In Too Hard (Freshman Roommates Trilogy, Book 3)

by Mara Jacobs

  “Um…well…I know you’ve been reluctant to show me anything you were working on in the past, but…”

  That was because there was never anything beyond chapter one. But, still…I wasn’t sure I was ready for feedback yet. At least not from my agent. “I don’t think it’ll be too much longer before I can send you the completed first draft. That might be best.”

  “Of course. Really, you think you’ll…complete it? Soon?”

  I laughed at Nora’s inability—even being the shark that she was—to hide her shock.

  “Yes, Nora, this one will be completed. And if I can get a couple of glitches figured out, it will probably only be three or four weeks. Of course, there will be edits and—”

  “Oh, my God, Billy! That is such great news.” Nora had been a great agent for me, leading me through the process of first time publication with tough love, but patience. To now hear what sounded like tears in her voice…it made me feel both joyous and shitty that it had taken five years to get to this point.

  Let the rest of the bullshit go. I’d said to Jane Winters. That’s all behind me. It was all…pre-Syd.

  I was vaguely paying attention as Nora went on and on about her game plan for the book. I made the necessary noises, but my mind wandered to Syd.

  I had thought that Bribury was what I needed to kick-start my writing, at the very least to get out of NYC and the various distractions the city held for me.

  But I’d been at Bribury for a semester and had never even come close to typing “Chapter Two.”

  It was only after working with Syd, talking with Syd, making love to Syd, that things became…unclogged, and I was able to let my thoughts flow freely on the page.

  As if I’d conjured her up, there was a knock on the door and she stuck her head in. Seeing I was on the phone, she started to back out of the semi-open door, but I motioned her in. She waved to me and then proceeded to take off her coat, boots, hat and mittens.

  “Okay, Nora, that all sounds good. Hold off on anything concrete, though, okay?” I said, not really having heard all she’d said. Certainly nothing since Syd had taken off her coat and I saw she was wearing those skin-tight, stretchy legging things that all the Bribury girls were wearing. Syd had on a long sweater hiding all the best parts, but I knew very well what I would find underneath that bulky, black wool. And I’d soon be refreshing my memory.

  “Okay, sure,” Nora said, drawing my mind back to the conversation. But my eyes stayed on Syd as she took a pile of papers from the credenza and headed over to the couch with her backpack. “But, Billy?” Nora said.

  “Yes?”

  “How about I have some casual lunches and just let it…slip that you’re close to being done. Just to, you know, get a buzz started. Would that be okay with you?”

  “How long can we sustain a buzz?”

  “For you? At least six months.”

  “I won’t need six months. Unless you read it and think it needs four months of work.”

  I could tell she was wondering which way to go. Be prudent and possibly deflate me, or… “There won’t be four months’ worth of work, Billy. I’m sure it will be great.”

  Nora wasn’t one of the top literary agents for nothin’.

  “Okay, then. Just a casual slip. Don’t let them think we’re shopping yet. And make sure Adina is one of the people who hears the news.”

  Adina Saunders had been my editor with Folly and had really smoothed out my first-time edges and helped shape the book. Because of the deal we’d held out for, we didn’t have to bring it to her first, but I wanted to give her that courtesy. I’d take the best deal for me and for Down in Flames (assuming I was offered any deal), but I wanted to give Adina a chance to match it so we could work together again.

  “Got it. As it so happens, I’m having lunch with her next week.”

  “Great. Then hold off on any other leaks until you have lunch with her. Let her be the first to hear it.”

  “Will do. Are you sure you don’t want me to take a look at what you’ve got so far?”

  I swallowed, thinking. It just didn’t feel right. “Nah, I’m good right now. I just want to finish it.”

  “Super. Okay, I—Oh, Christ, I almost forgot the reason I called you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, but we’ve been getting mail again from an overzealous reader. Another Folly Dolly.”

  “Kari Aldrich again?” I said, naming my most persistent fan/stalker. I noticed Syd’s head move when I mentioned another woman’s name, but she didn’t look up from her work.

  No need, she had nothing to worry about. Crazy fan girls (who got absolutely no attention from me) aside, these days I wasn’t looking at anyone but Syd.

  “No, a new one. I just wanted to give you a heads-up. Her name is Sarah Tudreau. The usual kind of letters…‘she feels she knows you’ and ‘she knows you’re her soul mate.’ You know the drill.”

  I sighed. “Anything I need to do?”

  “No. We’ve sent her the standard letter. And are prepared to send her the more strident one if we keep hearing from her. It helps that you’re not at your apartment. This one lives in the city.”

  Jesus. It was sad that we had levels of “Fuck off, Crazy” letters that we’d had to send to some people.

  We’d even had to do a restraining order against one.

  Women. Girls. They were all female, and all knew that we were “meant to be together” because they’d loved the character Aidan Colly and assumed he was me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “It’s probably nothing, but I wanted you to know the name. Just in case she showed up on your doorstep or something.”

  “Yeah, I appreciate it.”

  “Okay. Keep me posted on your timeline and I’ll let you know how lunch with Adina goes next week.”

