Losing the Plot

Chapter One

Jess

Jess can’t concentrate this morning. The next-door neighbours have been drilling through the wall again, but if she’s honest, that’s not the real reason she’s distracted.

The real reason is the email on her phone, burning a hole in her pocket.

Well, that and the few affiliate pounds that have just landed in her bank account.

Under these circumstances, there’s no point trying to work.

She might as well do what she always does when she’s feeling flush: head to her favourite bookshop for a browse.

See what’s new (as if she didn’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of that already).

See what’s old, that she might have missed.

Chat to her favourite booksellers. (They’re all her favourite.

How could anybody who has chosen to spend their life around books possibly not be her favourite?) She has to while away the time somehow until the big important meeting that the email in her pocket has summoned her to.

And as big important meetings go, this one is a whopper: she’s been invited into the hallowed offices of one of London’s biggest publishers by a man whose name she recognises from a million acknowledgement sections, because of course she reads those.

You’d be crazy not to: authors thanking their pets, their kids, the random man in the corner shop who always remembers to keep their favourite wine in stock.

You find out who is related and which authors are friends and who is secretly annoyed with whom.

(You have to read between the lines for that one, but that’s the most fun part.)

The man who has invited Jess into his office is none other than Nathan Thomas, Senior Acquiring Editor at a major imprint, aka a man who has the power to make dreams happen.

Jess imagines him in a high-ceilinged room, surrounded by manuscripts, pointing randomly with a sparkly wand and saying, ‘I’ll have this one …

and this one … and that one.’ Obviously, that isn’t how it works, she knows: it’s bound to be all staring at a screen and reading emails, like almost everyone else’s office job, with maybe the occasional glamorous lunch charged to the company credit card.

But Nathan Thomas remains a fairy godmother of sorts, granting wishes at what seems like random, and for as long as Jess remembers, her greatest wish has been to write a book.

Or rather, to actually have the self-discipline to finish one.

At the last count, she had twenty-seven first chapters sitting in her metaphorical bottom drawer – some on her computer, some in her grandparents’ loft, some lost in the depths of the boxes under her bed alongside postcards from her mum and essays from school and cinema tickets from her university days.

Jess is, she admits, a little confused as to why Nathan has summoned her.

She has worked closely with his colleagues in marketing on giveaways and paid collabs for Instagram, and she’s got the collection of tote bags to prove it.

It’s not impossible that she’s mentioned the twenty-seven first chapters she has to the marketing people, in the course of a wine-fuelled brainstorming meeting.

Or, come to that, the fanfic she wrote when she was heavily into her Younger phase, inventing romance plotlines and subtly correcting some of the inaccuracies about the publishing industry that bugged her most about a TV series she otherwise loved.

But Nathan is a Serious Editor of Serious Fiction, and that probably isn’t how people like him choose books to publish.

Oh, you’ve always wanted to write a novel, have you?

Dabbled in fan fiction? Well, here’s a hundred thousand pounds and a contract.

From what she knows of the publishing industry, it can’t possibly be that simple.

A Tube journey and a bit of a walk later, Jess is standing in front of her favourite bookshop. She scrolls through her phone to Nathan’s email, rereading it for clues for what is probably the fifteenth time that morning.

From: Nathan Thomas

To: Jess Martin

Subject: A project

Dear Jess,

My colleagues in Marketing have passed your email address onto me – I hope that’s okay.

I wanted to be in touch directly because I have a project that I’m hoping you’d be interested in.

My team have told me that your emails frequently make them laugh, and your writing style should be bottled.

They’ve also mentioned that you know the book market inside out across an impressive array of genres.

Based on all this, I believe you’d be a great fit for this particular project.

If it suits you, I’d be delighted to meet you – let me know when works for you.

Kind regards,

Nathan

Making people laugh is Jess’s favourite thing. Being praised for her writing style by a man of Nathan’s standing is a very, very close second. Her cheeks have ached from smiling since she first received the email a week ago.

And now she’s smiling all over again, because she’s in one of the places she loves most in the world: a bookshop with bright blue walls and tables stacked with new releases.

The low hum of customers talking to each other while they browse, even on a weekday.

And there, face-out among the fiction shelves, a book she’s just written the most fun kind of review for: the ten-out-of-ten-would-recommend, five-stars-and-then-some kind.

Her favourite romance author has once again knocked it out of the park with her latest, a gender-swapped retelling of Persuasion, and Jess is excited to hit submit on her review and get to tell the world about it.

And of course to humblebrag about having read an early copy – that part of her job never gets old.

The early copies, of course. The free books.

Not the humblebragging and the slight sense of superiority she feels about it. Perish the thought.

Jess runs her index finger across the spines of the books.

She pulls a few off the shelf at random, opens one and inhales.

It’s the best smell in the world; she can’t help spinning with delight.

And as she does so, she catches the amused eye of someone smiling at her from the other side of the bookshop.

Not just someone: a very handsome man. A man, in fact, who seems to have leapt straight off the pages of the books she has just reviewed.

If she was going to cast anyone dreaming of the day his beloved would return from her years of training to sail across the Pacific, then it would be him.

Speaking of clichés, he is one himself: tall, dark, handsome.

His hair is slightly unkempt in the way of hair that started out perfectly combed but has had a hand run through it repeatedly, probably in the throes of creative thought.

