Chapter 23 - The Write Off

Present Day

I spent a lot of my mid-twenties in hotel rooms, and for a few years, it was extremely fun. Traveling to new cities, visiting bookstores across the country, meeting readers, visiting movie sets. Being an author on tour is the best level of famous because absolutely no one knows or cares who you are except for your own fans. I was almost never recognized in public, but my readers were thrilled to meet me at a signing or a conference. And after an event, there is nothing better than coming back to a hotel room, taking off my bra, and eating delivery while watching HGTV.

Tonight, my bra is off, a half-eaten poke bowl rests on my lap, and real estate porn is on mute in the background. Unfortunately, I can’t appreciate any of it. I toss a paperback to the end of the bed, where it joins a growing pile. I’ve read the same page five times, and I couldn’t tell you if I’m reading a mystery or a romance.

I stare at my Kindle. It’s taunting me from the nightstand. If I open it, I won’t have the self-control not to download Drought, and I don’t think I can handle that tonight. Now that I know the reason West refused to go to New York, buried guilt threatens to claw its way to the surface. The fact that he was drowning in fear and self-doubt while I was having sex with some guy I didn’t care about is a brutal thought. The last thing I need is to crawl inside West’s head and look around.

I groan and pull a pillow over my face.

My mind skips easily from if to if: If that agent had waited one day to send the rejection. If West had told me about it. If I’d not left the house, not gotten drunk, not tried to hurt West to get back at him for hurting me.

Ugh.

Now is not the time to fall into a depressive spiral. Tomorrow is too important. This book and this tour and this second chance are too important.

I need a distraction. Books aren’t cutting it. Reality TV isn’t cutting it. Not even a doomscroll is enough to get me out of my own head and my mind off West. I’ve got one thing left to try, and it’s the thing I tend to do when I’m desperately bored or incurably sad.

I redownload my dating apps.

I swore them off six months ago, after I spent an hour getting to Manhattan for a date only to be stood up, ghosted, and blocked without ever meeting the guy. But desperate times and all that.

I open an app that’s location based. I don’t want to meet anyone in Tucson—heaven forbid—but I’m so burned-out on the wannabe stand-up comedians and finance bros who are inescapable in the city. With any luck, the men of Tucson will be interesting enough to keep my mind off West for the night.

I spend the next hour numbly swiping through the profiles and am devastated to realize that bad dating profiles aren’t unique to New York.

Some things are different in the Southwest: I swipe left on too many pictures of men holding fish, men holding guns, men in the driver’s seat of a truck, wearing sunglasses that hide their entire face. There are also way too many guys who can’t be bothered to fill out their bio and ones who are looking for their “partner in crime.” I’m constantly surprised by the number of men who apparently need someone to rob a bank with. Don’t they have friends?

Eventually, I drift to sleep, and hours later, my phone is still open on Josh, 34 (Just ask) when a shrill alarm wrenches me from sleep. Instinctively, I check the phone still clutched in my hand, but the noise is coming from somewhere else. My brain plays catch-up as I blink sleep from my eyes. The alarm is blaring through the hotel, and I’m out of bed with my feet in sandals before I realize there’s a fire. My brain turns to autopilot; my body moves without direction. I race seven floors down the smoky stairwell and don’t stop running until I get to the crowded parking lot.

It’s chaos. People are everywhere. Parents clutch sleeping or crying kids in their arms. I’m weaving through the crowd in search of red hair when my phone lights up with a text from Daphne.

Sidewalk across the street.

I breathe an enormous sigh of relief. When I get to her, she quickly folds me into the blanket wrapped around her shoulders. We huddle together and watch smoke billow from the hotel.

“You’re a lifesaver,” I say, breath misting in front of me. I didn’t consider the nearly freezing weather when I left my room in a thin tank top and sweats, and my teeth chatter from a mixture of cold and adrenaline. Daphne clutches my hand as screaming fire trucks pull onto the scene. Ambulances follow closely behind, but soon enough, word spreads that no one is hurt, and some of the tension in the air dissipates. The fire was contained to several empty conference rooms, and aside from checking out a few people for smoke inhalation, the EMTs stand around without much to do.

Daphne and I sink to the curb and wait, adrenaline draining nearly as quickly as it arrived. She leans her head on my shoulder and drifts off. After what feels like hours, a man from the fire department gathers all the displaced guests and tells us that because of smoke damage, no one will be allowed back inside for several hours.