  We said our goodbyes and I hung up. I stayed behind my desk, but said to Syd, still engrossed with something I’d written on a cocktail napkin, “I didn’t expect to see you tonight. How was the party?”

  She lowered the napkin, putting it into a pile next to the couch. One of several she’d already made since she arrived. The woman worked quickly.

  “It was good. Lily and her boyfriend dropped me at the dorm. They were going somewhere to be alone, and Jane was staying at the Stratton’s, so I decided to change and come over here and get a couple of hours of work done.”

  It was nearly eleven. I had been thinking about packing it in and heading home before Nora had called. Now I was happy that her call had made me stay until Syd arrived.

  “Oh, I wanted to ask you something,” she said as she extricated herself from the pile of papers on—and around—the couch and came over to me, pulling something up on her phone.

  I rolled my chair back and moved my laptop over so she could sit on my desk and face me, as she often did when we were talking about one of my student’s papers that I asked her opinion on, or one of my characters that she was working on.

  My desk chair was kind of cool in an old-school kind of way, but with its high, curved, wooden arms, it wasn’t ideal for her to sit on my lap, or straddle me.

  Though we’d tried like hell a couple of times. We had kind of gotten it to a point though, if she straddled me, but put her legs up high, over the arms, then leaned back to the desk—

  “Is this the guy from the wedding?” she said, holding a pic on her phone in front of me, pulling me from my carnal memories.

  “What guy? What wedding?” I said, as I took the phone from her. She hoisted herself to sit in the space on the desk I’d cleared for her.

  “From Betsy Stratton’s wedding. The one who Jane kissed.”

  I looked at the photo. It was of Jane Winters in a green dress, looking very different than she normally did, standing next to a young man in a tux. I enlarged the photo to see their faces better.

  It was obvious they didn’t know Syd had taken the photo
—they only had eyes for each other. What may have begun that night on the dance floor of Betsy’s wedding had definitely developed into something…deep. I almost felt like I was prying in on a very private moment.

  “Yeah, that’s him. His hair’s not in the ponytail, but it’s him.” I handed the phone back to Syd who studied it again.

  “Hmmm, the plot thickens.”

  She went on to recap Jane’s party, which, for reasons Syd didn’t know for sure, had been held at Caro Stratton’s estate. A home I knew a little bit from when the gang would go for an occasional weekend away from Brown. It’d been a lot of years since I’d been there.

  “It’s all tied to Joe Stratton running for governor?” I asked Syd when she’d finished.

  She shrugged. “I guess. There was a big undercurrent of secrecy all evening, but I wasn’t sure of what. But, my take is that this guy—Stick is his name, by the way—is doing some auto mechanic work for Mrs. Stratton, and somehow met Jane and…I think they’ve got something going.” She was still gazing at the picture.

  “It would appear that way from the way they’re looking at each other,” I said.

  “But why keep it secret?” she said, more to herself than me. She seemed to remember she and I were in a top-secret relationship, because after a moment she softly nodded, like she understood. She clicked her phone off, and put it down next to her hip on the desk.

  “I wish…” I said, not really sure I could tell her everything I did wish about her and me. About us. “I wish we weren’t secret. I wish I could have been your date tonight. Besides being with you, it would have been nice to see Caro.”

  Her legs swinging softly into the desk well, she said, “That’s okay. It was really small. You didn’t miss much.”

  I placed my hands on her calves, stilling her movement. “But…I’m sorry,” I said, trying to convey my feelings of regret that we couldn’t be public. That I couldn’t publicly let the Bribury campus know that I was crazy about Syd O’Brien.

  A student. And my employee.

  She placed her sock-clad feet on my knees. “It’s okay, I know the score,” she said.

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Would I have loved to go to the party with you tonight? Yes. Would I like for my friends to know you’re my—” She stopped, and chewed a little on her bottom lip, a mannerism she produced when she felt a little insecure. Yeah, I knew her that well.

  “Valentine?” I finished for her. I was happy for her to call me anything she wanted, but of course she couldn’t. At least not to anybody else.

  “Exactly. That you’re my Valentine.” She smiled and I moved my hands up and down her calves. “But,” she continued, “there is something kind of hot about the secret lover thing.”

  “Nah, it’s just us. There’s something kind of hot about us,” I joked, but the teasing tone in my voice quickly died as she looked at me with those huge brown eyes.

  Just as I was about to move her foot higher up my leg, she pulled away. “Unh-uh. I need to get some work done…first.”

  Happy to know there would be a “second,” I let her go and watched as she returned to the couch.

  I couldn’t tell anybody how I felt about Syd. And, to be truthful, my feelings for her scared the shit out of me. I hadn’t felt like this about anybody since Diandra. And what was especially scary, I was pretty sure I hadn’t felt as deeply about Diandra in the several years we’d been together as I did about Syd after only months.

  No, I couldn’t publicly announce my feelings for Syd. And, because I couldn’t articulate them myself (some writer!) I couldn’t even tell her privately how I felt.

  Or maybe I could…

  I put my hands on my keyboard and pressed the space bar, waking up my laptop to the Down in Flames doc I’d been working on when Nora called.

