Chapter 1 Planes and Paps #2
“The baby,” he adds, as if he knows Sage is one breath from launching into a verbal sparring match that straddles the line between flirting and … decidedly not.
“It’s your superpower,” Emerson told her once. “You fling insults and people fall in love with you.”
He doesn’t seem as bothered by the prospect as he should be.
“Right,” she finally says, rather stupidly. “The baby.”
His grin inexplicably widens, and he motions toward her laptop. “What are you working on?”
Now she really wishes that cow would fall through the plane ceiling and crush her to death.
Sage loves her job. Obviously Sage loves her job, because she threw away an entire career she had been steadily working toward for years on the hope of fulfilling a dream.
Ever since she was a child, she’s been scribbling prose on scraps of paper, losing herself in the tangle of her mind only to find her way out by jotting it all down.
To be able to do this for a living? It’s …
well, it’s more than she ever dreamt of, and especially when she considers that she was raised in a house where your value was tied to how high up the corporate ladder you climbed.
Her creativity was admirable, but it wasn’t viable for a career.
And yet … the world seems to disagree.
Because now, she’s a full-time author, her first book an instant New York Times bestseller, and according to her entire publishing team, that’s a feat that simply “doesn’t happen often. Or, like, ever.”
It’s what secured her a place at Comic Con, what has her on this plane headed for New York, her best friend and entertainment lawyer tagging along “just because,” what has a film studio mulling over movie rights with her agent.
It’s amazing, a dream come true, and she wouldn’t trade it for anything, but now …
Well, now she wonders if that’s exactly what it is: a dream. A dream that she’s waking up from, because now she’s staring down the sequel, and it’s not working.
What if she has only one good book in her? What if all of those scraps of paper and abandoned notebooks weren’t a sign of talent but of the limitations of her mind? What if this whole thing just … vanishes tomorrow?
What if my parents were right?
She doesn’t have time for a self-induced breakdown, so she shoves the thoughts away and evades his question with a brief “Nothing exciting.”
She eyes his stack of papers. She may not be in the mood to converse with a stranger, but she’s not above using him for deflection. “What are you working on?”
He glances down, his lips twitching at the corners. When he looks back at her, his eyes—god, they’re like … rom-com blue—are glinting with something that rivals mischievousness. “Nothing exciting,” he parrots.
Sage can’t decide if she wants to stick her tongue out at him like a child or flip him the bird—you know, like an adult—but suddenly he’s ripping open a sugar packet and she’s mildly distracted by his long fingers.
(She’s hungover—give her a break.)
He takes a sip, then promptly chokes. “Ugh, Christ, this is still horrid.”
Sage bites back a smirk as she turns to her work. She can feel his eyes on her, but she stares pointedly at the blinking cursor and forces herself to focus. She can do this. She just needs to start.
And stop letting him distract her.
“You wouldn’t happen to be writing your own obituary, would you?” the man asks.
“What? No?” She turns to see him grinning at her, his head lolling back against the seat in a way that looks disarmingly at ease.
“You look like you’re contemplating death.”
“Maybe it’s because some people never learned proper plane etiquette.”
“I’m English. We invented etiquette.” He straightens and punches the flight attendant call button. “I’ll prove it.”
“Please don’t,” Sage warns. The last thing she needs is the overly friendly flight attendant coming to—
“Well, hello again!” The attendant giggles, reaching the man’s seat in no time at all. Sage can’t help the way her eyes bug, and she can tell the stranger is swallowing a laugh.
“Terribly sorry to be a bother, but could I trouble you for two glasses of whiskey?” His English charm is turned up to ten, all round vowels and quick syllables, and Sage is so distracted for a moment that she misses the flight attendant’s question.
“Ice?” he repeats, head cocked as he waits for Sage to answer.
“It’s ten am,” she replies with a blink.
“It’s five PM in London.” Then, to the attendant, “Ice for both of us, thanks.”
The flight attendant shoots Sage a conspicuous look, and she’s still eyeing her when she drops off the whiskey and waves off the man’s attempt to pay. Sage has enough good sense to wait until she leaves before she snorts incredulously.
“What?” The man asks as he hands her a cup and clinks his own against it.
“She must really like you.”
“Or,” he says, clearing his throat against the burn of the liquor, “she’s just being kind. I hear some Americans are capable of it.” He shoots her a pointed look.
