by Carrie Quest
No. The big reveal is that my writing group is totally useless.
“I got another revise and resubmit,” Eli says. “I didn’t even bother to answer the email.”
I’m sitting as far away from him as possible because he doesn’t appear to like showering any more than he likes requests for revisions these days.
“What was the feedback?” I ask.
“Who cares? I’m not going to do it.”
“Valid choice,” Karen says. Carole nods along and clicks her coffee mug against Eli’s.
“Have you two started sending out letters yet?”
Karen shakes her head and blows her bangs out of her eyes. “I need another round of revisions,” she says. “Maybe two. At least.”
I happen to know she’s been revising the same book for two years, which seems like a lot. I mean, the thought of wrestling with Tag for two years makes me want to erase my hard drive and sign up for an entire semester’s worth of business classes. It would kill me dead.
“I need more time too,” Carole says. She pulls her black cardigan tight around her shoulders and hugs herself. “It has to be perfect, right? You only get the…”
“One shot,” we all chorus out. One shot has become our battle cry this summer.
Except, now that I think about it, maybe it’s more like our funeral dirge.
The others bring their cups together, but I keep mine on the table, staring at the foam on top of my latte. Watching the tiny bubbles pop.
None of them seem to notice I’m not joining in. Karen hands out copies of the chapter she wants us to read for next time. I glance at it and realize we’ve already critiqued it. Twice.
“I’ve tweaked a few things,” she says. “Let me know what you think of the changes.”
“Excellent,” Monique says. “Well done. You keep going until you’re comfortable.”
It’s hot as hell today, even in the shade of the outside patio, and I stare at Monique as she bunches her masses of red curls up on top of her head, holding it up so she can fan her neck with the sheaf of papers Karen handed her.
“I’ll have some poems for you all next week,” she says. “Still waiting for the muse to arrive and finish what he’s started.”
She’s been saying the same thing all summer, so either her muse is on vacation or he got hit by a bus. Either way, the fucker’s not showing up anytime soon.
“Ah, the elusive muse,” Carole says.
“We are but slaves,” Monique agrees.
Carole nods sadly, like maybe her muse took her number but then never called.
“Maybe you should go out and look for him,” I suggest.
Monique shakes her head. She drops her hair first and the scent of her shampoo hits me as she moves: cloves and patchouli. It reminds me of the time I got wasted freshman year and smoked clove cigarettes with a guy who lived down the hall from me in the dorms.
I have never puked so much in my life.
I hold my breath and scoot my chair away, pretending to be reaching for my bag.
“A muse never allows himself to be found,” she says. I know she probably only half believes what she’s saying, that it’s all part of the cape-wearing writer-guru persona she trots out from time to time, but it still pisses me off. I bite down on my lip to keep from arguing, because I still need that letter, and she has helped me quite a bit this summer. When she isn’t spouting new-agey bullshit, she’s actually a pretty good teacher.
I’m beginning to suspect, however, that she hasn’t written a word in a very long time. Which, whatever, right? If it doesn’t bother her, then it shouldn’t bother the rest of us.
But it does bother me, because I wish she’d be honest about it instead of banging on about muses and shit.
“I got another R-and-R as well,” I say. “From the first agent who requested. She’s waiting for me to nail down the love story, but I still can’t get it. I’ve tried outlining, mapping the scenes out on cards, doing character dossiers…everything I can think of. I just can’t get it all to fit, you know? It’s like I’m looking at one of those optical illusions, trying to relax my eyes so I can see the picture, and I can’t do it. A couple times I’ve maybe gotten a glimpse, but it’s gone before my brain can catch up.”
I look around the table. Eli is staring at me with a look of disgust, which is rich coming from him. Karen’s maniacally ripping up sugar packets, and Carole looks terrified, like I’ve spent the last minute or two describing in intimate detail how I’m going to kill her chinchilla and use his skin for a muff.
“Have any of you experienced this?” I ask. “Any suggestions?”
Crickets. Not even just silent crickets. Crickets who have been murdered and beheaded and had their little lacey wings torn off.
Dead fucking crickets.
“Stop writing for a month or two,” Eli finally says. His face is still fixed in a sour scowl, but it’s fully possible that has nothing to do with me. He could just be smelling himself.
“Maybe start a new project?” Carole says timidly. “This one might not be meant to be.”
“I have to finish,” I say firmly. “She’s waiting. She wants to see it. I don’t have a choice.”
Carole shrugs. “If your muse isn’t feeling it, then you have to move on. You can always come back to it in a year or two. I have plenty of projects tucked away, patiently waiting for me to finish them someday.”
At that moment I am hit with a feeling so unfamiliar I have to close my eyes for a beat or two and sort out what the hell is going on in my head. When I do, I can’t believe it.
I actually miss my mother. My no-nonsense, workaholic, batshit basket-metaphor-weaving mother. Because if I was having this conversation with her, she sure as shit wouldn’t tell me to wait for some flaky muse to show up, she’d tell me to sit my ass down and do it myself. Now.
And she’d be right.
I’m hearing my mother’s voice in my head and I’m actually agreeing with her.
