Romantic Friction

A Crime of Passion

“Yes, I would.”

I tug the brim of my floppy hat farther down my forehead and slink into my first-class seat. My voice floats down the aisle,

exiting the speaker of at least a couple of phones as boarding passengers in puffy coats jostle my elbow with their carry-ons.

I’m a meme. I’m not even sure what a meme is, but I am one. And not a good one, according to Lacey.

Team Torrence posted the video. My rant is all over the internet. My social media is locked down. I can’t post (well, Lacey

can’t post for me). No one can comment or message me. A day before my book drops—a series conclusion a decade in the making—I

have no online presence. But Lacey assures me that’s better than the alternative.

The announcement comes that this Boston-to-Chicago flight is pushing back. We’re asked to place our phones in airplane mode.

I dash off a quick: Taking off to Lacey and On my way to Blaire, who assures me that this will all blow over in a couple of days. I’m not the first public figure to have stepped into this particular storm of shit, and I won’t be the last.

But it is my first time, one I regret in myriad ways. I regret trying to heal my wounded ego with bourbon. I regret my hypocritical

tossing of the work of other hardworking (and not-so-hardworking) authors on the floor. I regret not recognizing the ringing

between my ears was actually the ding of the opening door.

And yet, this business isn’t a meritocracy. The blatant manipulation is what people should be in an uproar over. Some are,

or so Lacey patronizes me by saying. But what they’re truly in an uproar over is what I said about Hartley West. It was the

brainless coward bit that did it.

After Hartley saying I saved her.

Admittedly, when taken in concert, it’s not a good look, as they say. (As Lacey tells me they’re actively saying, quite loudly.)

I also called readers stupid and basically accused them of murder. My biggest regret of all. And not because of a fear of what that will do to my sales

numbers (well, not only because of that fear). Because readers aren’t stupid. They’ve simply been lied to.

I shut my phone off entirely, slip from the aisle seat to the empty one beside me. I angle my body toward the window and let

my mind wander, to a new world with new problems and new characters whom I will torture for thousands of pages. I am at peace.

Three hours and one time change later, I’ve abandoned Pick Me —my animal shelter meet-cute where a fun-loving man-boy stand-up comedian and a disciplined Boston ballet dancer clash over the Labrador/poodle/German shepherd mutt they both want to adopt—and returned to my safe space. I’m deep in the underground world of Palladium, the last habitable zone for the human race. Brianna/Sylvia/Laurel (names are so important) is either a spy or pawn and is in love with either the head of a criminal gang or the leader of a coterie determined to replenish the climate change–ravaged Earth. In turn, she’s, naturally, the opposite of whomever she’s in love with.

My mind asks what-if questions, spins from idea to idea, gnaws on twists, visualizes the color and fabric of Brianna/Sylvia/Laurel’s

surroundings. I am a plantser—a cross between a plotter, a writer who painstakingly plans the details of their story in advance,

and a pantser, an anarchist who fires their brain and their fingers at the same time, creating story on the fly or “by the

seat of their pants.” Plotting takes too much time up front and can feel like writing in a straitjacket. Pantsing mires one

in revision for what feels like decades and too often results in a scrapped manuscript with no way to knit together a hundred

thousand words of loosely related tangents. The mix gives me a solid map: a starting place and a destination. But the roads are fuzzy, some only dotted lines, some nonexistent. I pave them into existence as I go. The

more my brain lives in a fictional world, the more that fictional world is revealed. Cows spend nearly eight hours a day chewing,

and when I’m working out a story, my mind does the same, both consciously and subconsciously. The constant rumination leads

to what could be construed as epiphanies—disparate story ideas suddenly fitting together. But it’s actually the result of

my mind tirelessly working, of a full immersion in the story world.

It is maddening.

It is glorious.

It is easier with Palladium than with Pick Me .

But that doesn’t mean that Pick Me is wrong. Palladium benefits from mental muscle memory. Pick Me is new. Different. That means it might be a heavier lift at the start. I must remind myself that this is the process; this

is how it always begins.

I love and hate this part in equal measure. The freedom to create something new is as thrilling as it is daunting. I try not to imagine the comparisons to Jocelyn that will come. Those blurred-vision, heart-thumping panic attacks are future Sofie’s problem. As is the fallout from my viral rant. And so as we land, I relish the quiet, keeping my phone turned off. For just a little while longer, I will allow myself to remain oblivious.

I let myself explore this story world I’m building out of nothing as I deplane, as I find the driver holding a sign reading

“Wilde,” as I check into the hotel, wash my face, apply a heavier layer of makeup than I normally wear, and gather myself

in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of this suite that overlooks the Chicago Bean and the waters of Lake Michigan beyond.

