by Olivia Dade
“Thank you so much for the invitation, Bashir.” When she hugged him, he patted her back tentatively. “I’m busy this weekend, unfortunately. I have to be at my new apartment, getting it ready for the move. But I’ll be back in town late next week. Can we do dinner then instead?”
When she pulled away, he smiled down at her, looking pleased. “Of course. I’ll check Mimi’s schedule and text you later tonight, after we get back from dinner at her family’s house. They live nearby, so she’s picking me up at the hotel, and we’ll drive home afterward.”
Fuck billability, she thought.
“I plan to spend the evening eating a room service burger and writing Gods of the Gates fanfiction,” she told him. “Your night sounds much more exciting.”
He blinked at her for a few seconds before flashing an impish grin. “You only say that because you haven’t met my in-laws.”
She laughed. “Fair enough.”
“When we have dinner, I want to hear more about your writing.” His head tilted, he was studying her curiously. “Mimi loves that show. Especially the pretty dude.”
“Marcus Caster-Rupp?” Honestly, it could be any one of a handful of actors, but Caster-Rupp was undeniably the prettiest dude of all. Also the most boring. So boring, she sometimes wondered how one man could be so shiny, yet so incredibly dull.
“That’s the one.” He directed a pained grimace at the heavens. “He’s on her freebie list. Every time we stream an episode, she’s always very insistent about that.”
April patted his arm. “Think about it this way: She won’t ever actually meet him. None of us will, unless we move to LA and start selling vital organs to pay for our haircuts.”
“Huh.” His expression brightened. “That’s true.”
Before leaving the site, they thanked the drill crew. Then, after she exchanged one last round of goodbyes with Bashir, he climbed into his car while she boosted herself into the driver’s seat of the truck. With a farewell beep, she headed toward her hotel, while he drove to his in-laws’ home.
For each mile she traveled, invisible tethers surrounding her seemed to snap free, leaving her oddly, giddily buoyant. Yeah, she still had a personal drilling rig operating in her skull, but a few glasses of water would take care of the headache, no problem. And so what if she had dirt all over her jeans? Even contaminated soil couldn’t sully the essential, joyful truth.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror. Her smile was so wide, she might as well have been starring in a toothpaste commercial.
And no wonder. No wonder.
This was her last day in the dirt.
She was starting now.
When she got back to the hotel, she dumped her jeans into a waiting plastic bag and got naked. In the shower, she scrubbed her body pink under the hot spray.
Her clean flannel pajamas felt like a cloud against her skin as she drained a glass of water and read over BAWN’s latest messages. At long last, he’d decided what to write for his next fic. Monday’s prompt for their upcoming Aeneas and Lavinia Week requested a showdown between Aeneas’s two lady loves, and BAWN had been contemplating the best way to handle it for days.
Since the two women haven’t met in the books or on the show, you could always come up with a fluffy alternative-universe story, which is what I’m doing, she’d written before work that morning, already knowing how he’d respond to that suggestion. Or—and I really think this idea might work for you—maybe Aeneas could dream about the showdown, so you can keep things canon-compliant and in his POV? What do you think?
The latter option offered plenty of opportunity for angst, so of course he’d chosen that one. BAWN was such an insightful writer, but April had to admit it: Some of his fics were depressing as hell.
Less so now than when he’d started, though. Back then, even his Aeneas/Lavinia stories had been bursting with their hero’s guilt and shame when it came to Dido, all dirges and funeral pyres and lamentations. April’s first real conversation with BAWN on the Lavineas server, in fact, had involved her half-joking suggestion that he use the tag misery ahoy! on some of his fics.
For his mental health alone, it was better for him to focus on the Lavinia-Aeneas OTP. Clearly. Writing occasional fluffy fics wouldn’t do him any harm, either.
