have been some department members in the offices upstairs, but the first floor was quiet. No students. Just Syd and me. And Esel, of course.
“Take a break,” I said, as I unloaded my booty from the bags and spread it out on my desk.
She held up a finger, like she’d be there in a second, but she made no move to wrap up.
She did take a sip of coffee, and I waited for her to look at me, but she kept her eyes on the page the entire time, almost spilling the cup as she set it back on the floor.
It’s what every author wants of course—to have a reader not be able to put the book down, to stay up all night reading. One of the best emails I ever received was from a reader berating me for making them lose sleep and call in sick because they couldn’t stop reading Folly.
I ate my breakfast while it was warm, checked my emails, started reading students’ papers, but stopped, realizing I wasn’t giving them the attention they deserved.
Because all I could think about was what Syd was thinking. What part was she at? What did that clearing of her throat mean? Was it a piece of shit? And would she be able to tell me if it was?
Just when I thought it would be best to leave and come back later, she put down the last page in her hand. I would give her time to collect her thoughts, not pounce on her right away, though I desperately wanted to.
Shit, I always wanted to pounce on Syd, physically and/or literarily. And Literally.
She looked at me, her expression unreadable. Fuck, what did that mean? I could usually read Syd.
Not being able to stand it, I opened my mouth, but she held up a finger.
“Wait. Not yet. I…I want to try something,” she said.
Try something? My throat was clogged with uncertainty and she wanted to “try something?”
“Okay,” I said, keeping my cool, though I did think my voice might have cracked a little.
She got off the couch and walked over to where her backpack sat on the floor by the coatrack. After pulling out her laptop, and sifting through a bunch of flash drives she had in a side pocket of the backpack, she moved back to the couch, snatching a bagel from my desk as she passed.
“Mmm, good, thanks,” she said, taking a bite and then booting up her laptop, and inserting the drive, as she sat on the couch. “This is all I want. You finish the rest.”
I was stuffed from my half of the breakfast, but when I saw her start to work on her laptop, and then heard the printer a minute later, I dug into her breakfast with the zeal of a compulsive eater.
Comfort food for sure. But comfort from the unknown?
About ten minutes later she put her laptop aside, then came over and moved the guest chair in front of my desk over to the corner of the room. I rose to help her, even though I wasn’t sure what she was doing.
“Sit, sit. I’ve got it,” she said. “I just want lots of floor space.”
“What’d you have in mind?” I asked, putting a lecherous tone in my voice.
She laughed (God, I loved that sound) and wagged a finger at me. “Not yet.” Then she turned her back to me to get the papers off the printer. She looked over her shoulder, certain I was looking at her ass—which of course I was—then shot me a slow, sexy smile. “But soon.”
I went hard, and only my writer’s ego kept me from jumping up and telling her that my book could wait, and that we’d make better use of all that space on the floor.
Yeah, I wanted to know what she was going to do. Even more than I wanted to bang her silly.
At least, right now.
She spent the next hour taking pages from my manuscript that she’d dog-eared while reading, and spreading them out on the floor. Then she’d take a page from the ones she’d printed and intersperse them with the others, writing notes all over both sets.
I sat, mesmerized, but not saying a word.
I didn’t even feign doing any of my own work, just sat and watched as Syd worked.
Her hair was loose this morning—she must have pulled her ponytail out at some point while reading—and it swayed against her back as she stretched to put different pages in piles.
She’d created a circle around herself, with the papers on all sides of her, some two or three pieces of paper wide, creating a petal effect, as if Syd was the center of a daisy.
No. With her coloring, it would be more of a black-eyed Susan.
She stood up gracefully, careful not to catch any of the paper. Hands on hips, she surveyed her work, turning slowly in a circle until she faced me.
“Okay,” she said. “First let me say that Down in Flames, as you have it written now, is…” She took a deep breath and let it out. I knew mine was held, but I couldn’t seem to exhale. Not yet. Not until she finished her sentence. “Brilliant.” Exhale. Big exhale. “It’s really…so, so good, Billy.”
Really big exhale.
“I mean, your voice is there, for sure, but this is also new and fresh. It’s not you just trying to recreate the beauty of Folly.”
I put my hands together, lacing my fingers, so they wouldn’t shake in front of Syd.
“You’re being honest, right? I’ve got lots of people who will blow smoke up my ass, Syd, please don’t be one of them.”
She looked semi-offended, and then waved a hand at me, as if dismissing what I’d just said.
“Of course not. I mean, as your…Valentine, I’m gonna gush of course. But as your assistant, it doesn’t help you to not tell you if there are problems.”
I pointedly looked at the paper flower surrounding her. “And are there? Problems?”
She didn’t break her gaze and said—quite professionally for a nineteen-year-old—“Not problems. An opportunity.”
I laughed. “You should go to work for my agent.”
She smiled and beckoned me to her. I rose, somewhat hesitantly, and carefully made my way to the center of the flower. (Was that the pistil? I’d always sucked at natural science.)