I could live here. I have the same thought every time. A city whose architecture is actually art, built around a wide snaking

river they will dye green for St. Patrick’s Day. The world’s fair was here in 1893, and it’s easy to imagine it. Chicago feels

both set in the future and the past at the same time.

I slip on three thin gold bangles and loop a purple scarf around my neck, echoing the coloring of the first book in my series—the

one I tossed at the woman in the Team Torrence tee. My phone is still off; I need just a bit more respite from reality, especially

since no events are scheduled for today, only the evening VIP meet and greet for attendees who paid extra to have dinner with

the authors. “With” meaning sitting at separate tables, eating different food, and taking photos from afar. Though we do “mingle”

post-dinner. The authors behind a velvet rope strung across the stage in the largest ballroom of the convention center, the

one where I will join the ranks of the romance literati who have come before me and give my keynote speech that will bring

this three-day event to a close and launch my expansion of the Sofie Wilde brand. By then, Hartley West will surely be on

her way to becoming nothing more than an obscure answer on Jeopardy .

My mind is sharp, my body light as I stride through the lobby to the attached convention center. Only then, in full event mode, do I finally turn my phone back on, confident that Lacey and Blaire will confirm the strong winds have whipped through and this has all blown over.

I face the entrance to the grand ballroom. I would be lying, and not convincingly, if I said my throat didn’t swell at the

sight before me. My name in swirly letters three feet high—aquamarine, a nice touch—the cover of my final book on one side,

my author photo (with my face five years younger and Photoshopped) on the other. I’ve been here six times, half of those as

a VIP author, but I’ve never been the headliner. (WTF is right.)

Tall ladders flank both sides of the entrance. At the top of the one on the right, a man in a yellow safety vest tugs on the

cord holding up the banner. They must have just finished putting it up. Impeccable timing.

I lift my phone to take a photo, and it buzzes as if set to Taser mode.

The man on the left, also in a yellow safety vest, shouts something I can’t make out. I lower my phone. Flip it around. And

the banner with my name snaps like thunder and plummets to the ground.

Lacey: There have been developments.

Lacey: You need to call me.

Lacey: It’s not blowing over.

Lacey: Call.

Lacey: Me.

Blaire: Good flight? Get in a catnap?

Blaire: Just a heads-up. Things are percolating.

Blaire: But I’m on it! Don’t panic. We’ll fix it.

I message Blaire back first: Fix what?

Blaire: The keynote is being... reimagined.

My chest tightens as I lift my phone and take a photo of the banner strewn across the floor. I send it to Lacey and Blaire

on the same text chain.

Lacey: Such disrespect. To not even tell me!

Blaire: This is a misunderstanding, I’m positive. We have a contract. They can’t... Oh, my word.

Lacey: Just seeing it too. Oh, no, oh, oh, oh. Oh.

Lacey is the person you want taking the controls when the pilot has a heart attack. Lacey is not an “oh, no” person. Certainly

not an “oh, oh, oh” person.

Me: Whatever it is, you can make this right, can’t you, B?

Blaire gives a thumbs-up. Nothing else.

Lacey: Get yourself a drink. On second thought, no. No drinking for you.

Me: It’s that bad. Spill.

Blaire: She’s going to find out anyway. So...

Lacey: She’s getting a review.

A vice grips my heart, and small little dots float in front of my eyes.

Blaire: We haven’t heard about yours yet, but it’s coming. I just know it.

Hartley West is getting a New York Times book review. The thing that will surely lead to her hitting the list.

“Spectacular work, Sofie.” I look up from my phone and straight into the judging dark eyes of Grace Chang. “Just spectacular.”

“Grace,” I say curtly. “I’m in the middle of something.”

“I’ll say,” she says. “A steaming pile of shit. And I woke up this morning smelling it because you’re dragging us all in behind

you.”

I glue my lips together. Lacey would scold me if I said what I actually want to say, which is that Grace and every other author

younger than me is only at this convention, in this world, because my books created a readership for them.

“Funny,” I say, watching as a group of early attendees or maybe volunteers try to sidestep the banner. “It’s only my name

currently being used as a doormat.”

What turns out to be a volunteer in a red Romance US shirt bends his dark curly-haired head to free his foot from the heavy

plastic.

“For now,” Grace says. She’s in the middle of her five-book Sapphic paranormal romance series about shipwrecked ghosts. Her writing is compelling and vibrant and she really brings the characters to life. (Oh, come on, how could I not go there? In truth, she’s quite talented, and hello, have you met me? Those are not words I dispense lightly.)

Grace exaggerates the arch in her back. “But when Hartley West takes the stage, what then? She appears beside us as an author

without ever having written a word. She becomes more and we become less. Like that.” She snaps her fingers and her neon rubber

bracelets slide down her arm. She modeled in the late eighties, the last time she updated her wardrobe. Her hair helmet is

news-anchor lacquered and she has a slight British affect despite her Nashville roots.