Tonight, though, she didn’t have time the Good Gospel of Fluff. By the time she finished describing her own fluffy AU fic idea—Lavinia and Dido would meet as teenage combatants in a trivia contest, their feelings for Aeneas making each round of questions and answers increasingly fraught and hilarious—she was on the verge of losing her courage. Again.
Months ago, when she’d applied for her new job, she’d decided she was done shielding different parts of herself for fear of others’ disapproval. That applied to her fandom too.
On Twitter, to dodge possible professional disaster, she’d always cropped her cosplay pictures to exclude her face. But she’d failed to share her Twitter handle with fellow Lavineas stans for an entirely different reason.
Her body.
She hadn’t wanted her friends on the server to see her body in those Lavinia costumes. Particularly one of those friends, whose opinion mattered more than it should.
For a ship whose essential heartbeat was all about love for goodness, for sterling character and intelligence, over appearance, Lavineas fics included a surprising, disappointing amount of fat-shaming. Not BAWN’s, to his credit. But some of his favorite fics, the ones he’d bookmarked and recommended to her, did.
After a lifetime of struggle, April now loved her body. All of it. Red hair to freckled, chubby toes.
She hadn’t expected the same from others. Still didn’t. But she was tired of fucking hiding, and she was done with more than just contaminated mud on her jeans and colleagues she only allowed so close.
This year, she was attending her fandom’s biggest convention, Con of the Gates, which always took place—appropriately enough—within a sunny day’s view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Countless bloggers and reporters showed up to that con, and they took pictures, some of which always ended up going viral or printed in newspaper articles or splashed across the television screen.
She wouldn’t care. Not anymore. If her colleagues could openly discuss their terrible folk-music trio, she could certainly discuss her love for the most popular show on television.
And when she came to the con, she was finally going to meet her fandom friends there in person. She might even meet BAWN in person, despite his shyness. She would give all of them an opportunity to prove they’d truly understood the message of their OTP.
If they didn’t, it would hurt. She couldn’t lie to herself about that.
Especially if BAWN took one look at her and—
Well, no point in imagining rejection that didn’t yet exist.
Worst-case scenario, though, she’d find other friends. Other fandoms more accepting of who and what she was. Another beta reader for her fics, whose DMs were beams of sunshine to start her morning and the warmth of a down comforter at night.
Another man she wanted in her face-to-face life and maybe even her bed.
So she had to do this tonight, before she lost her nerve. It wasn’t the final step, or even the hardest. But it was the first.
Without letting herself think too hard about it, she checked a thread on Twitter from that morning, still going strong. The Gods of the Gates’s official account had asked fans to post their best cosplay photos, and the responses now numbered in the hundreds. A few dozen featured people her size, and she very carefully didn’t click to see replies to those tweets.
On her phone, she had a selfie from her most recent Lavinia costume. The image was uncropped, her face and body both clearly visible. Her colleagues, present and future, would recognize her. Her friends and family too. Most nerve-racking of all: If she told him her Twitter handle, Book!AeneasWouldNever would finally see her for the first time.
Deep breath.
She tweeted it. Then immedi
ately shut her laptop and ordered some damn room service, because she deserved it. After dinner, she began her one-shot, fluffy, modern AU fic so BAWN could give her some feedback over the weekend.
Right before bedtime, she couldn’t stand it anymore.
Block finger ready, she checked her Twitter notifications.
Holy fuck. Holy fuck.
She’d gone viral. At least by her modest standards. Hundreds of people had commented on her photo, with more chiming in by the second. She couldn’t read her notifications fast enough, and some of them she didn’t want to read at all.
She’d known how certain swaths of the Gods of the Gates fandom acted. She wasn’t surprised to find, scattered amongst admiring and supportive responses, a few ugly threads.
Looks like she ate Lavinia seemed to be the most popular among those tweets.
It stung, of course. But no stranger on the internet could truly hurt her. Not the same way family and friends and coworkers could.
Still, she didn’t intend to inflict that sort of harm on herself longer than necessary. It might take time, but she needed to wrestle her mentions into submission.