  “Hey,” I said, and Syd looked up with a question in her eyes. “How would you like to read something I’m working on? I’d like your thoughts.”

  I could tell she was trying to temper her reaction, to act cool about my offer, and I think I fell a little in love with her right then.

  She put down the stuff she was working on and did a nonchalant stretch of her arms over her head, like she was getting ready to read just another box of my existential meanderings on paper. “Sure. Whatever. This pile can wait.”

  Yeah. Definitely a little in love. Maybe even a lot.

  “Cool,” I said, trying to match her nonchalance.

  But my hand trembled as I did a keyboard command I hadn’t done for anything original in…shit, I didn’t know how long.

  Print.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Montrose

  When I got back with breakfast, she was still reading, though she’d moved back to the couch from the desk where I’d left her. I put a coffee on the floor next to her, noticing the pile of pages she’d already read was considerably higher than when I had left a couple of hours before to go back to my apartment and shower, then pick up some food for us.

  Syd had been up all night reading Down in Flames. I’d tried to distract her with kisses and a neck massage, but she wasn’t having it. She woke me up when I’d dozed off in my office chair, my eyes tired of looking at my laptop screen. I thought she was ready for a little round of nooky, or to even go home and get some sleep, but she only told me to move to the couch, then she’d taken up my spot at the desk and kept on reading while I slept.

  It was Saturday morning, and though there had been a long line at the diner off campus, Snyder Hall was deserted. There might have been some department members in the offices upstairs, but the first floor was quiet. No students. Just Syd and me. And Esel, of course.

  “Take a break,” I said, as I unloaded my booty from the bags and spread it out on my desk. She held up a finger, like she’d be there in a second, but she made no move to wrap up. She did take a sip of coffee, and I waited for her to look at me, but she kept her eyes on the page the entire time, almost spilling the cup as she set it back on the floor.

  It’s what every author wants of course—to have a reader not be able to put the book down, to stay up all night reading. One of the best emails I ever received was from a reader berating me for making them lose sleep and call in sick because they couldn’t stop reading Folly.

  I ate my breakfast while it was warm, checked my emails, started reading students’ papers, but stopped, realizing I wasn’t giving them the attention they deserved.

  Because all I could think about was what Syd was thinking. What part was she at? What did that clearing of her throat mean? Was it a piece of shit? And would she be able to tell me if it was?

  Just when I thought it would be best to leave and come back later, she put down the last page in her hand. I would give her time to collect her thoughts, not pounce on her right away, though I desperately wanted to.

  Shit, I always wanted to pounce on Syd, physically and/or literarily. And Literally.

  She looked at me, her expression unreadable. Fuck, what did that mean? I could usually read Syd.

  Not being able to stand it, I opened my mouth, but she held up a finger.

  “Wait. Not yet. I…I want to try something,” she said.

  Try something? My throat was clogged with uncertainty and she wanted to “try something?”

  “Okay,” I said, keeping my cool, though I did think my voice might have cracked a little.

  She got off the couch and walked over to where her backpack sat on the floor by the coatrack. After pulling out her laptop, and sifting through a bunch of flash drives she had in a side pocket of the backpack, she moved back to the couch, snatching a bagel from my desk as she passed.

  “Mmm, good, thanks,” she said, taking a bite and then booting up her laptop, and inserting the drive, as she sat on the couch. “This is all I want. You finish the rest.”

  I was stuffed from my half of the breakfast, but when I saw her start to work on her laptop, and then heard the printer a minute later, I dug into her breakfast with the
zeal of a compulsive eater.

  Comfort food for sure. But comfort from the unknown?

  About ten minutes later she put her laptop aside, then came over and moved the guest chair in front of my desk over to the corner of the room. I rose to help her, even though I wasn’t sure what she was doing.

  “Sit, sit. I’ve got it,” she said. “I just want lots of floor space.”

  “What’d you have in mind?” I asked, putting a lecherous tone in my voice.

  She laughed (God, I loved that sound) and wagged a finger at me. “Not yet.” Then she turned her back to me to get the papers off the printer. She looked over her shoulder, certain I was looking at her ass—which of course I was—then shot me a slow, sexy smile. “But soon.”

  I went hard, and only my writer’s ego kept me from jumping up and telling her that my book could wait, and that we’d make better use of all that space on the floor.

  Yeah, I wanted to know what she was going to do. Even more than I wanted to bang her silly.

  At least, right now.

  She spent the next hour taking pages from my manuscript that she’d dog-eared while reading, and spreading them out on the floor. Then she’d take a page from the ones she’d printed and intersperse them with the others, writing notes all over both sets.

  I sat, mesmerized, but not saying a word. I didn’t even feign doing any of my own work, just sat and watched as Syd worked. Her hair was loose this morning—she must have pulled her ponytail out at some point while reading—and it swayed against her back as she stretched to put different pages in piles. She’d created a circle around herself, with the papers on all sides of her, some two or three pieces of paper wide, creating a petal effect, as if Syd was the center of a daisy. No. With her coloring, it would be more of a black-eyed Susan.