Chapter 33 - The Write Off

Present Day

I slam the door to West’s truck and barely think as I charge across rain-soaked asphalt. “Mars!” West catches up to me too quickly. “Where are you going?”

“I’m storming away!” I’m not ready to face him yet. I’m still fuming.

“Why?”

“It’s called a dramatic exit, and you’re ruining it.” Nature has provided all the drama an author could ask for: mountains and desert and a traffic-stopping thunderstorm. If West would’ve just left me alone, this would have been an extremely cool, cathartic moment.

Instead, his long strides easily keep pace with me. His height is pissing me off. Why does he have to be so tall?

“Mars.” He catches me by the crook of my elbow and turns me toward him. “Please talk to me.” His expression is bewildered, and if I had any sense at all, I’d stomp away and leave him wet and miserable and confused.

I hate myself a little when I don’t.

I want him to beg me on his hands and knees to stay.

I want it to hurt when I leave.

And the fact that any of that still matters to me is the reason I stay. If I had ever been capable of walking away from West, we wouldn’t be in this mess at all.

“I read your book.”

“I gathered.” West’s eyes are heavy with unspoken words that make me feel too many things. I drop my gaze to the raindrops sliding over his lips. No. I look at his chest. His shirt is plastered to every groove and hard line. My eyes slide back up to his face, and my rib cage feels like it’s been cracked open.

I grit my teeth. “It’s not fair.”

He nods, relieved that I’ve decided to stay and hash this out. “Which part?”

“You can’t write about me like that.”

His eyes narrow, his focus sharpening. “Like what?”

“Like you’re in love with me!”

West looks genuinely surprised. “I know you of all people aren’t trying to argue that art can’t be inspired by real life.”

“Not yours!” I step closer to him. “You lost the right to be inspired by me or write about me or even think about me the second you sat down with that journalist. If you think my books are trash—”

“You’ve seen what I think of your books, Darling.” His stern voice knocks me off-kilter. He read and reread and marked up my books like scripture, and I don’t know how to handle the cognitive dissonance this gives me.

“You had an interview with that same journalist scheduled today,” I accuse.

“I’ve been trying to schedule that interview for months, but she’s been giving me the runaround. She’s the one who canceled today’s call. I’ve been trying to publicly apologize for everything I said in the first article.”

I narrow my eyes. “Like when you said you didn’t want to be associated with me.”

Pain and regret are etched in every line in his face. “I need you to believe me when I say this: I was an idiot back then. I’ve been an idiot a lot, unfortunately, but especially during that time, with those people. What I said was awful, but if you walk away from this weekend with anything, I need you to know that I did not mean it. Not then, not now, not ever.”

“Those thoughts didn’t come from nowhere, West.”

He squares his shoulders. “Have you ever had a thought you didn’t believe?”

Every time I’ve told myself that I hate you, I can admit, but lying to myself is not the same thing as humiliating someone in public. “If you have something more to say, just say it.”

He presses his lips into a hard line. “Okay. I’ve been waiting seven years to explain this to you, and I don’t want to mess it up, but I hardly know where to start.” He paces back and forth on the road, his body restless as he sorts his thoughts. Finally, he rolls his shoulders and faces me again, fixing me with a determined, naked expression.

“I was so fucking insecure, Mars. Full stop. It’s embarrassing, but it’s the truth. From the moment you signed with Danielle, if not sooner, I knew that you were going to take over the world.”

I roll my eyes in disbelief, but he’s not having a second of it.

“Doubt me all you want, but your success was never even a question to me, Mars. I met you, and I fell in love with you, and I saw your path so clearly that it made my future all the more laughable. Who the fuck was I, to think I was good enough for you? I dropped out of school. I broke your heart when I couldn’t go to New York. I was replaced in a matter of hours—”

“West—” My voice rasps.

“Let me finish. I felt replaceable and discarded, and it confirmed all the insecurities that were already suffocating me.