But… Jesus. Where had all these people come from?
Blocking all the haters in one particular thread took a while, as did muting—at least for the moment—certain key, livestock- and zoo animal-related words. Hog. Cow. Hippo. Elephant.
By the time she finished, she had dozens more notifications. These seemed friendlier, for the most part, but she didn’t plan to tackle them until the morning.
Until she noticed one at the very top, received seconds before.
The account boasted a bright blue bubble with a check inside. An official, verified account, then.
Marcus Caster-Rupp’s account.
The guy playing Aeneas—fucking Aeneas—had tweeted to her. Followed her.
And…he appeared to have—
No, that couldn’t be right. She was hallucinating.
She squinted. Blinked. Read it again. A third time.
For reasons yet unknown, he appeared to have—
Well, he appeared to have asked her out. On a date.
“I read a fic like this once,” she whispered.
Then she clicked on the thread to find out what the fuck had just happened.
Spoiler Alert will be available October 6, 2020! To preorder, click here. And for more news and release-day alerts, sign up for my newsletter, the Hussy Herald, here.
Also by Olivia Dade
SPOILER ALERT
* * *
THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARYSBURG
Teach Me
40-Love
Sweetest in the Gale: A Marysburg Story Collection
* * *
LOVE UNSCRIPTED
Desire and the Deep Blue Sea
Tiny House, Big Love
* * *
LOVESTRUCK LIBRARIANS
My Reckless Valentine
Mayday
Ready to Fall
Driven to Distraction
Hidden Hearts
About Olivia
Olivia Dade grew up an undeniable nerd, prone to ignoring the world around her as she read any book she could find. Her favorites, though, were always, always romances. As an adult, she earned an M.A. in American history and worked in a variety of jobs that required the donning of actual pants: Colonial Williamsburg interpreter, high school teacher, academic tutor, and (of course) librarian. Now, however, she has finally achieved her lifelong goal of wearing pajamas all day as a hermit-like writer and enthusiastic hag. She currently lives outside Stockholm with her patient Swedish husband, their whip-smart daughter, and the family’s ever-burgeoning collection of books.
If you want to find me online, here’s where to go!
Website: https://oliviadade.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OliviaWrites
Newsletter: https://go.oliviadade.com/Newsletter
Acknowledgments
I’d intended “Sweetest in the Gale” to be a light, fun, extremely short story, one in which a new teacher in the English Department would woo Candy via linguistics-based bickering. Instead…well. It’s a novella, not a short story, and it’s not especially light. It’s about linguistics, yes, but also about grief and poetry and guilt. Thank you to Emma Barry, Kate Clayborn, and Maria Vale for making sure I got the story and its tone right, even if it wasn’t the story I’d intended to tell or the tone I’d intended to take. Thank you too to everyone I met through my volunteer work at the Hospice of Washington County in Maryland: the dedicated staff, the loving families, and—most of all—the patients. I haven’t forgotten you. I won’t forget you.
I am so proud to have worked with my incredibly talented friends while writing “Unraveled.” I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Emma Barry, Adriana Herrera, Ruby Lang, and Cat Sebastian for agreeing to the He’s Come Undone anthology and ensuring there was nothing but joy in the process of making it reality. Thank you too for reading over this story and providing notes, encouragement, and emoji-laden DMs! You’re all the literal best. :-)
With “Cover Me,” I veered so far outside my prior romantic-comedy lane that I required a great deal of handholding (even more than usual!). So I owe an enormous thank-you to everyone who read this story and gave me the help and reassurance I needed: Alexandra Haughton, Gwendolen Crane, Emma Barry, Sonoma Lass, Cecilia Grant, Molly O’Keefe, and Ruby Lang. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness and the care with which you considered my words.
Finally, a huge thank-you to Sionna Fox for all her help, and to Leni Kauffman for my gorgeous cover and illustrations.
And of course, all my love to my family. Without you, I’d be lost (if somewhat better-rested).
