9
hannah
“Hey,” says Nicole Bruin, the agent I intern for. “Earth to Hannah. Where’d you go?”
I blink at her, shaking myself, embarrassed. I was thinking about Ellis again, obviously.
It’s Monday morning, and I’m at work. I don’t come in to the office every single day, because a lot of my interning is just as easily done at home on my couch.
A lot of my duties are to read all the submissions that Nicole gets, note any that hold my interest to pass on to her, and to send out form rejections to any that don’t.
I was trained heavily by Nicole until I understood her preferences.
We’d go through the same group of emails, and I would reject or give to her, and until I got it exactly the same way she would do it, I wasn’t allowed to sort the submissions for her.
But I know what she likes now. I am an expert in Nicole Bruin.
I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not, because I took this internship so that I could learn how to be an agent on my own, and I need to develop my own preferences and my own instincts for what sells and what doesn’t.
But all of that has been obliterated, because I have trained myself to think exactly like Nicole.
I wonder if I am just this sort of person, the kind of person who lives to please other people, and who never makes any space for whatever it is that I want.
But here’s the real truth: it feels better to make other people happy than it does to make myself happy.
And in all the noise about people-pleasing and toxicity and everything else, I sometimes think people lose track of that.
We didn’t evolve from creatures who lived all alone in the woods, after all.
We used to live in tribes. Maybe we’re supposed to please each other. Maybe that’s the way to be happy.
Anyway, like I said, I am not even sure, anymore, if I ever wanted to be a literary agent at all.
I know that I spent all of my undergrad talking about it, telling everyone that I was going to have a job on the other side of graduation with my English degree, that I was going to carve out my own path.
What the fuck was I thinking?
What path?
When have I ever done anything daring or original or just for myself?
“Sorry, Nicole,” I say, giving her my undivided attention.
She laughs. “It’s fine. Whatever you were thinking about, you seemed to be enjoying it. Did you have a good weekend?”
Good? Not the word I would use, exactly. “It was eventful,” I say.
She laughs. She did not see my Instagram, because I have a professional Instagram that I use for my literary agent self, assuming I ever figure out how to be a literary agent.
Nicole starts talking about all the things we’re preparing for, including her next trip to New York.
She’s one of the few agents who isn’t based in NYC, instead living here, in one of the many suburbs of DC instead.
She travels to New York frequently, however, to lunch with editors and other sorts of things that literary agents do.
I always want to come along for these visits, because this is how I’ll make connections in the industry.
She tells me that we need to see where we are on the checklist of all the things we’re meant to have accomplished by then, and I pull up the checklist, and we start going over each item on it together.
The rest of the morning is busy, working on this or that, trying to work through the checklist.
When I leave the office for lunch, I’m met by my mother’s assistant Jordan and my brother Andrew, who are waiting on the bottom floor of my office building. There are a bunch of different offices in this building. Nicole rents space here.
It’s so typical that my mother sent her assistant.
Jordan is non-binary. They are tall and elegant and smoothly androgynous.
They are my mother’s right hand, and they take care of all sorts of things for her.
They know everything about my mother’s personal business, and I have gotten used to Jordan being my mother’s surrogate since I was about eighteen, which was when Jordan was hired.
“We’re taking you to lunch,” Jordan informs me, gesturing with their hand as if this is a regal sort of order that we all have to obey.
I groan. “Andrew, I thought we did this, already.”
“That was before brunch,” says Andrew.
“I heard about brunch,” says Jordan, hand to their chest, sighing dramatically. Jordan doesn’t mean to be dramatic. They are just dramatic on accident. “Anyway, where do you want to eat, Hannah? We have about fifteen restaurants within walking distance, and I think you should pick.”
I was going to go and get a salad from the deli across the street, because I thought I’d be bringing my lunch back upstairs to the office, and I like it if the people I work with think I’m the kind of person who voluntarily eats salads.
I know, I’m a very pathetic person who cares too much about what people think of me.
And I do like salads.
Mostly.
Sort of.
Okay, I hate salads. I clear my throat. “Pizza.”
“Excellent choice,” says Jordan, making another regal gesture with their wrist.
We go to the pizza place and order slices.
I get a veggie one—spinach and black olives and mushrooms, so that’s sort of healthy.