“I stockpiled rejection letters. I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote, while the walls of my parents’ house closed in on me, but I didn’t let myself write about you, because I knew once I started, I’d have to take a hard look at my life and my choices, and they would be found wanting.” He is a man possessed, confessions pouring from his lips like honey.

“So then finally, finally, I make it to New York with an expanded version of a story I wrote in Dr. B’s class. It tanked—it wasn’t that good—but in exchange for hanging out with the worst crowd on the planet, a journalist was going to talk to me. About my writing, Mars. The one and only thing I had going for me. God, was I naive. I thought I’d done something worth talking about, but in the end, all she cared about was you.” The softness in his voice matches the tenderness in his eyes. His next words are a reverent whisper. “And how could she not? You are spectacular, Mars Darling.”

My head spins. “West,” I say again, not sure what’s on the other side of that plea.

He’s not done. “So she asked me about you, about us, and in a matter of seconds, I was reduced to a juicy bit of gossip. I’m not proud of it, but it brought back every doubt I’d ever had. About myself, about my career, about why you would want to be with a man who is a footnote in your biography. Years of pent-up self-loathing and frustration erupted. Frustration at my god-awful friends and with the journalist and with the fact that right when I almost had you, you had to leave for your own movie premiere! I was convinced that you’d land in London and realize that you’d made a mistake in letting me touch you again. I just…snapped,” he finishes at last. His eyes fall closed, and his shoulders relax with the unburdening.

I never got the impression from the article that West was losing his temper, but I forgot about his capacity for restraint. “Thank you for telling me.” I exhale the words, unsure if they’re the ones he wants to hear.

He steps close enough that I can see the raindrops clinging to his eyelashes.

I close my eyes and swallow the hard knot in my throat. It’d be so easy to lean into him and let him put his arms around me. “I wish I hated you more,” I whisper.

He cups my face in his hands and brushes his thumb over my cheek, wiping away either rain or tears. “I’m sorry for the article. Thinking about it makes me physically ill. And mostly I’m sorry that I ever let you or anyone else believe that I have not been amazed by you since the day we met.”

“Why did it take you so long to say that?” My voice breaks. I’m afraid the time apart has done us no favors.

“You blocked me on everything,” he points out. I start to protest (email exists!) but don’t get the chance. “I wrote you a letter. Several, actually, but I trashed them all until that last one.”

“I didn’t get a letter.”

“I didn’t send it. I still have it if you want to read it. I carried it with me for weeks, convinced every day that this would be the day I was brave enough to send it.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“It was a bad letter, full of excuses and self-sabotage and groveling.”

Despite myself, my mouth twitches. “I don’t mind a little groveling.”

He breathes a laugh. “Maybe it wasn’t so bad, after all. But the words felt wrong,” he says as one or both of us closes the last bit of distance. We’re so close now, trading air, inhaling each other’s syllables.

“Telling you that I was sorry was never going to be good enough. I needed to show you, but I didn’t know how. And then, after I’d had some time to reckon with what I’d done, the truth became painfully clear. I needed to fix my own shit. I needed to get out of New York and write something I was proud of. I needed to grow up. We wouldn’t have survived if we’d gotten together seven years ago, Mars. I wasn’t ready then.”

His words hang in the barely there space between us.

“And now?” I’m in a trance. Dazed by his proximity.

“I already told you: I’ve been waiting ten years. Just say go.” His husky voice scratches my skin like sandpaper. It’s almost enough to make me forget.

“How do I know this time will be different? That you don’t think I’m pathetic?” My voice cracks as I step away from West.

His eyes are wild and desperate as he pushes his hand through his curls. “Because I never have. I was upset, yes, but I was also terrified of your fans, Mars. They are relentless. I wanted to get rid of the connection between Fox and me so that no one on the internet would care if you and I tried to make a real go of it.”

“We’re not famous! We’re not Fox and Juniper. No one would have cared.”

“Maybe you’re right. But they combed through our history. They saved our college pictures and made the online equivalent of one of those crazy FBI string boards.” He drags a hand over his face. “It freaked me out, Mars. When I said all that, I just wanted them to go away, and I wanted them to see how invasive they were so that we could figure out how to be together without any eyes on us.” He’s dangerously close to groveling, just like I thought I wanted. I feel nauseous about all of it.