“Make other arrangements for the night,” he concludes.

Daphne yawns.

“Should we start calling hotels?” I ask.

“Doubt we’ll have much luck,” she says, gesturing to the people around us. Most of the families called other hotels immediately, and we hear loud groans and low mutters of “fully booked.” The city is packed due to the book festival; it’s not going to be easy to find an empty room in the middle of the night.

“I’ll call our mutual sabotage friend Jazz,” Daphne says. The phone rings until it goes to voicemail.

“We’re old now, Daph. No one we know is awake at this hour.” I drop my forehead to my knees and breathe into my hands to stay warm.

“I’m texting her. I’ll keep trying.”

“If nothing else, there’s a twenty-four-hour Waffle House down the street.”

“I can’t,” she says.

“Why not?”

“I’m wearing a crocheted nightgown.”

“Cute. Can I see?”

“It’s covered in holes.”

“As most crocheted things are.”

She opens the blanket, giving me a view of her chest.

I press a hand to my mouth to keep from laughing. “You’re right. Even for the Waffle House at two a.m., it’s too much nipple.”

“And that’s only the top half.” She cinches the blanket tighter around us. “What now?”

“I don’t know.” My ass is numb from cold concrete.

“What about your old roommate?”

“Amber moved to Oregon a few years ago.” I scrub my hands over my face. “If I’d been better about keeping in touch with people from college, we’d have more options.”

“Well, we have at least one option.” She stares at me pointedly.

“No.”

“What else are we going to do? Sit here half-naked and turn into Popsicles for the next six hours?”

“I knew you’d understand.”

“I absolutely don’t.”

“I can’t, Daph,” I whine.

She pulls the blanket from my shoulders and wraps it snugly around herself. “You owe me.” I start to protest, but she continues. “For helping your ill-fated revenge scheme and for not even trying with your sourdough starter.”

I knew that sourdough would come back to bite me in the ass. “Fine! I’ll try, but I can’t promise he’ll answer.”

She rolls her eyes. “He will.”

West answers after one ring, his voice sounding shockingly coherent for the middle of the night. “What’s wrong?”

I walk out of Daphne’s earshot. “My hotel caught on fire.”

“What?” he barks.

“I’m fine.”

He swears under his breath. “Lead with that next time.”

“Sorry.”

“You need somewhere to stay?” Mercifully, his intuition saves me from having to ask. I wonder absently if he’s in bed. If his pajamas are appropriate for Waffle House.

I’m in so much trouble.

“Daphne and I both do.”

“On my way.”

I squirm at the thought. “We can Uber. Text me your address and leave a key under the mat. We’ll find a couch to crash on.”

“I’m already in the car.” The timbre of his voice tells me he’s rolling his eyes hard.

“Are you wearing a shirt?”

He swears again, this time exasperated instead of annoyed. “I’ll see you soon,” he says in a low, gruff voice that sends a shiver down my spine. For some reason, his words register like a warning.

I rejoin Daphne under the blanket. “He’s on his way.”

“I could tell. You had that smile on your face.”

“The smile that means we’re not going to die of hypothermia?”

“The smile that means you’re thinking about West. Your eyes get kind of big and crazy, too.”

“Sounds flattering,” I say dryly. After a few minutes, I turn to her. “Do you really think my revenge scheme is ill-fated?”

“Do you think it’s going well?”

That’s enough conversation for now, I think.

Less than fifteen minutes after our phone call, West pulls his pickup truck parallel with the curb. Daphne and I stand, and I wonder what her plan is, blanket-wise. Does she care if West sees her nipples?

Do I?

(Yes. Yes, I do.)

West steps out of his car as a yellow Volkswagen Beetle pulls up to the curb behind him. “I think that’s Jazz,” Daphne says, and my relief is staggering. Jazz leans across the empty passenger seat and waves.

“Perfect! We’ll go with her! Sorry for bringing you all the way out here,” I tell West as he holds the passenger door open. He’s wearing gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt, with slippers on his feet and glasses on his nose. It’s a combination of choices that makes my throat dry.

Jazz rolls the window down. “Who’s coming with me?”

“Both of us!” I’m emphatic, leaving zero room for discussion.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing the couch,” she says.

