Chapter 2
NOVA
“Well, how am I possibly supposed to write now?” I yelled over the sound of our coffee machine imitating a spaceship liftoff.
“This changes nothing,” Hudson said, tilting his head as he threw me a pointed look.
“Let Judas carry on with her new lifestyle influencer content slop grind, bankrolled by Mr. Alpha Daddy. After everything she said to us—to you especially—she’s not worth the rent-free access to your mind.
Her rent’s already paid for. Ours is not. Get to work.”
With that, Hudson grabbed his coffee, turned on his heel, and left the kitchen.
“Wait—aren’t you curious about what her latest post meant? What about the ad for The Circle? You never said if you’d seen it before.”
Hudson paused, his hand on his bedroom doorknob.
“Nova. You’re sounding a little scary right now.
No, I haven’t seen that random PicWave ad for a new tantric yoga studio or a Soho House knockoff or whatever the fuck.
Lorelei is not as interesting or as mysterious as you’re making her sound.
I’m going to need you to take off the tinfoil hat.
I love you, but you need to drop it. Go write. ”
Okay, so maybe I did sound a little unhinged. I could take constructive criticism. They were probably right. Lorelei was just soft-launching an online business selling essential oils and delusions. Her algorithms had always skewed a bit woo-woo.
But how could she use such religious language without wanting to puke? How could she give all of herself to these men after everything we left behind?
She really was Judas. And because I didn’t want to confront the grief of her betrayal, I stewed in resentment instead. Delilah hummed, completely oblivious to the storm brewing in our cozy living space.
I peeled off to my room, where, instead of writing, I searched @O on PicWave.
No results found.
“You’re joking,” I muttered to myself. Inara jumped into my lap. “I’m almost done,” I told her. “And then, I will write.” She stared up at me, slowly reaching a paw to my face. “I will play with you, and then I will write.”
I clicked back to my regular account and scrolled.
I was greeted by a barrage of Publisher’s Marketplace deal announcements.
My stomach dropped, but I commented congratulations on a few posts, and I hit the like button on the others.
I felt guilty for my own envy. A better person would be entirely excited for others without thinking about themselves.
I was happy for them—I swore I was—but my excitement for my peers was undercut by my own frustrations.
It was hard to watch everyone else ascend while I worked my ass off merely to stay where I was.
Every post and advertisement fought for my attention as I scrolled.
I made a mental note of marketing trends and hooks working well for other cozy romance authors, ones like me who didn’t write spicy sex scenes.
I groaned, thinking about how I hadn’t posted in three days.
My sales rankings reflected it. Maybe I’d feel better if I booked a massage at the new location in Williamsburg—book now flashed in inviting pink letters.
Or maybe I should go dancing with friends at a bar an influencer was promoting in Tribeca.
Was she actually having a good time, or was she smiling about the new deposit in her bank account?
Were any of us having a good time on these apps anymore? Had we ever been having a good time?
Finally, I found what I was looking for.
Feeling like a sucker, I clicked learn more on the bottom of the black square.
“This didn’t work on me,” I whispered to my screen. “I just need you to know that. I am only clicking because I am conducting an investigation.”
It was important that the billionaire tech overlords listening to me through my phone understood I was not merely a gullible cog in the hive mind machine, but I was actually an exceptionally discerning critical thinker.
This was also what I told myself when I clocked in an entire second job’s worth of screen time a week.
Or rather, a fourth job, considering being an author was at least three different jobs in one.
The link took me to a website just as non-descript as the post itself. In the center of the black screen, a button read initiate. At the top of the page was a silver-scaled ouroboros, eating itself in a perfect circle.
“If this gives me malware, I’m deleting social media for good this time.”
Clicking the button did not, to my knowledge, give me malware. It did, however, bring me to the first paragraph of actual information on my hunt thus far.
Orientation for potential initiates of The Circle occurs the first Saturday of every month.
Orientation is free, but what follows comes at a price.
Are you willing to sacrifice isolation for community?
Screen time for in-person connection, adventure, and self-exploration?
What about your shame, fear, disappointment, and dissatisfaction?
What are you willing to lose for absolute freedom?
What false roles and ideas about yourself are you willing to kill to exist fully authentically—perhaps for the first time in your life?
I scanned the words quickly, my alarm bells going off in a cacophony that sounded a lot like the word cult in different tones and inflections.