“Do you understand how that article destroyed me? How it flattened me so thoroughly that I blew up my career because of it? How am I ever supposed to forgive you for that?”

I’m not sure how it happened, but we’re standing inches apart again, forever doomed to orbit only each other.

He looks away as he rubs the side of his jaw. “Do you want to forgive me?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It’s the only thing that does.”

I swallow past the tears that threaten to overwhelm me and brush past him. “If you want me as much as you claim, you would have apologized,” I say over my shoulder.

“The book is the apology!” he shouts, forcing me to come face-to-face with what was clear from the first page. I stop walking.

For seven years, I’ve operated under the idea that West hates me. The article is the evidence, and cutting him out of my life was the conclusion. It was painfully easy to draw a line from A to B to C, until Drought came along and upended the premise. If none of my carefully drawn lines make sense, what does that mean for the one I’m keeping between us?

“I was trying to speak your language, Jupiter. Our language. The way we did from the very beginning. I was trying to get the words exactly, perfectly right, because I knew I’d only get one more chance. I didn’t contact that journalist before my book was out, because at the time, a public apology felt like a cop-out. It would have been too easy. I wanted to give you the apology that you deserved, and that wasn’t with some online statement that you had no reason to believe. It was only once I’d finished Drought and put it out into the world that I thought there was even a chance you’d forgive me.”

I close my eyes and take a bracing breath. West is wrong about one thing. There were days I was so sad and months that were so dark I would have accepted a public statement or an email or a note sent by carrier pigeon. Instead, he wrote me a whole damn book. A love letter on every page. He devoted the last several years of his life to apologizing the best way he knew how.

I turn toward him, one foot on a tightrope, unsure which way the wind will blow.

He takes a shuddering breath. “I don’t know if I deserve your forgiveness, but you once told me that’s not the reason to give it.”

My chest squeezes until I can’t breathe. Heat and fear and longing coil tight in my center.

I look at the strong lines of West’s jaw and the broad planes of his shoulders, and it’s hard to see the boy I fell in love with underneath the confident, determined man standing before me, but there are traces. In the rhythm of ink-stained fingers tapping against thighs. In the slow dip of dark lashes against his cheeks. In the way my brain settles when I’m with him, if only I can stop fighting instinct. And forever in the way he looks at me, and how I savor the heat of his gaze all the way down to my bone marrow.

Truth after truth piles up in my brain like a mudslide until I’m left with one question: Am I willing to make myself miserable just to prove a point? I find the answer in West’s eyes, and it’s the same as it was a decade ago.

I lick salt and rainwater off my lips. “Go.”

A whisper of a word crosses his features before he steadies himself and nods. Heartsick.

“If that’s what you want,” he says, and takes a step back.

“West. I’m saying go.”

He stares at me for a few breathless seconds, but when my meaning registers, he pounces. He reaches me in three strides and threads one hand through my hair until his palm rests on the back of my head. With his other hand on the small of my back, he pulls me in to him and holds me tight against his body as he bends his face to mine. His tongue sweeps over my bottom lip, and my mouth opens for him as I struggle to keep up. He is tall and hot and hard, his body firm against all my soft curves. Our clothes are soaking wet and paper-thin, and I press and press and press, needing him closer.

He kisses with abandon, his jaw working furiously, his tongue sweeping across mine. I tip my head back as his lips fall to my neck, then scrape my nails through his hair, pulling a low groan from him that crackles hotly at the base of my spine. “I’ve waited so long—so fucking beautiful—wanted to tell you—” He mutters words I barely comprehend as he marches me backward toward the car, his hands still firmly in place, his body steering me, holding me upright when my knees threaten to buckle.

We reach the truck, and he presses me back against the cab. He catches my bottom lip between his teeth and pulls, dragging slowly until it pops free. I’m drowning in sensation and the aching need to touch him everywhere, but my hands are shaking with nerves and years of anticipation. My breaths come out shallow and fractured.