“I mean, I didn’t ask you to buy me a drink, but thanks …” She trails off, waiting for him to fill in his name.
“Theo,” he supplies with an amused smile. “And I didn’t buy it.”
For some inexplicable reason, Sage feels her face heating at that. She can’t tell if he’s flirting or simply bored and desperate to annoy her until she self-destructs.
“Anyway,” he says as he fishes around his pocket and pulls out an AirPods case. He slips them into his ears and holds up his cup once more. “Cheers.”
Then he’s turning back to his stack of papers, as if Sage were the one pestering him. She can feel her lips part incredulously, so she snaps her mouth shut as she turns back to her computer in a huff.
It takes her a moment to notice Emerson’s eyes are open and her brows are raised as she looks between Sage and the man. “Who’s your friend?”
Sage rolls her eyes. “Theo, I guess? You were snoring, by the way.”
Emerson merely swipes the whiskey from her tray table and gives her a grin. “Good,” she says, before she downs the entire glass. “Cheers.”
Sage knows three things with absolute certainty:
The first five minutes of Finding Nemo are a guaranteed cry-fest.
Pineapple doesn’t belong on pizza.
Emerson is and always will be the better half of them, despite the many times Sage has wanted to murder her.
They’ve operated as a unit for so long that Sage honestly struggles to remember what life was like before Emerson threw a crop top at her face, shoved her off the tiny twin bed in their shared dorm freshman year at UCLA, and demanded Sage come out with her lest she wither away “like a sad, Victorian woman locked in a tower.”
Emerson had held Sage’s hair back that night as she threw up Taaka. They’ve been best friends ever since.
They just fit together. Sage is chaotically caught up in her brain, and Emerson is decisive and a magnet for a good time, and together, they make mostly goodish decisions and force one another to be the best they can be.
Emerson reminds Sage to live in the moment, and Sage keeps Emerson from taking that moment and making it one that lands them both in jail.
And sure, sometimes Emerson takes on the role of doctoring Sage’s life a little too much, but Sage loves her anyway. At least, that’s what she reminds herself as Emerson strikes up a conversation with Theo as they taxi to their gate.
She’s doing that thing where her tone is sugary, her Southern accent thick like honey. If it hadn’t been for the years living together through under- and postgrad, Sage might think her friend was flirting.
But Sage knows she’s actually meddling, and given she’s currently seated between Emerson and Theo, she can’t very well shoot her a look that tells her to stop. So instead, she occupies herself with her phone, ignoring both of them entirely. Emerson allows it until they disembark.
They’re off the jet bridge, and Sage is squinting at her screen as she tries to read the instructions her publicist, Taylor, sent about where to meet their driver when she hears Emerson say, “Doesn’t it, Collins?”
Sage’s surname rolls off of Emerson’s tongue pointedly, her shoulder bumping hers as they make their way toward baggage claim.
“Um …” Sage manages to say, phone still gripped in her hand as she blinks up at Emerson. Theo is walking on Em’s other side, looking bemused from beneath the plain black ball cap he’s pulled on.
It does absolutely nothing to make him look less devastatingly attractive, and Sage sort of hates that.
“Yes,” she answers decidedly.
“Sage loves a good club,” Emerson explains to Theo with a wicked grin, and dammit, what did Sage just agree to?
“Excellent,” he retorts, his lips pressing together to fight off a laugh. “It’s on Friday. You can just give my name at the door, they’ll show you to our area.”
A noise that sounds a lot like an objection builds in Sage’s throat, because she’s finally putting the pieces together and realizing that Emerson has somehow invited them to some club that Theo has special access for, but Emerson is speaking before she can.
“Great!” She snatches Sage’s phone out of her hand. “I’ll pull up the car information. That’s my job.”
“Technically, your job is making sure I’m not breaking the law. Or getting screwed over. And you’re not here in that capacity.”
The irony that it was Emerson who became the lawyer isn’t lost on Sage.
But she’s incredibly talented. Yet despite having thoroughly reviewed every single one of Sage’s contracts, this week, she’s here as Sage’s friend.
Emerson needed a break after a tough few months at work, and Sage needed the moral support.
But Emerson gives her a dismissive wave and puts her full focus into Sage’s phone like it’s going to tell her the winning lottery combination.
She punches her thumb against the screen and brings the phone to her ear, stepping out from between them and leaving Theo and Sage side by side as they continue toward baggage claim.