I keep my eyes screwed shut so long Monique reaches over and pats me on the back.
“There’s no shame in taking a break, Natalie,” she says. “If this agent is rushing you, then she’s not the right person to represent your work. I’ve got a friend who will be delighted to see it when you manage to finish. She’s at a reputable agency and I’ve sent a few people her way. We have an arrangement. I’m sure I’ve mentioned her before, when I told you we’d work something out in exchange for our meetings.”
An arrangement. The coffee churns in my stomach and I swallow hard before opening my eyes.
“Like a finder’s fee?”
Monique shrugs and waves her hand. “Something like that. We can discuss it when you’re ready.”
“Right.” I give her a quick smile and look away. Of course she wasn’t helping me solely out of the goodness of her heart. My chest is tight, and I can feel tears building even though I know it’s ridiculous. She obviously thinks I have talent, that I’m good enough to impress her friend and get published.
Still, it’s shitty to realize she’s been giving me her time and attention all along not because she saw something beautiful in me, but because she saw something she thinks she can sell.
This day needs to be over. I am so desperate to crawl into my own bed right now I would even welcome Chuckles with open arms. At least he openly expresses his intentions to claw the living hell out of me.
He’s a monster, but he’s honest.
“It’s time for our favorite game!” Karen slaps a magazine down on the table and does a little shimmy in her chair.
I look down, grateful for the distraction, and see a journal that all of them have mentioned wanting to submit to. When they’re ready, of course.
“Let’s see what crap they published this month,” Karen says. She flicks it open to the table of contents and starts scanning. “Oooooh, this one’s called Songs of My Mother.”
Eli groans and everyone else giggles.
“Mothers are so overdone,” Carole says. “Ho
nestly. Have some originality.”
Karen nods. “Shall I read it out loud?”
“A critique can’t hurt,” Monique says. She winks. “I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot.”
The tone of her voice suggests the opposite, but I have zero interest in sitting here and listening to them rip a story apart just to be dicks about it, so I stand up.
“I’m going to skip the critique,” I say. “I need the writing time.”
“It’s not a long one today,” Karen says. “Stay! Write later.”
Eli checks his phone. “Happy hour starts in thirty minutes. Two-for-one draft beers.”
I shake my head. “I’ve got to go, and I’ll probably be in the writing cave for the next few weeks, so I might not make it again this summer. Keep in touch.”
I say my goodbyes, leaving Monique until last. She stands up and pulls me into a hug. “Thanks for everything,” I whisper.
“Send it to me when you finish,” she says.
I nod, but I think we both know I probably won’t.
As soon as I’m out of sight, I pull out my phone and dial the only person I can stand to talk to right now.
Piper answers on the first ring. “I was seriously just about to call you. I got done early. Want to meet me for dinner and a movie?”
She mentions a mall halfway between Boulder and Denver that has a theater and a bunch of restaurants. Heaven.
“Can the food be fried, and the movie have shirtless guys?” I ask.
She laughs. “Maybe even pantless, if we play our cards right.”
“I’m there. See you in an hour.”
She beats me to the restaurant and is sitting at a table with a basket of curly fries in front of her when I walk in.
“Help yourself,” she says, pushing it forward. “You sounded like you needed it.”
I can’t really answer because I’ve got a curly fry wrapped around my tongue, but I nod vigorously.
Piper helps me destroy the fries and then murmurs “good idea” when I order another basket to go with my cheeseburger. This is why she’s my best friend.
“What’s going on?” she asks after the waiter brings us our beers and disappears to tell the kitchen they’re going to need a bigger fryer.
“My parents found out I dropped the class, Ben and I got in a fight, my writing group are a bunch of useless jerks, and I haven’t written a word in days.” I hold up my hand, ticking off my points until only my middle finger is left. “Basically, I’m fucked.” I smile and gulp down half my beer. “How was your day?”
“One of my patients wiped out next to the pool and hit his head, my computer ate all my case notes, and Adam yelled at me and kicked me out of his room.”
I wince. “Shit. Is the patient okay?”
“Yeah, I think so, but it was scary. I was freaked, so I went to talk to Adam to, you know, calm down. But he went nuts and started screaming.”
“When was this?”
She shrugs. “This morning. Why?”
“He was texting Ben nonstop this morning. I think it has to do with the accident. Ben flipped. He said something about everything being his fault and then he took off.”
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling her this, but I need my best friend.
Piper taps her fingers on her lips, lost in thought. “Did he say why?”
“He wasn’t in a talking mood,” I say. Then hastily add, “I guess I wasn’t either,” because it’s not like I really tried to be that supportive.
“I knew there was something,” Piper says. “The way he acted after the accident was so weird, you know?”
“Yeah.” At the time I honestly thought Piper was overreacting a little when she freaked out about Ben disappearing and not calling her back, but now that I know him, I understand why. It’s not in his nature to ignore someone he cares about.
“Do you think you can forget Ben’s your brother for five minutes?”
Piper crinkles up her nose like I just asked her to smell a cow patty. “Not if it’s about sex,” she says.
“The sex is not the problem,” I say.
She holds up her hand. “That right there? That’s a little too close to talking about the sex.”
