“Syd,” he said as I had my hand on the doorknob. I turned. “I’m sorry. So, sorry. The last thing I want to do is to hurt you. I…” He still stood at the couch, and didn’t move closer to me. Didn’t try to reach out to me, and he certainly didn’t try to get me to stay.
The work he’d done, the pages he’d so eloquently written, stretched like a white sea of snow between us. As cold and frosty as the remains of Montrose and me.
Ha. How was that for a goddamned metaphor! I was learning from the best.
“Goodbye, Billy,” I said and walked out the door.
Chapter26
Montrose
A month later I pushed “send”on the email to Nora withDown In Flamesattached.
It had been a tremendous month writing-wise. In every other way I was completely miserable.
I’d freaked when I realized Syd had been a…superfan. I couldn’t call her a Folly Dolly, even though I wasn’t really sure what the difference was between her and the other women who felt they were destined to be with me because of a character I wrote years ago.
The difference was I was in love with Sydney O’Brien.
And there were lots of other things, too. For one, she’d never let on that she’d readFollythat many times. I’d played all our conversations over in my mind countless times in the last month and I was fairly certain she had never even mentioned that it was one of her favorite books.
And for another thing, sheneverinitiated contact with me in any way. And, being in my class, she certainly had every opportunity. Hell, if I had been told I had a zealous fan in that class I would have pegged Jane Winters as it for sure.
I sat back in my chair at the kitchen table in my apartment and watched as the email to Nora chugged through. Even though Syd was no longer in my office in the evenings (or ever), I continued to work in my apartment, only spending time in the office for my official office hours and to pick up and drop off students’ papers.
It was just too painful to spend time in a room that reminded me of Syd at every turn.
She had finished her work a couple of weeks ago, just around the first of April. It felt like a cruel April Fool’s joke to see her note reading “last one” with a flash drive sitting on my desk. But it was no joke, and I realized that, even though Bribury was a small campus, there was a very good chance that I would never see Syd O’Brien again.
I’d had all the boxes with my original notes shipped to my parents’ place. They were going to put them in storage for me. I didn’t want to trash them altogether, even though Syd had transcribed every bit of them, and I’d backed them up on external drives, flash drives and on Dropbox. I still liked knowing they were there for me somewhere—five years of my life. Five tough years of floundering with ideas that wouldn’t stop coming, and no focus or direction to do anything with them.
Syd had given me that. Or Bribury. Or time. Or just plain manning up.
But I knew…it was Syd.
I’d wanted to call her so many times in the past month. Or leave her a note on the desk. But then I’d look at the calendar and realize we only would have another couple of months anyway (and only a month by now), and I’d crumple up the paper, or put my phone down.
She was so young, so sharp, and the drive she had…Syd was going to go places. And I didn’t want her making any of those life decisions based on me being in NYC.
The night we broke up, when she told me about her past… My heart ached for her, for her thirteen-year-old self, for the woman she was becoming. I’d wished I could have taken on her pain myself. I’d also wished that I had half the guts that she did. Does.
And then I’d gone and caused her more pain. It was for the best, though. Or at least that’s what I’d told myself about forty times a day for the past month.
My phone rang, jarring me out of my pity party. “Hey, Nora,” I said when I picked up. “I just sent you—”
“I know. That’s why I’m calling.”
“That was fast.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been waiting five years for that email.”
I laughed. “Hopefully it will have been worth it.”
“I’m sure it will. Listen, Billy, I want to show this to Adina first as we talked about. I’m prepared to give her a week to make a preempt deal if you’re okay with that. If she doesn’t hit our number, we shop it all over and hope it goes to auction.”
“Yeah, that sounds good. I’d really like to work with Adina again. So, what should we ask for?”
We discussed our magic number for a while and finally came to an agreement. I thought Nora was asking for too much, but she assured me she could get it.
