Last Flame (The Forgotten Ones #1)

1. Elara

Elara

Okay but here’s the thing about Xaviar.

“He didn’t have to catch her,” I tell Gerald.

“She tripped over a tree root. A tree root, Gerald. She’s a grown woman with a sword.

She has killed people. And he just—” I make the motion.

The catch. One arm, no warning, like gravity is something he negotiates with personally.

“He just did it. Didn’t even look up from the map.

Caught her, set her back on her feet, kept looking. ”

Gerald says nothing. Gerald is a pothos. But he’s a good listener, which is more than I can say for most people I’ve dated.

I read that scene four times. Then I read it a fifth time, slower, because the fourth time I was rushing and that’s disrespectful to the craft. The author put a comma in the middle of the catch. A comma. Like even the sentence had to pause and recover.

“And the worst part,” I say, pointing at Gerald with my coffee so he understands this is the important part, “is that he’s not even the love interest. He’s the side one.

The author is just handing these out now.

Just—” I flick my fingers like I’m scattering birdseed.

“Catching women left and right. Off the books. No receipt.”

If Xaviar were real, the whole arrangement would collapse immediately.

That’s what nobody tells you. Real men do not catch you without looking up from the map.

Real men look up from the map, assess the situation, decide whether catching you fits into their morning, and by then you’re already on the floor with a concussion and a story you’ll tell at brunch.

No. The catch only works because he’s made of paper and somebody good wrote him. If he were real I’d find out he chews with his mouth open, or has opinions about cryptocurrency, or texts k. The single letter. The lowercase one. A war crime.

He’s not real, and that’s why it’s perfect. I have the love of a man who will never disappoint me because he does not exist. This is, I’m fairly sure, the healthiest relationship I have ever been in.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell Gerald, who is not looking at me like anything, because he doesn’t have eyes. “It’s fine. I read romance. I don’t do romance. Those are completely different activities and only one of them requires pants.”

I take a sip of coffee. It’s gone cold but I drink it anyway.

The article is due Friday.

I know it’s due Friday because the email said due Friday, and then my editor sent a follow-up that just said Friday :) and the smiley face was a threat.

I know it was a threat because Julie does not use emojis.

Julie uses emojis the way other people use the word frankly.

When the colon-parenthesis comes out, someone is about to lose a kidney.

The piece is called — and I want it on record that I did not name it — “Why Nobody Wants to Meet in Real Life Anymore (And Why That’s Actually Healthy).

” For Dopamine. Where I work. Where my job is to have feelings about cultural trends in a way that makes people forward the link to their group chat with three crying-laughing faces and the word literally.

The problem is that I am the single worst human being alive to write this article.

Not because I disagree. I deeply agree. I am the trend.

I am the reason the trend has a trend. I meet plenty of people.

Online. Where it’s safe and the lighting is good and I can close the tab if it gets weird.

The last time I met someone new in real life on purpose was a wedding, and I spent the reception hiding in a coat closet avoiding everyone, so. The data supports my thesis.

The problem is the cursor.

It’s blinking at me. Top left. In an otherwise white and entirely empty document. Blink. Blink. Blink. Just sitting there. Confident. It has nowhere to be and it knows it.

I type: In an increasingly digital world—

I delete it. We are not opening with in an increasingly digital world. I have standards.

I type: Let’s be honest.

Delete. Let’s not.

I type: Remember when—

I get up to make more coffee.

This is the part where I should explain that I’m being productive even if it doesn’t seem like it. My brain needs to wander. And, let’s be honest, some of history’s greatest thinkers did their best work in the shower or on long walks or while staring at a wall.

I am staring at a wall. So really, I’m in excellent company.

I make the coffee. I drink some of it before it’s done, which scalds my tongue, which is fine, that’s just adrenaline now, that’s free focus.

While it brews I eat one of the breakfast bars from the box on the counter, the ones with the oats and the little chunks of dried fruit, and I tell myself this is breakfast.

“There are at least three raisins in every bar,” I say, around the bar. “That’s basically a salad.”

I have not had a vegetable since Tuesday. The raisins are doing the work of an entire food group and they’re not even being thanked for it.

Back at the desk, the cursor hasn’t moved.

The cursor has been blinking this entire time with a patience I find personally insulting.

I crack my knuckles. I roll my neck. I do the thing where you breathe in for four counts and hold it for four and let it out for four, which I read about in a different article, one I also didn’t write, by someone who presumably met their deadline.

In for four. Hold. Out for—

The breathing is supposed to make my mind go quiet. Instead my mind, given a clean and silent room, immediately puts on a show.

What if you wrote the whole article as a letter to your future self.

What if you’ve been pronouncing the word “epitome” wrong your entire life.

You have, by the way.

Xaviar wouldn’t be intimidated by a cursor, which isn’t even relevant, Xaviar can’t read, Xaviar is fictional and also illiterate, and somehow that’s the thought that gets me to open a new browser tab and look up whether dolphins sleep with both eyes open.

