Chapter 14 - The Write Off

11 Years Ago

Junior Year, Second Semester

The first sign of trouble between West and Bethany came at a bonfire in the desert. A guy I’d just met had his hand on my knee when their fight started, and by the time he leaned in for a kiss, the ice coming off both of them was enough to douse the fire.

The second sign was at a game night in January. I watched the couple have an entire silent fight with their eyes over a game of Cards Against Humanity because West wasn’t picking her cards to win.

The third time is when I’m sitting on the floor in West’s room, scrolling through Facebook instead of writing, and I see that Bethany has posted an old picture of them with a long caption about how much she loves him—aka the relationship death rattle.

I glance at West. He’s sitting on his bed playing video games, The Canterbury Tales abandoned on the floor. We don’t spend much time at his apartment, but Amber’s dad is making repairs at the house, so we ended up here, hiding from West’s roommates and their intense game of Dungeons & Dragons at the kitchen table.

“What are you doing this weekend?” I ask. We have no classes on Monday, and West usually makes it a point to visit his girlfriend at cosmetology school in Scottsdale if he hasn’t seen her for a few weeks.

His expression is pained. “Gabbi’s visiting for the week. My mom wants me to come home and do the happy family thing…but I don’t know.”

“Is your dad still…?”

“An asshole? Yes.” He sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair. “She wants me to forgive him, but I don’t know if he deserves it.”

“Hmm.” I click through Bethany’s most recent photo album.

“You’re ruminating.”

“Only a little.”

“About what?”

I bite the inside of my cheek, trying to figure out how to word this without sounding like I am defending West’s stupid dad. “I guess I don’t think you forgive someone because they deserve it or they’ve earned it or something.”

“Then why would I do it?”

I shrug. “Because you love your mom. And you love him.”

After a pause, West says, “I don’t know if I do love him.”

My heart squeezes. “You don’t have to.”

“It’s not Gabbi’s fault, but I hate him more when she’s around, because she deserves better than a cheating dad who flies her in once every few months and an older brother who doesn’t want to be around her. I lied and told her I was busy this weekend, so if you’re keeping score, I’m not exactly treating her any better than my dad is.”

“You’re nothing like him.”

“I’m trying not to be,” he mutters.

“It wouldn’t be a lie if you visit Bethany this weekend.” I’m careful to put the same amount of stress on each syllable, and as a result, I’ve been saying her name like a robot for two years now.

His eyes flick quickly away from mine. “Nah.”

Nah? He doesn’t know me at all if he thinks I’m going to be content with that answer.

“Is everything good with you two?”

He blinks in surprise, and I wonder if he thinks I haven’t noticed the way he’s been uncharacteristically sleeping in and missing classes or zoning out when we’re together. I’ll catch him looking at me with a strange expression, and it’s clear his mind is somewhere else entirely.

He dies on-screen. “Yeah, why?”

“No reason.” I close out of Facebook and pull my Word doc up. That’s enough internet stalking for me.

“Maybe I can convince my mom to bring Gabbi and the others down here this weekend,” he says.

“Gonna take them on a tour of Greek row?”

He tilts his head to the side. “Gabbi’s never been to Kartchner Caverns. She’d like that.”

“What is it?”

“An underground cave filled with limestone formations. You’ve never been?” When I shake my head, his eyes light up. “You should come with us. It’s pretty cool, and I doubt she’s seen anything like it on the East Coast.” He smiles for the first time all day, and my stomach tugs strangely while I watch him plan an afternoon for his sister. An afternoon he wants to include me in.

“What about you?” he asks, stretching out on his bed with his arms behind his head, a chewed pen cap appearing in his mouth from who knows where. His shirt pulls up, revealing a strip of skin above his boxers, and the room shrinks by half. “Do you have big plans for the long weekend?”

“Just cave exploring, apparently, and this.” I hold up my laptop. What started out as a spite goal (to prove my parents wrong) quickly turned into self-preservation. The minute I tell someone that I’m a creative writing major, I get a scoff or a sneer or a condescending lecture that boils down to one point: How are you going to make money doing that?

It’s not like I’m a theater major!

My parents cloak their disapproval in concern for my future, but they’re the only ones. Strangers, classmates, and friends have zero filter when it comes to my job prospects, and I figure the best way to make them eat their words is to have a book on the shelves by the time I cross the stage in a cap and gown.