Grace crosses her arms in front of her chest. “She can’t do the keynote.”

My pulse thrashes. “She’s not. The keynote is mine.”

“Is it?” Grace raises an eyebrow at my banner, being stuffed into a gigantic orange crate. “That’s not what my agent says.”

“And mine.” Fiona Finley strides toward us, nodding to Grace as if this were planned. Her red curls skim the bottom of her

shoulder blades. It’s a wig. Part of her signature. She dresses as though she stepped out of one of her books—true bodice

rippers. Today, her gown is light blue with a lace collar and a train. It’s not even three o’clock, and she’s already in full

costume. Some might call that commitment; I call it excessive.

Fiona bunches up the fabric at the front of her dress and smooths it back down as she stands before me. “You’re out, Sofie.

Normally, I’d be giddy. But this affects—”

“All of us.” I spin around to face Rosie Gardens, whose presence confirms this is an ambush.

“But mostly me,” I say, embarrassment over (potentially) losing my keynote soaring.

Rosie’s lips thin. “No, Sofie, it is all of us, truly. We know you think you’ve worked harder than the rest of us to get here, and maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But we all worked hard. We’re all here, just like you.”

I do think I worked harder than most everyone here, except, perhaps, for Rosie. She’s like me. She has just as many bestsellers

as I do, has been a Riley Read twice, and has been writing as long—longer. But she’s also not like me. She is a Black author

in a white-dominated industry—romance, even more so. She’s never been given the keynote either. If she were replacing me,

I’d be fine with it. Well, not fine, but okay. Actually, I’d still be fuming, yet I’d not only understand the choice but applaud

it.

Rosie’s books tend toward the literary, with most of her novels being historical romances about marginalized women who have

so rarely been featured as protagonists, in books and in life. Her literary style is the embodiment of what I grew up thinking

a writer was, though my reading tastes ran the gamut from Sweet Valley High to Stephen King to Margaret Atwood. In my first writing workshop, surrounded by writers who eschewed all but the authors

whose names were accompanied by Pulitzer or Booker or Caldecott, I realized my style fit in the commercial or (dreaded) genre

bucket. I nearly collapsed under the weight of the chip on my shoulder. Until I wrote my first sex scene. And that was it.

Romance gave me a place I could call home.

It is a home we all share, though that doesn’t mean there isn’t dysfunction. Rosie walks a tightrope, literary on one side,

romance on the other, and she does it better than anyone I’ve ever read. And she does it by never making anyone feel that

they are less, that there even is a less.

Before me, Rosie’s stacked bob shines, the dark strands framing her petite face, the tips at the front dyed a subtle shimmery gold, her book accent, the same as my scarf. We get asked about it on panels—if we came up with the idea together. We tell a story about how we did, how we came up with the idea of matching the hues of our book covers one late night after a book event where no one showed up so we took ourselves to the bar across the street. Only half the story is true. No one showed up. But we didn’t go to the bar. She invited me, and I said no.

I’ve never been good at engaging with my peers. I was a shy kid, small for my age, with crappy coordination and fragile bones

that gifted me with sprains and broken limbs and a learned aversion to soccer balls and monkey bars. My parents must have

wondered if there’d been a mix-up at the hospital, because I was nothing like them. For a couple who prided themselves on

costume parties at Halloween and Christmas in July cookouts complete with fake snow, I must have been a disappointment. By

the time I was in the fourth grade, I had established myself as the girl who helped the teacher clean the classroom during

recess. Except, that year, I gave them a reprieve. I still remember the way my mother’s eyes danced when I came home and told

her about Sandy.

The über-popular Sandy had one day appeared inside the classroom at recess. She’d broken her leg in a nasty fall off the balance

beam. Of course, Sandy was in gymnastics. She was the prettiest girl in class. Dirty-blonde hair and actual heart-shaped lips

that were naturally shiny and bubblegum pink. Except they weren’t. I caught her sneaking an application of lip gloss. For

some reason, she offered it to me. And that was it.

For the next seven weeks while her leg healed, I read my favorite books aloud to her, and then we began to make up stories

together. She soon realized that I was the better writer and she was the better artist. We collaborated on eleven illustrated

books while her leg was in a cast. Nine of them about squirrels—Sandy loved squirrels.

They sawed off the cast, but nothing could cut through our friendship. She introduced me to chopped apples in pancakes and I ushered her into the world of V.C. Andrews. We were both small with glasses and each had a giggly laugh we saved for the other. And for the next three years, we were the definition of BFFs with those split-heart necklaces to ensure everyone knew it.

Then came a transition from elementary school to middle school and the arrival of a new girl. Another Sandy, but this one

with an i .

