Chapter 47
Davian
Paradise
The Voice in My Heart – Piano
(Violet Evergarden Original Soundtrack)
maats, Evan Call
White, inconspicuous tulips. She decorated the entire house with them, filled every vase with our blood. And I knew it would only take one day for them to turn into ink flowers.
I tried not to let her see that she confused me, tried at the same time to hide my smile, and, because I couldn't and shouldn't talk about it with Quill, I withdrew to my study to correct student papers.
At some point, Lara brought me pumpkin-shaped cookies, because my daughter knew how badly I could control myself when she baked.
She disappeared with a grin, and I lost myself in my work until the creeping darkness announced the coming of evening.
On my way down to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee, I noticed that the house smelled like a damn bakery. But there was no sign of Monica or my daughter.
I stopped in front of Quill's door and hesitated.
You just want to ask her something... and see if she's okay...
Taking a deep breath, I knocked gently and waited a moment before opening the door.
She was sitting at her desk wearing headphones. Lara's headphones. And my old Walkman.
She listened to music while writing. I could never.
As always, a smile stole across my lips, beyond my control.
“Quill?”
She looked up, smiled immediately, took off her headphones, pressed stop, but then looked back at the sheet of paper in front of her, obviously trying to ignore my watchful gaze.
The last thing I wanted was for her to feel uncomfortable or watched, even though I could watch her write for hours.
The mere thought was wrong.
Clearing my throat, I looked around, trying to focus on the many notes on the pinboard or those she had attached to the shelf with tape. Unsuccessfully.
“Have you seen Lara or Monica?”
She paused for a moment, staring intently at the paper.
The hand with the two band-aids was adorned with countless ink stains.
“Monica had to go to a spontaneous apartment viewing. And Lara is meeting with three students I don’t know to work on an article for the university newspaper.”
She had barely finished the sentence when she continued writing.
Chaos reigned around her. Lots of unsorted sheets of paper covered in handwriting, two coffee cups with dried traces of coffee running down them. Coffee stains decorated some of her notes, and a few sheets lay crumpled on the floor.
I had never met anyone so chaotic before, but Anthony's office sometimes looked similar.
I smirked.
“You write as if the world were ending tomorrow.”
Again, she didn't look up, and I knew these moments. She was in a kind of hyperfocus that I didn't want to pull her out of, but she decided on her own to continue the conversation.
“This method is helpful if you want to get the most out of a project.”
I nodded slowly, admiring her for this obsession, which, whenever it haunted me, only helped me until my perfectionism took over and brought me to a standstill.
“Time kills projects. Whenever I have good ideas and don't act on them right away, the spark dies after a few weeks. I stick with it anyway, but the initial euphoria never returns.” She snorted softly, sounding frustrated.
“Something authors don't talk about much. And something they blame themselves for.” She leaned back and closed her fountain pen before looking at me.
“But that's creativity. You can't let it solidify into a pillar of salt and cling to it. Then it becomes lifeless... crumbles.”
Something in her words awakened a longing within me. A quiet, pleading flame that, if I wasn't careful, could turn into a raging fire.
I wanted to write.
At the same time, I thirsted for these conversations with her, no doubt because of the desert I had been wandering in for decades, searching for the oasis of other authors' company without wanting to admit it.
I let go of the doorknob and entered her room, hesitantly at first, but she didn't seem to mind, so I pulled back the second chair next to her desk and sat down.
“Time can help you become aware of things. Plot twists, changes, patterns. Time has given all my projects more depth.”
Too late, I noticed that she was scrutinizing me with narrowed eyes.
“What did young Davian write?”
I should have known she would ask me that question at some point. Still, nothing had prepared me for it. And I was a poor liar.
“Let me guess. Science fiction?”
At a loss for what to say without giving myself away, I reached for one of her black fountain pens.
“I enjoy reading it, but no.” I chuckled, and I disliked how exhausted I sounded, even though Quill knew I wasn't functioning the way I was supposed to. “More like...”
Should I?
“Ah” Quill grinned, raised her index finger, and wagged her hand slightly forward and back. “That hesitation...” Her grin intensified until her crystal-clear eyes began to sparkle playfully and I couldn't take my eyes off her. “...is something I've only seen in male romance authors.”