She carefully stepped out of it on the couch side, as I entered from the credenza side.
She sat on the couch as I stood at the center. “Okay,” she said, hands up, as if gentling a wild animal. “This is just a thought, an idea. Like I said, I love it already as it is, but something kept striking me as I was reading, and then it clicked for me.”
I looked at the papers, trying to see, trying to guess, what she meant. “What?”
“You’re using the secondary character Brandon as your Greek chorus, right?”
I’d stopped being impressed and surprised by Syd’s knowledge of literary structure and devices.
The way she’d broken down all my notes and cut and pasted them together when she’d put them on the flash drives proved time and time again that she was wise way beyond her years when it came to books and the way that a novel worked.
“Yes,” I said. “Part Greek chorus and part voice of reason,” I added.
She was already nodding. “Right. Exactly. And I kept thinking, ‘this isn’t a Brandon. This isn’t a new character.’”
“It isn’t? He isn’t?”
She took a deep breath as she shook her head. “No. It’s…Aidan Colly.”
I just stared at her, then looked down at the papers again, too far away to read as I stood over them. My head came back up to see her watching me. “It is?”
She nodded. “It is. It’s exactly the Aidan at the end of Folly, where you left him, having sort of figured it all out.”
“Is that bad? I mean, will people just think I recycled one character and threw him in another book with a new name?” I knew I shouldn’t worry about what other people thought about my work, but there would be a lot of scrutiny on this book since it took me so long to write it, and because of how well Folly had done.
“No, it’s not bad. But…here’s a thought.” A huge, bright smile came across her face and I couldn’t help but smile back at her, even though I was scared to death of what she might say next.
“What if it’s not Brandon? What if it is Aidan Colly?”
“Like, find and replace Brandon with Aidan? Bump up his scene count?” It wouldn’t be hard to do, but it felt kind of…false.
“Sort of,” she said, then rose from the couch and walked the outside perimeter of the flower. “I think the thought of Aidan came so easily to me because I’d recently transcribed your notes for Gangster’s Providence.”
“Okay….”
She took another step around the circle. “And then I thought about the notes you’d started for Providence, and things clicked.”
“Clicked?”
“Yep. As I was reading, there was something that was being forced. Like you were trying to fit a green triangle into a red hole.”
“What?”
She waved a hand. “Like that little kids’ game, with the pegs and holes and squares and stuff.” I nodded, and she went on. “I know that feeling. I’m like the green triangle and Bribury is the red hole.”
I wanted to ask her about that, to dig deeper, she so seldom talked about herself, but I only waited. Though I did file the thought away for later.
“Like here,” she said and crouched down in front of one of the petals of paper.
“Brandon is doing this while he’s with Esel—cute placeholder amalgamation, by the way—but at one point for Providence, you thought Aidan would say this.
” She pointed at two of the sheets of paper and I squatted down in front of her, with just a paper petal, four sheets of paper wide, between us.
“He would say this to Esel. My thought is Aidan is your Brandon—your secondary character, your voice of reason and Greek chorus—but you use your notes from Providence to do it. To make him really Aidan, even give him a small character arc that you alluded to in your notes, here.” She pointed to the petal in front of us and I read her printout from the Providence transcribed notes.
“And here,” she said, pointing again to a different petal.
“And also here.” Another point. Another petal.
My mind was spinning. I wanted to both scream with frustration, and plant myself on the floor and start scouring her notes and breakdowns.
I told myself to keep it together. We could not have another scene like the time I’d pitched a fit when I saw her reading all my chapter ones. We had come a long way since then. And I hoped that I’d come a long way in the arrogant asshole department.
“Listen,” she said, rising and taking a small step back, and then another, leaving the flower altogether. “In case you want to freak out and don’t want to do it in front of me, I’m going to go to the bathroom, and take a long walk around the building to stretch my legs.”
I wanted to stop her, tell her to stay, but I just nodded. She was so much smarter than I was.
“When I get back, all you have to say is, ‘thanks for the feedback, I’ll think about it,’ and I’ll never bring it up again. We’ll forget I even said anything about Aidan.”
I wanted to tell her how great I thought she was in that moment, to give me a graceful out, but I found my throat wouldn’t work.
She was at the door, opened it and turned her head to say, “The book is really good on its own, Billy. No one will be disappointed in it.”
She left, shutting the door behind her, and I spent what turned out to be the next hour going through her notes.
When she stepped back into the room, my arrogant asshole was nowhere to be seen, and instead I didn’t know what to tell Syd first: that I loved her, or that I thought she should seriously consider becoming an editor, her notes being that good.
But instead of either of those things, I just led her to the couch, sitting first, then pulling her onto my lap so that she straddled my hips and I could look into those gorgeous brown eyes and say, “Thank you,” in a soft whisper.
When I felt her body relax, when she was certain I wasn’t going to throw a hissy fit, I then added, “Now. Let’s see about those pegs and holes, shall we?”
I flipped her down on the couch and all thoughts of Aidan Colly left me as I slid my body over hers.