And somewhere between now and the reveal, I’ll figure out how to tell her that the infuriating man and the letter writer and the author she’s been critiquing are all the same person.
A person who’s falling for her.
One honest word at a time.
NINE
JESSICA
I’m walking on the beach at dawn because I’m a rational, well-adjusted adult who definitely doesn’t make poor life choices.
That’s a lie.
I had a dream about Scott Avery reading poetry to me while we were both trapped in a library made entirely of his early V. Langley books, and I woke up disoriented and slightly breathless, which is completely unacceptable.
So. Beach walk. Where normal people process their feelings about their emotionally complicated landlord while the sun rises and the seagulls judge them.
One particularly large gull has been following me for the past ten minutes, making a sound that’s somewhere between a shriek and disappointed laughter. I’ve named him Sigmund because he’s clearly trying to psychoanalyze my life choices.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Sigmund,” I tell him.
He shrieks louder.
“Fine. Yes, I had a swoony dream about my landlord. Happy?”
More shrieking. Sigmund has opinions.
“It wasn’t even a good dream,” I continue, because apparently I’m the kind of person who has therapy sessions with seagulls now. “We were just reading poetry. That’s it. Just him reading Walt Whitman and looking at me like I was?—”
I stop walking because there’s a person sitting on my favorite driftwood log.
A person who looks suspiciously like Scott Avery.
It’s definitely him, and he just heard me confess to having dreams about him to a judgmental seagull.
Our gazes meet.
He’s holding a coffee cup with messy hair, wearing joggers and a t-shirt instead of his usual suit, and he looks exhausted and vulnerable and completely unlike Corporate Shark Scott.
This is Poetry-Reading-At-The-Library Scott.
This is potentially even more dangerous.
“Jessica,” he says.
“Scott.” I manage. “I was just...talking to a bird.”
“I heard.”
Oh goodness. “How much did you hear?”
“Something about Walt Whitman.”
I'm going to die. I'm going to spontaneously combust right here on this beach and become a cautionary tale about the dangers of public seagull therapy.
“I read a lot of poetry,” I say, which is true but also completely beside the point. “For the bookstore. Professional development.”
“Before sunrise?”