Without breaking the delicious, wet contact between his lips and my neck, West gathers my wrists in his hand and holds them steady against his chest. “Breathe with me.”

I drag air through my teeth and exhale through my nose, and I cannot believe I’m getting this worked up over a kiss, like it’s the first time I’ve ever been touched. “Should we talk about this?” I gasp nonsensically.

“Respectfully, I’m tired of talking.” West drops my wrists and wrenches the back door open. “Get in,” he demands in a hoarse voice. It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever heard. It’s a torch pressed against sensitive skin. A swallowed match. I’m smoking, melting, turning to molten lava. I put my heel up on the running board and lift myself up into the back seat. He sees something on my face that makes him smirk.

“What?”

He shakes his head and puts his hands up on the doorframe. When he leans in for a kiss, I hold a finger to his lips. “Tell me.”

He presses his lips together, still fighting a smile. “In the past, I’ve asked you what you want. Now I know you like it better when I tell you.” He breaks into a wicked grin.

“West!” I shriek.

He tips his head back, laughing. All these years later, it still makes my insides glow. I still want to tattoo it on my eardrums. I lean in and press my lips to the hollow at the bottom of his throat. His laughter turns to a low groan. I flick my tongue against skin, and his hand shoots up to my thigh, under the hem of my dress. He swears under his breath.

I do it again, and he shakes his head, even as his tight grip holds me in place. “Wait, Mars.”

I pull away in surprise. “What?”

He grits his teeth as his chest heaves with the effort of holding back his wandering hand. “Help. On the way. If I— If we start—I don’t know if I’ll be able to stop.”

“Okay. Right. That makes sense,” I say through deep, shuddering breaths, even as my face grimaces. I writhe against the seat. I’m so turned on it’s almost painful.

He exhales through his nose and makes a quick decision as he pulls me out of the truck. Like before, he presses me against the cab, this time bracing his thigh between my legs. The noise that escapes me would be mortifying if I had the means to care. “Don’t move,” he says as his hands settle low on my hips and he shifts me farther up his leg until I’m in a position to grind against him. He pulls his head back. We make heated eye contact, electricity gathering in me like a storm cloud. After several motionless breaths, his hands slowly and deliberately roll my hips over his thigh.

He raises an eyebrow. Can I? Will you? he asks silently. I nod, and when he does it again, I gasp and scrabble for contact, sinking my fingers into his forearms. “There, yeah?” His mouth tilts up in a cocky grin. On the third press, my head falls forward to his shoulder. He gradually increases the pressure and pace until my hips are moving on their own, grinding down hard as he murmurs unheard words into my drenched hair.

A hysterical laugh bubbles out of me. “I can’t believe I’m grinding on you like a teenager,” I gasp between whimpers.

West flashes his wolfish grin. “I feel perpetually nineteen around you, Darling. I can’t help myself.” His fingertips sear into my hip bones as instinct takes over and my movements become desperate and jerky.

“That’s it, come on,” he says, the rasp of his voice enough to drag me to the edge. The tension coiling tight inside me becomes almost unbearable. “Come for me, Darling,” he whispers, and the exquisite friction, combined with his coaxing plea, is my unraveling. My orgasm hits hard and fast, and I bite my lip to keep from crying out as I muffle my face in West’s neck.

With one hand on my nape and one on my lower back, he holds me to his chest as the aftershocks subside, and I slowly melt into him. It takes a long moment for my breathing to settle, but when it does, I hide my grin in his chest. “Nineteen again, huh?”

“Fuck, Mars. I’d forgotten what it’s like with you.” He laughs in joy and disbelief, then presses a kiss to the crown of my head.

I glance between us, stomach fluttering again at the sight of his cock straining against his jeans. I move my hand down, but he stills it with his own as he reaches to smooth my dress over my thighs.

“Keep that thought, but not yet.” I’m about to ask why when he nods over my shoulder at the approaching truck. “Help has arrived.”