The pizza slices here are too big to actually fit on the paper plates they serve them on, greasy, salty cheese dripping down over the edges, getting all over your fingers, and everything here tastes amazing.
Andrew folds his pepperoni slice in half.
Jordan puts red pepper flakes and parmesan all over their cheese slice.
I chew, trying to concentrate on how good the pizza tastes.
“So,” says Jordan, “the thing is, your mother is really worried right now. She does not like the fact that you won’t pick up the phone when she calls.”
“She can text me,” I say. “I am texting her back. Texts are the way that everyone communicates now. Maybe she should wake up and realize what century she is living in.”
“Okay,” says Jordan. “I think that’s fair, and I will pass that on. But she is really upset, and she is your mother, so if you could pick up, say, every third call, I think that would be a good compromise?”
“If she’s so worried, why isn’t she here herself?” I say. “She sent you.”
“Yes, that’s true,” says Jordan. “But it is a big sacrifice to her to have sent me to see you instead of seeing to my other duties, and you should recognize that. Your mother is the sort of person who is always trying to do more things that a human being can actually do, and between her and me, we do the work of ten people, I’m telling you.
” They take a bite of pizza and chew. “You know this, though,” they say around their bite, dabbing at their mouth with a napkin.
Andrew sets down his pizza. “Callie’s a fucking mess. She won’t let me come home—”
“She said that you were crying and you stayed at Mom’s,” I say.
“She told you that?” says Andrew, furrowing his brow.
“I maybe saw Ellis’s text messages,” I say. “He left me to go see her and he told me he went down on her. And she says you’re cool with that? But somehow, this is my problem, not that you married the crazy omega who is obsessed with him?”
Andrew clears his throat, looking embarrassed. He eats more of his pizza.
“Your brother is free to conduct his marriage however he likes,” says Jordan. “But you are being used by a psychopath—”
“Oh, if Ellis is a psychopath, then Callie is, too. Do you know how many texts she sent him?” I say.
Andrew swallows his bite of pizza. “Granted, they are, uh, toxically co-dependent. And granted, if I had known he was going to come back, and all of the progress she had made while he was gone would unravel in two seconds, maybe I would have thought harder about proposing marriage.”
“Whatever,” I say. “You had already bitten her at that point.”
Andrew makes a face. “True.” He eats more pizza, seemingly defeated. “That’s true. I’m fucked.”
Jordan raises both of their hands. “Okay, well, to stay on topic, we think that whatever the situation is, it’s improved if we get Hannah away from Ellis.” They give me a gentle smile. “Near as we can tell, you’ve spent the last three nights with him, is that right?”
“That’s not anyone else’s business,” I say.
“Well, when it’s affecting your brother’s marriage,” says Jordan, “maybe it is.”
“You mean,” I say pointedly to Andrew, “Mom wants you out of her guest bedroom.”
“Your mother is worried,” says Jordan smoothly. “About both of you.”
“I did not sign up for this,” says Andrew to me quietly.
“Callie was the way she is about him, but he left, and I was there for her while she got through that. He abandoned her; she broke; I stayed by her side. I stupidly thought that would mean something to her, but she’s obsessed with him. She could give a fuck about me.”
“Andrew,” says Jordan, shaking their head at my brother.
“It’s not like I can divorce her or something,” says Andrew to me. “As you pointed out, I have bitten her. We have a life bond.”
I look at my pizza, feeling sick to my stomach for my brother.
“What I can’t understand is why you’re involved in it,” says Andrew. “You’re torturing her, and you’re torturing me, and I thought you cared about us both. I thought you loved us, Hannah. I love you. I would never do this to you.”
I lift my shoulders. “Ellis is just… he’s hard to say no to.”
“But you know he’s using you,” says Andrew. “You know it.”
I don’t look at him. I look at my pizza.
“Andrew,” says Jordan quietly, “I wonder if that’s the best way to go about this?”
“He does not give a shit about you, Hannah,” says Andrew.
Same thing that Callie said.
“You know,” says Jordan, “maybe we could just get to the ask here. Andrew’s staying at your mom’s place tonight, so maybe you can come over for dinner, Hannah, and you can plan to stay, and you can have a little reset, some family time. What do you say?”
I sigh. I pick up the pizza. “I mean, dinner, okay. But sleeping over at my mother’s house because she wants to cock-block me?”
“Jesus, Hannah,” says Andrew.