“Seriously? I didn’t even say anything about his tongue or his—”
A sugar packet bounces off my nose. “Enough! You’ve got five sexless minutes. Go.”
“He told me he didn’t have time for girlfriend shit,” I say. My voice is small, because saying the words out loud, even in a whisper, hurts. “I was really upset about my parents, and he left anyway. Adam kept calling, and he was out the door.”
She’s silent for a few minutes. The food comes, and she takes the onions off my plate and gives me her pickle.
“Ben cares about you a lot,” she finally says. “I’ve never seen him like this with anyone. He’s certainly never called anyone else his girlfriend.”
“I know.”
“But if he went to see Adam, it was about snowboarding. Maybe the accident, maybe something else, but definitely snowboarding. And that’s his whole life.”
“Was,” I correct her. “It was his whole life.”
She smiles at me, but her eyes are sad. “That’s what he’s saying now, yeah.”
“You think he’ll change his mind?”
“I think it’s about the accident,” she says. “He’s working through something. Maybe he’s scared, maybe he blames himself, I don’t know. But I do know my brother. He’s been eating, sleeping, breathing snowboarding since he strapped on his first Burton, and I can’t see him giving it all up. Not unless he really did blow his knee.”
Nobody with a blown knee could be doing the kind of runs that turn Thor into a puppy puddle for the rest of the day.
And no guy I’ve ever met would give up a morning blowjob because someone startled him by kissing his knee, not unless he had something to hide.
“I think the knee is okay,” I whisper. I’ve been pushing that thought down all summer, but ignoring it won’t make it go away.
Piper covers my hand with hers. “I think so too,” she whispers back, then hands me a handful of napkins.
The tears make my cheeseburger taste a little salty, but I power through because I’m tough like that. We watch a ridiculous movie with hot superheroes fighting aliens, and I try to concentrate, but the image of Ben slamming out the door keeps playing in my mind. He left.
And he’s going to do it again. Soon.
26
Ben
Nat’s car is gone when I get home. She left a note saying she’s meeting Pipes for dinner and a movie, and when I text her, she doesn’t reply, so maybe they’re at the show. Or maybe she’s so pissed she doesn’t want anything to do with me.
I walk Thor and then I pace. I try to look up plane tickets, find a condo in Wanaka, dig through the shit downstairs for my gear…but nothing can hold my attention for more than ten minutes. My laptop’s open on the table, my room looks like there was a snowboard factory explosion, and there are little scraps of paper all over the place. Lists I started making every time the car hit a red light on my way home.
For the first ten minutes of the drive I was still buzzing from the relief high of coming clean to Adam. Then I started to think about snowboarding, and it felt like my brain was completely back online for the first time in months. All the little things I’d pushed aside and not allowed myself to think about came rushing back: the cold, clean smell when you breathe in and the night air feels a little bit heavier in your lungs because snow is coming. The crowd cheering when someone’s in the half-pipe, their voices rising and falling as the rider whizzes up and down the walls. The absolute silence when you’re the first one on the lift in the morning, everyone else still sleeping off their binges as you breathe out clouds of steam and glide over trees laden with ice crystals.
Most of all, the way time stands still and all thoughts fade away when I start a run, and my whole existence is my body moving in perfect harmony with the board and t
he snow and the mountain. No doubts. No fear. No guilt or pain. Just pure exhilaration that I’ve never experienced anywhere else.
I thought it was all over, and as much as I tried to convince myself I could build another life, I can see now that I was in denial. I need this.
But I also need Nat, and I don’t think I can go back to the person I used to be. Sure, I’m already making lists of what I should be eating and notes about my training program, but that doesn’t mean I can snap back into being the same old machine. I still want to have a life, and I want Nat to be in it.
I just wish she’d fucking come home so I can find out if that’s what she wants too.
She doesn’t show until after midnight, which gives me plenty of time to freak the fuck out and run every single scenario in my head of how our conversation might go. I almost resort to the bottle of vodka Pipes keeps in the freezer, but I want my mind to be sharp.
I’m sprawled on the sofa flipping channels like a madman when her headlights flash through the windows. I click off the TV and jump up because sitting down now is impossible. It’s taking all my self-control not to rush outside and drag her out of her car, so I can apologize. Instead, I hover at the foot of the stairs, drumming my hands on the banister, and wait.
When she finally opens the door, I just want to grab her and hug her. She looks tired, and sad, and it guts me because most of that is my fault.
“Hi,” she says. Thor rushes her, and she smiles at him and rubs his ears, but she doesn’t look me in the eye, just scoots past me and sinks down on the sofa with a sigh.
“Hey.” I clear my throat and head over to the chair because I doubt she wants me next to her right now. We stare at each other for a minute and fuck this is awkward, which makes no sense at all because this morning I was inside her and she screamed her orgasm into my mouth. How is it possible that we can’t even speak right now, especially when there’s so much to say?
“I’m really sorry about this morning,” I finally say. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. I was a dick, and you didn’t deserve it.”
She holds my eyes and she looks so fucking sad I just want to hug her, but I’m too scared to try in case she pushes me away.