“Nope!”

“Or cats. I have four.”

I tug the blanket toward the Volkswagen.

“You’re allergic to cats,” West says.

“No, I’m not!”

“Yes, you are,” Daphne says.

“I’ll take a Benadryl,” I say tightly.

Daphne turns to me. “I love you, Mars, but not enough to be the big spoon, and especially not enough to wake up every thirty minutes and make sure your throat hasn’t closed up.”

I blink at her. “I’ll take the floor.”

She presses her hands together, pleading. “It’s the middle of the night, we’re both freezing, and there’s an obvious solution here.”

“But—”

“I’m not above begging, Mars. I can barely keep my eyes open.”

I glance over my shoulder at West. He’s leaning patiently against the open door with his arm draped over the top. He raises one eyebrow in a move that feels like a dare.

I exhale heavily. “Okay.”

Daphne pulls the blanket off my shoulders and pushes me toward West. “Don’t give me a reason to hate you,” she warns him.

“Another reason,” I remind her.

“Hmm?”

“You already hate him. You don’t need another reason.”

“Don’t worry. I don’t bite,” he says as I slide into the front seat. He rests his palm on the top of the doorframe and leans in so only I can hear him. “Hard.”

West shuts the door with an ominous thud. There’s no going back now. I inhale slowly as I buckle my seat belt, the scent inside the truck making my head swim. It smells like I crawled into West’s lap and stuck my face in his neck.

He turns the heat up, puts his hand on my headrest, and angles his body toward me as he backs up the car. “So, you really didn’t want to go home alone with me, huh?”

I’m in dangerous proximity to his forearm. “Not really.”

“Just so we’re clear, I was joking about biting.”

“So, it will be hard?”

I expect him to take a shot back, but his expression sobers. “I want you to feel comfortable tonight. It won’t be a repeat of last night.”

I roll my eyes. “That’s a very honorable speech, but it’s not you I don’t trust.”

“Oh?”

I squirm in my seat, suddenly on fire. I might not trust West with my feelings, but I fully trust him with my safety. He wouldn’t do anything that I don’t want him to do. The problem is, he might do some of the stuff I do want, and that’s not a good idea. I press my knees together and crack the window open to get some cool air.

“Was that the woman who asked a bunch of awkward questions at my panel this afternoon?”

“Yep.”

“And she’s friends with Daphne?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Unbelievably, the corner of his mouth quirks up. “Got it.”

“It sounds insane when you say it out loud.”

“I wonder why that would be.”

I suppress a laugh. He’s not even mad. Daphne was right; I have no future in revenge.

I shift toward him and lean against the headrest, staring shamelessly. The silence settles, and I suddenly have the alarming thought that I could stay like this for the rest of the night, breathing his air and watching the way streetlights create shadows on his crooked nose, his sharp jaw. I can’t get enough of him. It feels like making up for lost time. In lieu of the last ten years, I’ll accept a few stolen minutes in a dark car.

His fingers flex on the steering wheel. “You know how to make a guy self-conscious, Darling.” His hoarse voice makes my blood hum.

“I won’t mess with you anymore,” I say.

He throws me a cautious glance. “Why not?”

I shrug. “I’m not very good at it.”

He laughs loud enough to indicate his agreement.

“Even so,” I continue, the words pulled out of me by the late hour and the small space, “it was petty. And it doesn’t feel right now that I know what I know. I’m sorry.”

“Now that you know I used to be a tragic, insecure loser who was scared of your success?” he asks.

I don’t know if he’s being sarcastic or serious, so I let the comment drop. It’s too late to relitigate the past tonight, and I want to stay a little longer in this bubble with him, pretending that a small but very vocal group of chronically online Torchers wouldn’t find it outrageous that I’m on my way to sleep at his house.

“I didn’t mind when you were messing with me,” he says after a long stretch of silence, and I wonder if he’s as sleep-deprived as I am. Maybe he’s delirious.

“How quickly you’ve forgotten that you showed up to the bar last night in my book merch.”

“I like knowing that you’re thinking about me.”

“What else is new?” He’s never going to let me forget that I was once so obsessed with him it inspired a half-billion-dollar franchise.

West turns off the main road into a neighborhood with charming tree-lined streets. We pass Whitman, then Elmwood, then Burns. He turns onto Poe Street and pulls into the driveway of a redbrick mid-century modern home with a black front door.