The Circle is a radical approach to living life deeply embodied and raw. We are unapologetically inclusive, trauma-informed, kink-celebratory, and consent-mandatory. Our mission is to seek the sacred in the sensual, the transcendent in the erotic.
We live in a broken world. It’s time to come closer.
Me and my tinfoil hat were right. Inara trilled, and I realized I’d stopped mid-pet, my hand buried in her fur as I stared at my screen.
If these words stirred your innermost self, come say hello. If, at any point, now or in the future, you decide we’re not a match, we wish you well on your own journey.
Below the artful script was an address and a time. I pulled the address up in my navigation app, noting it was only twenty-five minutes away via the L train.
The first Saturday of the month was in five days.
When I went back to the webpage, everything was gone.
I kept replaying in my mind everything I could remember from the website. Likely by design, I mostly remembered the feelings the words evoked—the shame, the curiosity, the excitement, the suspicion.
The subway car creaked and groaned loud enough to pierce through my noise cancelling earbuds.
I was listening to a comfort playlist of indie music from the early 2000s in an effort to forget about The Circle and prepare my mind for a night of laughter at my favorite small comedy club, Metro Hall.
When the G Train was behaving, hitting up comedy shows by myself and getting a slice of pizza on my way home was my favorite mood-booster.
I could still remember the first show I went to when Lorelei and I moved to the city.
She’d been sleeping off a hangover, and I was walking around Central Park shooting stars out of my eyes.
A poor open mic-er was begging passersby to take free tickets to a show later that night, and, feeling on top of the world, I gladly obliged.
Looking back, most of the newer comics who took the stage weren’t all that funny, but one or two of them were.
I’d never laughed so hard in my life. And more than that, there was something in all of them I deeply admired—the boldness to strip themselves bare on stage for all to see.
I could think of nothing worse than a crowd staring at me in silence, or, God forbid, laughing at me instead of with me.
It was also the thing about humans I loved most—we were dreadfully social creatures.
We craved each other. Being in a crowd was electric.
Being part of something greater than ourselves was the motivation behind all our best and all our worst events in history.
To risk that basic feeling of belonging by potentially making an ass of oneself on stage took a level of courage I wasn’t sure I’d ever find.
At a pair of oversized black sunglasses and curly blonde hair in my periphery, my gaze rose to a girl in a pink dress, clutching the stanchion. When she glanced back at me, I looked away.
I shook my head. Lorelei was a storm of chaos and destruction.
She had been for a while. Even with the horrific stress of scrambling to find a new third roommate, life had been better with her gone.
For a while, after she’d destroyed our relationship and stabbed me in the back, I was numb to it all.
Now, it finally felt like I could breathe again.
The apartment was cleaner and quieter. My mind was less preoccupied with what she was doing, what she was thinking, who she was doing it all with.
I could better focus on me—the good in my life, my hope for the future, my infinite love for this city I’d made my home.
Lorelei had spent so long eclipsing my world, I’d never learned how expansive one outside of her could be.
And yet, the guilt had crept back up, disguised as anger. I couldn’t abandon her, not after all we’d gone through together. She needed help. Of the psychiatric variety, perhaps, but still. She had no one, not anymore.
I shoved Lorelei out of my brain, and in her place appeared the phrase kink-celebratory. I stared at the empty seats in front of me as the doors opened and more passengers stepped into the car.
My hands began to sweat; I wished I could say it was because of the obscene heat wave. Well, it was partly due to that. But it was also because The Circle’s culty little mission statement had appealed to a part of me buried deep, a part of me I never wanted to face or admit to anyone.
Which meant I could never involve myself with whatever pseudo-spiritual sex cult Lorelei had gotten herself wrapped up in. They weren’t the cure for this broken world—they were a product of it. No, they were a perpetuator of it.
I hopped off at my stop into the one-hundred-and-ten-degree underground. It was so hot, I felt cold as sweat dripped down my back.
Above ground, it was cooler, but not by much.
“Hey, gorgeous,” a man smoking a cigarette called from where he leaned against a building.
Ah, yes. My disgusting sweatiness was enticing to all.
Ignoring the catcall, I made my way to Metro Hall with a fierce determination to turn this cursed day around. I was going to delete my burner account. No more checking up on Lorelei. No more clicking PicWave Ads. No more comparing myself to my peers.
I was going to write a best-selling novel and continue having the best summer of my life with people who actually cared about me.
And I would never, under any circumstances, enter The Circle.