He clearly hasn’t had time to iron his shirt, probably because his brilliant mind is occupied with far more important things.

Love, perhaps. His faraway beloved. Or else, not that at all: philosophical questions like how to salvage democracy from its current downward trajectory; how to save the world from itself.

Could she get away with sneaking a picture of him and posting it on her Instagram story, suggesting that if he makes you swoon, then the book she’s reviewed is definitely for you?

Probably not. Cursed be privacy laws. And cursed, she supposes, be basic human decency.

Oh, crap. Now he’s caught her looking. His deep brown eyes on her send a jolt of electricity up her spine.

Jess clears her throat, looks away, thanks the gods of Next and birthday vouchers for sending her the turtleneck she is wearing, which covers up her chest and the blush she can feel creeping up it.

She risks another glance, and he is still looking.

Is it hot in here? It must be hot in here.

It’s easy to overdo the heating in March, when the weather is all over the place.

But taking off the turtleneck is out of the question.

All in a rush, the book still in her hand, she moves towards the till.

Does she actually want to read this? Jess isn’t sure.

But she has to do something with this random burst of energy coursing through her. Moving seems to be that thing.

But Jess hasn’t thought this through. She knows that Amy, the only bookseller on the floor, is currently mid-conversation, recommending what to read after the latest Sally Rooney to an earnest young woman carrying what is already a perilously large stack.

So the till is empty and now, as well as hot and bothered, Jess also feels stupid and redundant, trying to avoid tapping her fingers and instead seem nonchalant and chill for this audience of one – this audience she isn’t sure is even an audience, for surely the tall, dark, handsome man has better things to do than check up on how patiently or impatiently she is waiting for the bookseller.

From behind her honey blonde fringe, she sneaks a glance in his direction – only to find him gone.

Had she imagined him into existence? She wouldn’t put it past herself.

She’s often been accused of spending so long with her nose in a book that she loses touch with reality.

Beside her, someone clears their throat, and she turns her head despite herself.

It’s him.

Patches on his elbows, his coat and laptop bag over his shoulder.

Presumably, coming to buy a book of his own, before he heads out to save the world from itself or deliver a philosophy lecture or whatever.

Not such an unreasonable thing in a bookshop.

And yet, Jess is startled. She suppresses a gasp. Choirs of angels launch into song, or perhaps that is just in her mind. In the film she is mentally casting. Because after all this time of reading about other people’s meet-cutes, is she finally having one of her own?

‘Hi,’ he says, having successfully caught her gaze and held it.

She has nowhere to go. She is stuck. She can barely hear him over the choir of angels, but she knows social conventions. She knows how she is expected to respond.

‘Hello,’ she says back, and then, in a moment of supreme inspiration, ‘I love it here.’

‘So lovely, isn’t it? It’s one of my favourite bookshops.’

‘Oh, really?’ It seems like she would have noticed him if she’d seen him before.

And if he’s here enough for it to be one of his favourites, and she’s here enough for it to be one of her favourites, then it stands to reason that she should have seen him.

As is so often the case, the filter that separates thought from speech in most normal people fails Jess. ‘I haven’t noticed you here before.’

The tall, dark, handsome stranger smiles. Just a twitch of a smile, like he knows she let this slip out by accident.

‘I-I mean …’ she stammers, as she often does in lieu of that filter operating properly. ‘Not that there’s any reason I would have noticed you. Just – you know. If we’re both here a lot.’

‘So you come here often?’

His handsome face contorts into a self-conscious wince at the cheesiness of the line.

Jess bites her lip, suppressing a giggle.

She doesn’t know what to say next. And neither does he, apparently.

The silence between them stretches past uncomfortable and into unbearable.

But then, at last, Amy makes her way back to the till, apologising profusely for the delay.

‘No worries,’ Jess says, handing over the random book she’d picked up in a rush of energy.

Its cover looks promising. This novel will be fine.

It will be good! Maybe she’ll discover a new favourite author.

She reaches down to the counter to pick up a bookmark.

And so, at the same time, does the handsome man.

The choir of angels starts up again as their fingers brush against each other.

‘Ah,’ he says, snatching his own bookmark away.

‘Sorry.’ He drops his hand by his side and flexes his fingers one at a time, as if trying to cool them down from the same heat that is spreading through hers.

‘Alex,’ Amy says. ‘We’ve got the book you ordered.

Let me find it.’ She hands Jess’s book to her and disappears behind the counter.

Alex, Jess thinks, once this has filtered past the choir and she gets to hear it.

That’s a nice name. Not that it matters, since she will be forced to abandon this bookshop forever and never see him again.

He clearly wasn’t lying about being a regular, since they know his name, and she can’t risk another encounter like this one.

It’s all so unbearably awkward. She’d always imagined that when the universe handed her a meet-cute, she would handle it with grace.

In this moment, it seems unclear where she would have got that impression.

‘Thank you,’ Alex says to Amy, once she’s returned with his book. And maybe also to Jess for keeping her company at the till?

‘You’re welcome,’ she says, just in case, and he looks at her oddly, then rearranges his features into a smile.

He nods, in that vague acknowledgement of a goodbye you do when you aren’t sure if there was enough of a meeting to warrant one but you’d feel rude just slipping away.

She nods back. She can’t help turning as he walks towards the door, just to see what the view from the back is like.

It is very pleasing.

Such a shame she will never see him again.