“Tell me the truth. Did you buy this house because it’s on Poe Street?” I ask.

West turns the car off. “Welcome to Poet’s Square.”

I laugh, no longer sleepy. I haven’t pulled an all-nighter since I was on deadline for my second book, but I’m feeling the same lightness in my chest that used to hit around this time. “That’s cute. Did you come up with that?” Regrettably, I love it.

He laughs. “It’s the name of the neighborhood, but I won’t pretend it wasn’t a contributing factor toward purchasing this home. C’mon. Let’s go inside.”

“Full moon tonight?” I ask as we walk up the stone path to his door.

“I think so, why?”

I pause, hands on my hips. “Have you done the thing?”

“What thing?”

“West!” I gasp, grabbing his arms. “You have to do the thing!” I tip my head back and howl at the moon. When I lower my chin, West is watching me in awe.

“I haven’t thought about that in so long.”

“Your turn.” I squeeze his biceps, and his pupils double in size. We howl together, too loud and too silly. By the time he unlocks the door and I’m lurching inside, tears of laughter are streaming down my cheeks.

The hall is dark, illuminated only by moonlight, and the door clicking shut lands like an anvil in my ears. West crosses his arms, lifts one foot, and presses it against the door, staring at me intently.

My throat goes dry. I hear nothing but my own shallow breaths.

His soft shirt clings to his body, his sweatpants low on his hips in a way that makes it hard to look anywhere else. I want to curl his eyelashes around my finger and trace the shape of his nose. I want to run my thumb over his lips, then follow it with my tongue.

“So, this is it, huh?” I ask, breaking eye contact. “I wonder where you stash the typewriters.”

He flips on a light and leads me into the kitchen. In the bright overhead light, I remember that I’m braless, in pajamas, with smoke in my hair and clinging to my skin.

“Can I get you anything?” he asks as he pours a glass of water and sets it on the counter in front of me.

I drag my fingertip over the rim of the cup. “Just somewhere to sleep, and then you can pretend I’m not here.”

“Not possible,” he says in a low voice that stirs something inside me. “My bedroom is this way.” He points down a long hall just off the kitchen.

“Your bedroom?” I ask sharply, my pulse jumping to wild conclusions.

He scratches the back of his neck, looking nervous. “It’s the only bed in the house. I’ll show you.” He leads me down the hall to a room that is clearly his office. It’s empty with the exception of a small desk, a laptop, an open notebook, and a handful of blue ink pens.

“Were you writing when I called?”

He confirms, thus quashing my daydream of him jumping shirtless out of bed.

The next room contains a set of weights and half a dozen moving boxes pushed against the wall. I look at him with a raised eyebrow.

“I haven’t been here that long,” he says defensively.

“Where are you going to sleep?” I ask dubiously. “A couch?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t fit. I’m too big.” His words hang in the silence between us as we make eye contact for a bit too long. I slap my hand over my mouth to suppress more giggles. “Get your mind out of the gutter,” he scolds. But when he turns away, I don’t miss the smirk he’s trying to hide. “I’m too tall, and it’s murder on my back. I’ll blow up an air mattress in here.”

“Oh, I can take that.”

“Not happening.” He motions for me to follow him. We stop at the open door of West’s bedroom. I survey the large bed with white sheets and a dove-gray comforter. The room is tidy but lived-in, a jacket draped over the back of a reading chair in the corner, a water bottle by the bed, a stack of books on the floor.

I put the back of my hand to my forehead and pretend to swoon against the doorframe.

“I forgot that you get a little weird when you’re tired,” West says.

“You have a headboard! And pillowcases!”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“I once hooked up with a guy who kept a bottle under his bed that he would pee in when he was too lazy to get up.”

West looks deeply disturbed.

“I was in a situationship for nine weeks with another guy who had a mushroom growing in his shower the whole time.” I double over, giggling at the disgusting memory. “And then he ghosted me!”

“Fucking hell, Mars!”

“What? I’m giving you a compliment! You should learn to take it!” I shove him lightly on the shoulder.

His eyes follow the path of the hand that touched him. “Why would you settle for that? Surely you know that you’re—” He snaps his jaw shut. The muscle works. “You deserve better than a condemned building,” he says somewhat lamely.