I should have been relieved that she had only guessed half the truth.
Unable to suppress my smirk, I raised both eyebrows.
“How many male romance authors do you know?”
“Only the ones on online forums.”
Back then, I used to have two female author friends.
One had been a classmate who had given up writing for a life as a busy stay-at-home mom, and the other was currently climbing the bestseller list with her crime novels.
Two inspiring women, even if the conversations I used to have with them didn't even come close to the ones I had with Quill.
She sorted through the papers in front of her, and I stared at the scrawled handwriting she seemed to fall into when writing under adrenaline.
My hand automatically moved forward.
She immediately stared at my fingers, and I paused, meticulously searching her gaze for any hint of rejection.
“May I read it?”
She hesitated, then pulled the last few sheets toward her and gathered them up into the pile.
“No.”
She smirked, as if she wanted to play with me.
It was a pleasant yet overwhelming thought, but I didn’t want to rack my brains with overinterpretations right now. Friends did things like that.
“I’ll read it when it comes out, at the latest.”
I grinned at her mischievously, certain that with all the time she spent writing, she had developed an extraordinary writing style and her own writing voice. Nothing she couldn't feel confident about.
Her right eyebrow rose challengingly, but my gaze automatically lingered on the red spots on her cheeks.
“Who says I'm going to publish it?”
She had to. Otherwise, all the sacrifices she had made would have been for nothing.
“Have you ever sent anything to a publisher?”
“No.” She put the stack of paper aside and stared at it, a sad smile on her chapped lips. “I don't think they would take my books. Either I write too long series with too many words...” Her lips pressed together and she hesitated. “...or I write disturbing things.”
“Now I want to read it even more.”
I fixed her with a glinting look, curious about what her mind was capable of, what complex worlds she created, how she intertwined the fates of her characters, what the profound moral of her stories was and how she packaged it, the way she played with words, weaving them together into tapestries of stories.
“Maybe in another life.”
Since I didn't believe in such things as other lives, I didn't want to give up.
Had she ever talked to anyone about her books? To Lara? Or to this Thomas?
It was cathartic to publish a book. Simply to get the reaction and feedback from readers.
A kind of validation, even though authors usually needed this in the early stages of a project, when the fascination with the new idea threatened to burst out of them, but there was no place for the unstoppable sea of words except on paper.
I was a good listener. She should know that by now.
“Why don't you want me to read anything you've written?”
Now she looked up, drawing a blank sheet of paper toward her.
She hesitated, eyeing me intently. That look, that was about to get under your skin, before she found the right words in time, unaware that she had already been under my skin since day one.
“Do you think it's fair for you to look into my soul while I don't get the key to yours?”
Something gleamed teasingly in her gray oceans of glass.
If only she knew that she had already held that key in her hand, that she leafed through its pages every day and that it drove me to the edge of my sanity.
“When was the last time you wrote fiction by hand?”
I tried to remember.
“Twenty years ago, maybe... I prefer typewriters.”
“A retro nostalgist.”
The corners of her mouth quirked up.
“Here.” She pushed a white sheet of paper and a dip pen toward me. “Write.”
The overwhelm must have been written all over my face.
“What?” she laughed. A pleasant sound that I would like to preserve in this house. “Does a sheet of paper and a dip pen scare you that much?”
She placed the inkwell between us, set her pen aside to reach for a dip pen herself, on which the ink was already drying, drew a new sheet of paper toward her, and leaned back with an expectant look.
“They offer possibilities with unpredictable consequences.”
And she knew that very well.
This was torture. And she was enjoying it.
“Good. They offer life. Which you desperately need.”
My lips pressed together and I twisted my mouth in tormented frustration.
“You can be quite provocative, Feather.”
“I’m a writer, Davian.” She twirled the dip pen around its own axis between her fingers in the air. “That's one of my few qualities.”
Nonsense. She had many qualities. Obviously, not enough people had made that clear to her yet.
I was sure she could win these debates if she just prepared properly. Years of practice weren't the number one winning factor.
There was only one way to prove it to her...
Admitting defeat, I dipped the tip of the pen into the inkwell, tapped it on the rim to remove the excess ink, before bringing it to the page.