If my Sandy was pretty, Sandi with an i was Cindy Crawford in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. Puberty had come in hard and fast. She had luscious dark hair, eyelashes like feathers, and a rasp to her

voice that felt far too sexy for a thirteen-year-old.

Unlike me, my Sandy shot up in height. Her dirty-blonde hair turned white-blonde. And she mastered the art of jabbing hard

contacts into her eyes, something she tried to teach me. But after three scratched corneas from my own fingernails, my mom

took my contacts away. As my face lost its baby fat, my nose appeared longer and narrower. The boys dubbed me “George Washington”

while Sandy became “Christie Brinkley.”

The class’s running bit of calling out “Sandy with a y ” or “Sandi with an i ” bonded the two of them. I hated sharing Sandy. For her birthday, I thought I could win her back by returning to what had

brought us together. I wrote a book about friendship with squirrels as the main characters and brought it as my gift to the

birthday party at her house. My stapled-together booklet had blank spaces for her to draw in the pictures. As she tore off

the squirrel gift wrap, she accidentally ripped the book in half. I’d warned her to be careful.

Later, I heard the giggly laugh I knew in my sleep from the kitchen. Sandy and Sandi shushed each other as they exited and strolled past me. I found my book in the trash beneath melted pools of strawberry ice cream. I told Sandy that no one likes strawberry, but Sandi with an i said the opposite. Sandi was wrong. I was right.

That day I learned I didn’t need an illustrator. Or half of a heart necklace. Years later, it would be a different heart,

given and taken and taken back, that would teach me how to navigate this world and eventually find my place in it, which I

did amid the people I wave to on the beach, the barflies I chat with in town, the books I create, the fictional people I invent,

and Blaire and Lacey and Roxanne and my parents’ pickleball videos. And my fans. Whom I very recently called stupid.

I filmed an apology, heartfelt, almost embarrassingly so. I just hope my fans can see that. Especially since, as I stand here

in the trap set by Grace and Fiona and Rosie, I know that my fellow authors aren’t going to jump in to help. I can’t really

blame them—though I’m trying, really, really hard.

I’m an anomaly in this industry. Writers, published and unpublished, live in a miasma of codependency. They squee over one

another’s cover reveals ( “dying, I am dying, dead, I am dead over this!” ). They high-five one another’s agent signings, and when book contracts are announced, they send balloons emoji on “nice”

deals (read: three grand). Add confetti cannons for “very nice” (okay, now maybe you can buy a car—a used one, after agent

commission and taxes). A cancan dancer with “good” (new car territory). A few champagne bottles at “significant” (now we’re

talking down payment on a house). And countless mind-blown ones on “major” (all the zeros). They celebrate what arguably deserves

to be (typing “the end”) and what categorically does not (“deleted more than I added today but PROGRESS”).

All to mask the vinegary bitter taste of jealousy. A lie said enough times becomes a truth.

Grace, Fiona, Rosie, and I aren’t friends. We’re barely even colleagues. I don’t owe them anything. And they don’t owe me. Clearly, a sentiment they share.

I can’t stand here looking at the empty space where my banner used to be. I need to extract myself from this group that would

burn me at the stake, except as authors we’re all too fond of witches to disparage the genre by using that metaphor. “Blaire

says she’s going to fix it. If there’s anything to even fix. Maybe they just decided to move the banner to a more prominent

spot.”

Two young women roll a cart toward the ballroom. Books fill all three shelves, the spine reading one thing and one thing only:

“ Love and Lawlessness Hartley West.”

Rosie leans closer. “She can’t have this. Hartley West taking that stage doesn’t just end your career. You were right about

that. She used AI to write a book that is more than likely on track to become a bestseller. She’s being lauded as a pioneer.

As the heralding of a future where writing no longer exists. Where entertainment , not creators reign. She lived in obscurity before your tirade brought her front and center. This may not have started as

your fault, but you made it your responsibility. Blaire or no Blaire, this has to be fixed. Here. And now. She can’t hit the

list.”

“She won’t,” I say, suddenly realizing just how hard that would be. To be in range of hitting the bestseller list, there have to be enough actual books in print, able to be bought in the current week. Most authors, even those traditionally published, have small print runs—another thing that separates a top-selling author from everyone else from day one. The chance isn’t even there. Dreams of breaking out and the power of word of mouth are at odds with this basic mathematical fact. Everyone from Oprah to Reese to Taylor Swift could endorse the same new release on the same day and still the book wouldn’t be in contention if there simply weren’t enough copies in circulation. “She can’t have enough.”

Rosie eyes the bookshelf with skepticism. “And what if she does?”

A huff of frustration erupts out. “What would you have me do?”

Rosie shrugs, her shoulder nudging the bottom tier of her chandelier earrings. “You’re creative. You’ve plotted your way out

of deeper holes, haven’t you?”

“This? It’s barely worthy of the flap copy.”

“Make sure it stays that way.”