“I know. That’s why you don’t see me with any of them now. But the city, my job—it’s lonely.” I shrug as the words tumble unexamined from my lips. “And most of the guys who ask me out still act like boys. But look at you.” I gesture to the room, the house, him. “You have your shit together. You’re an adult. A man.”

Heat crawls up my spine. What the hell was that? I meant it as a general acknowledgment of the passage of time, but one look at West’s gobsmacked expression tells me that my diatribe sounds as bad as I fear. Like I’m measuring West against the people I date, and he comes out on top.

Trouble left the station a long time ago. I am well and truly fucked.

“I don’t know why I said that,” I say in a quick breath.

West’s eyes darken as the air between us shifts, stretching taut, pulling us together—though we don’t move. My slaphappy mood sobers, and desire melts through me, dripping slowly, pooling, gathering, simmering until I’m molten. Want reaches every part of my body. Tightening my chest and gathering between my thighs and making my toes curl. I worry my bottom lip between my teeth and suddenly remember West’s words. I don’t bite. Hard. Another flush of my skin, and impossibly, his gaze grows hungrier. His intent is familiar, but the intensity is new.

I glance over my shoulder at the bed, and when I meet his eyes again, all the corded muscles in his neck and arms are visible. His hand flexes on the doorknob for the length of time it takes to build an empire and watch it collapse.

“If you don’t say something right now, I’ll walk to Jazz’s house and take my chances with the cats,” I say in a voice much huskier than I intended.

His expression is tortured, and I can’t tell if my outburst has horrified or intrigued him. I take half a step toward him at the exact moment West tears his eyes away. The tension defuses. He clears his throat and points toward the connecting bathroom. “You’ll find clean towels in the linen closet. T-shirts are in my dresser.”

Horrified, then. Good to know.

I blink at him, unsure how I misread the situation so astronomically.

“I, uh, assume you want to get out of your smoky clothes.”

“Thanks.” I don’t trust myself to say more.

“If you leave your clothes in the hall, I’ll wash them so you have something to wear in the morning.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“But I will,” he says, leaving no room for debate. I nod once.

West stands in the space between the hall and the bedroom for another minute, looking like a man desperate to confess his deepest secrets, but with a final clench of his jaw, he says, “Night, Darling,” and backs slowly away.

I watch him retreat to the room across the hall and pretend the feeling in my gut isn’t disappointment. For a few heart-stopping seconds, I thought he’d finally found the words he promised me a decade ago. The right ones, whatever that means. Logically, however, I know I’m better off with his silence. The right words no longer exist between West and me.

Showering in West’s bathroom is as weird and wonderful as I expected. I can’t help but pick up and inspect everything: his razor, his shaving cream, shampoo, conditioner, bodywash. I huff them all until I get high off the scent of him for old time’s sake, letting myself do what twenty-year-old Mars could only dream of.

I’ve been tiptoeing into dangerous territory all night, but now I fling myself in headfirst.

I wear one of his soft T-shirts, which hangs to my knees. No underwear. His shirt feels indecent as I slide the cotton over my skin. The hem brushes against my bare thighs, and I have a hunch that I’m going to feel the imprint of the soft stitches for a long time.

I approach West’s bed on cautious tiptoe, though I’m not sure what I’m scared of. I kneel on the floor and inspect the stack of books. I’ve only read a few of them. My heart thunders as I slowly slide open his bedside drawer. The scrape of wood is as loud as church bells. I hold my breath and wait to be caught snooping, but the house is quiet, and I resume my excavation.

The drawer is nearly empty, aside from a handful of condoms and a small stack of papers.

I make a promise to myself that I won’t read anything as I pick up the stack and thumb through it quickly. There are a few cards. A letter. West’s passport and birth certificate. What looks like the closing documents for this house. Sticking out of a corner near the bottom of the pile is a piece of bright blue paper that catches my eye. I flip to it, and there’s a brief moment of confusion as I stare at my own signature below a scrawled note that says Margot Darling’s #1 Fan.

A joke I made in another lifetime. A throwaway moment that I haven’t thought about since.

Quiet footsteps pass the door. I dump everything back in the drawer and jump to my feet, heart pounding recklessly in my chest. By the time I slide between West’s sheets, I’m wide-awake, vibrating with sensory overload, unsure I’ll survive the night.