Huh, maybe it is still a spite goal.

Or maybe I just love it.

Either way, I had to move the goalpost at the start of junior year. I’m nowhere near ready. My new goal is to finish a book and find a literary agent before the end of next year.

I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in the last half decade, but none of them felt good enough. After I finished my latest novel, I planned to take a two-week break. Two days later, everything changed. One minute, I was curling my hair, thinking about what to eat for dinner, and the next, these characters were in my brain. A fae king, the mortal girl who falls in love with him, and their fight to protect his kingdom against warring creatures. It’s magical and whimsical and deeply romantic. Or it will be, once I’ve transferred it from my brain onto the page. Small details.

“Are you working on something new?” West asks, and it’s the closest we’ve come to broaching the subject in months.

“Yes, and I’m so obsessed with it that I can barely sleep.”

“What’s it about?”

“Magical teenagers. What else?”

“Another weird story that should never be published?”

Oh. His words are a sucker punch. When it comes to my writing, I have my guard up around nearly everyone except him.

West takes one look at my expression, and his eyes widen in alarm. He rolls to his side and pushes his weight up onto his elbow. “Wait, hey, no—”

“Nice to know how you really feel.” I try to laugh it off, but my words come out hoarse and wounded.

“No! It’s a quote! Robert Pattinson said it about Twilight. You read it to me the first day we met.”

I swallow the lump in my throat. “Did I?” I don’t remember that at all.

“Yes,” he insists.

We stare at each other as the silence around us rises in volume. His expression is one of forged steel.

“Okay,” I say eventually. He looks relieved as he flops backward. I want to believe him as badly as I want to believe that I’m not delusional for writing every chapter with his reaction in mind. But it might be too late for that.

Last semester, I asked if he had time to proofread a short story (emphasis on short) for my Young Adult Lit class, but for the first time ever, he was too busy. He hasn’t asked to read anything of mine since, and the thought that he might have grown sick of my silly magical teenagers makes me feel like the oxygen is being sucked out of the room.

“Remember when you used to color your nails with Sharpie?” I ask suddenly.

“What about it?”

“Just thinking about freshman year.”

“Do you ever miss it?” he asks.

“Your emo nails? Full offense, but no.”

He rakes a hand through his hair, eyes still fixed on the ceiling. “Living in the dorms. Hanging out on campus between classes because we had hours to kill and nothing else to do. I didn’t have a job or any stress or a—whatever.” His head falls to the side and our eyes meet.

Something close to longing crosses his face, and a small, chronically curious part of me wonders what he almost said on the other side of whatever.

I avoid the place in my brain that still feels the weight of West’s gaze on my lips or his hands on my waist. I don’t think about the days following spring break, when I cried my eyes out over a boy who went running straight into the arms of his high school sweetheart, and I sure as hell don’t romanticize what could have been. West made his intentions very clear: If he wanted to be with Bethany, he would. Two years later, he still is.

“I miss it,” I finally admit. My whisper might as well be a shout. His gaze grows pensive as our eye contact holds for longer than I understand, and I worry we’re tipping into territory that we can’t ignore. “But this year is good, too.”

He turns his head, and the moment is gone. I’m relieved and disappointed and flushed with feelings I don’t want to feel.

“Are you hungry? I’m hungry,” he announces. Always good for an unsubtle change of subject, he is.

“I’m good.” I type a nonsense sentence as he leaves the room.

I tip my head back against his wall as a nostalgic kind of melancholy drips down my spine. I breathe deeply, count to ten, and browbeat my emotions into a manageable shape.

By the time West returns with a protein bar and starts another game, the weird tension between us has evaporated, and I’m back to writing. The main character is meeting her love interest for the first time. I’m giddy with anticipation, but I’m also at a roadblock; it’s time to describe what he looks like, and I suck at description.

I type the first thing that comes to mind. He has a nose. Two eyes. And a mouth. In a hot way.

I groan and delete it. What do people even look like?

“I need help,” I announce when my fingers have been hovering over the keyboard for the time it takes West’s on-screen character to die and come back to life and then die again.

“Nine times five is forty-five,” West says without skipping a beat. I snort. Now that’s a callback I remember.

Hands still frozen, I study his face: long black eyelashes and a crooked nose. Without my permission, my fingers move. Fox Caldwell is born.