They sleep with one eye open. Half their brain stays awake. I think about that for a while. Honestly, same.

I close the tab. I close the laptop. I open it. I close it again.

Well. That’s not working, clearly.

So I do jumping jacks.

This is a method. I swear.

I’m not just a woman doing jumping jacks in her living room at eleven on a Wednesday in her socks.

I’m unsticking the article. The blood goes to the brain.

The body moves and the words follow. I’ve solved at least four of my best opening paragraphs mid-jumping-jack.

The downstairs neighbor has filed a noise complaint about exactly one of them and it was worth it.

Five. Six. Seven.

“You don’t get it,” I tell Gerald, slightly winded, on the upswing. “Most people would just — write — the article.” Eight. “But most people — don’t have — my process.” Nine. “My process is — superior.” Ten. “My process is also — why I — have to do — this.”

Eleven. Twelve.

I’m starting to actually feel it, the loosening, the thing where a sentence starts to go together in the back of my head — something something we didn’t stop wanting connection, we just rerouted it through a screen because the screen never tripped over a tree root — okay that’s not bad, that’s actually not — keep it, keep it, don’t lose it —

I stop, mid-jack, arms still half up, to grab my phone and type the sentence into my notes before it evaporates.

And while my arms are up and my thumbs are moving and my whole stupid brain is finally, finally aimed in the right direction —

I notice the corner.

The far corner. By the bookshelf, behind the chair I never sit in, under the shelf with the books I keep meaning to read.

There’s nothing there.

That’s not the part. There being nothing there is normal. Corners are where nothing is supposed to be. That’s their whole job.

The part is that the nothing is — wrong. The light from the window is doing its usual eleven-a.m. thing, falling across the room in that flat way, catching the dust, catching the spine of Jennifer L. Armentrout I will die before finishing. It falls across everything.

It doesn’t fall across the corner.

The corner is just a little darker than it has any business being. Not dramatically. Not like a shadow but it’s darker than it should be.

I lower my arms.

My phone is still in my hand. The sentence is still in my head but I don’t type it.

I look at the corner.

I’ve lived here three years. I have vacuumed that corner. I have lost a single sock to that corner that I never found, which at the time I blamed on the void in a joking way, the way you do.

I’m not joking now. I’m not doing anything. I’m standing in the middle of my living room in my socks with my arms down and my heart going a little quicker than the jumping jacks earned, and I’m looking at a corner where nothing is happening.

Nothing happens.

Then nothing keeps happening, which is somehow worse. There’s no shift. No flicker. No moment where the light corrects itself and I laugh and go oh, it was the angle.

It’s a draft. That’s it. That’s a thing old buildings have.

The window seal’s bad on that side, the cold pools, and cold air looks darker, somehow, denser, that’s — I don’t know if that’s true.

That’s the kind of thing that sounds true.

Air doesn’t have a color. But the principle. The vibe of the principle.

Okay.

Okay. Let’s not get weird.

Gerald is on the windowsill where Gerald lives. Gerald is fine. Gerald’s leaves are doing the thing toward the light, the way they always do, reaching for the window, every single leaf turned toward the sun.

Except the ones on the left.

The ones on the left are turned toward the corner.

“That’s just how he grows,” I say, out loud, to the room, and my voice sounds normal, which is good, my voice sounds like a woman who is correct about her plant.

Plants are weird. Plants reach for all kinds of things.

There was probably better light over there last week, and the leaves haven’t gotten the memo.

Why? Because plants are slow. Plants are basically furniture that’s mad about it.

“That’s just how he grows,” I say again, and I don’t know which one of us I’m telling.

I cross the room. Not toward the corner.

To the window. I close the laptop on the way past — habit, protecting nothing — and I straighten the curtain that didn’t need straightening and I check the seal with my fingers and it’s cold, sure, and I do not, while I’m standing right there, four feet away, turn my head to the left.

I notice that I don’t turn my head to the left.

Not thinking about that right now.

The article is still empty.

I sit back down — chair angled, though I don’t remember angling it, angled so the bookshelf is at my back and the window is in front of me and the corner is somewhere off to the side where a person simply wouldn’t be looking.

Because that person would be working, that person has a deadline — and that person is me.

I open the laptop and the cursor is exactly where I left it. Blinking. Patient. Still nowhere to be.

I type the sentence I caught mid-jumping-jack. We didn’t stop wanting connection. We just rerouted it. It’s good. It’s a good first line. I should be thrilled. I built a whole jumping-jack ministry around this exact moment.

I read it back and I can’t feel it. My attention keeps drifting. Like it has somewhere better to be. Like it knows something I don’t.

The deadline is Friday. The smiley face was a threat. Julie does not get one of my kidneys. I’m attached.

Time to get serious.

The corner is fine.

It’s fine.

No one can tell me otherwise.