Prologue
The Rabbit
The problem with his house is, it’s in a very remote area, so it’s hard to get to. Especially now, in winter. I don’t do very well on snowshoes, and I never learned to cross-country ski. It’s challenging enough to keep on top of the weather and to make sure my tracks are covered. I could go when he’s not home—but what would be the point of that?
The house is on an island in rural Maine, the only one there. He built it after his first monster bestseller,You Never Said Goodbye(which is really his second book, but the first to hit the list)—craving more solitude to write, according to theNew York Magazineprofile “The Virtuoso Retreats.” The real reason is, one day he stepped out of the shower in his Martha’s Vineyard mansion to find a reader standing on his bath mat with a pen and a suitcase full of his books. He’s been off the grid ever since.
William’s island is accessible only by causeway, blocked at the end by a gate twelve feet tall with iron spikes like the kind you’d put a head on, although the only things that’ve ever been impaled there are gifts really dedicated superfans leave if they somehow figure out where he is. Over the years I’ve seen stuffed animals (why? There are none in his books), letters with porny selfies, bras and thongs that flap in the wind like forlorn flags. The gate is basically a bulletin board of unrequited William Corwyn love. He takes everything down and tosses it, and nobody ever gets in. Except me.
The house is an A-frame, like a ski chalet, with 360-degree views of thelake. It has a hot tub and a two-story fieldstone fireplace and skylights and specially built bookshelves, all full. Of course they are. It’s a beautiful house. Of course it is. He has good taste, and he has to spend all those royalties on something. Plus foreign rights—William Corwyn is published in 47 countries!, his website proclaims—and the film money forMedusa. A thread on his Goodreads page says there’s also an option on his second bestseller,The Space Between Worlds. That movie—or series; it would have been a TV miniseries back then—never came out, though, so maybe that was just a rumor. Or maybe it just never got made. I don’t know how these things work, I’m not a Hollywood type of person, but the authors I follow online complain a lot about how most options never materialize, they’re only fantasies. Brainf*cks.
It seems like an awful lot of griping about getting money for nothing, like being mad about a Christmas bonus you didn’t expect but still is not big enough. But what do I know. I’m just a bookseller. Author-adjacent. And probably it is disappointing to have your hopes raised and have nothing come of it.
I do know a lot about that.
Another thing I know: I know there’s more than a brainf*ck going on in that house right now. Because I can hear it. I can hear her. You’d have to be dead not to hear her. I hear him, too, if I listen closely. It’s harder, because mostly he just talks. He talks while he’s stripping their clothes off, while he’s stroking and pinching them, while he’s teasing them, while he’s pounding them as hard as he can. And because his talking is much lower-volume than the girls’ moaning, yelling, screaming, and hollering, I have to get right up next to the house to hear it.
Like I am now. Hunkered down between his hedge and the wall beneath the bedroom window, the branches scratching one side of my face, the glass cold against the other. The ground is freezing too. My feet are numb even in my good lined boots. There’s more snow forecast for tonight, and they will nap when they’re done, giving me time to either sneak inside to my observation post or steal away. During the day William is a big napper, conking out, whether he’s alone or with someone else, and he falls asleep withinthree breaths. I’ve never seen anything like it. One second he’s awake, the next he’s snoring—which he does like a cartoon character, with a whistling sound like he’s blowing a feather that rises and falls with the air from his lips. It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen, to tell the truth, unexpected in such a big man. Adorable, actually. It might have been the first thing I fell in love with.
Right now they are not sleeping. Nowhere close to it. “You’re an angel, honey,” I hear him say, his voice even deeper than usual with concentration. “Do you know how beautiful you are right now? You’re incandescent.”
“Oh! Oh! Oh!” the woman says, which is probably all she’s capable of saying at this moment. Like most of his women, she’s shouting it loud enough that when he started banging into her, she drove all the birds from the trees.
“Luminous,” he says. “Radiant. And so close. I can feel it. Do you want me to finish you off?”
“Oh!” the woman says. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Yes!” She is practically sobbing. I know what’s coming next.
His patented move: the f*cking narrative. Literally. For William Corwyn, the climax of the story isn’t just for fiction
“Buckle up,” he says, and now his own voice is a little more breathy, probably because he is thrusting deeper. I remember what this feels like, how he said to me, smiling and swiveling his hips,I knew how avid you’d be. I could tell just looking at you.
“You’re going to come for me,” he says, practically growling. “It’s right there. You feel it building. It’s inevitable. It’s exquisite. You’re trembling on the edge...”
I don’t know how, whether it’s the timbre of his voice or the power of storytelling, but the f*cking narrative always works. It did on me, in ways I can still feel in my body sometimes. Before he reaches the end of his monologue, they come. This one does it more than once, by the sound of it. BetweenYou’re doing it, do it for meandYou’re coming now!, she makes a coyote wail and then ayip yip yipnoise that startles the crows, who have resettled into the branches and start cawing in rusty cacophony. A whole murder of them.
Then it’s over, and I can’t hear what they’re saying, only murmurs. Next will come nap time. It’ll be dark soon, and I have a choice to make about whether to drive home or slip inside. Through the basement window he’s forgotten about, which leads to a root cellar William has never used, not being a store-onions kind of guy, and that I can ease open and just, if I hold my breath like a motherf*cker, squeeze through.
This is how I know what the women look like, what their faces look like when they climax, screwed up as if in pain, the expression he tells them he finds so beautiful. I know what their breasts and buttocks look like, jiggling as he thrusts. I know what his haunches look like, clenching and flexing, and the muscles in his back. I know what books he has on the bedside table in which he also keeps the gun, and what paths the sun and moonlight make from his bedroom skylight over his south wall, which is bare except for that one oil painting of himself and his sister, Pen, as kids. I know that he has been with this woman, his latest, before, but this is her first time here.
I know all this because he has a big walk-in closet, bigger than my whole sh*thole studio, and from behind the bag that contains his tuxedo, because of course he owns his own tuxedo, I have watched many a non-brainf*ck-fest commence.
I have made some noise or shifted my feet in the crunching dead leaves to bring the blood back into them, because I hear the woman say, “What was that?” She must be standing by the window because her voice is much closer now.
“I thought I heard something outside,” she says.
“Probably a deer,” he says, coming to stand beside or behind her. I know he is naked, looking out. A fine figure of a man, is how the nineteenth-century novelists would describe him, and they would not be wrong. Tall, dark, and handsome as a cliché, with those show-off silver streaks at his temples I suspect he dyes, though I’ve never caught him doing it or even found the coloring kit. Lumberjack-thick, more than he used to be since he shredded his meniscus on something called a double black diamond trail, according to his Reddit readers on r/WilliamCorwynAthlete. He’s not anIronman anymore, much to his displeasure, and if he’s not careful, he gets chunky fast.
But he is always careful. And he’s not even losing his hair. Yet. Much.
“You probably scared away all the animals,” he adds. “With your climactic aria.”
She laughs. “Which you made me make. You’re the best I’ve ever had.”
They all say this. I roll my eyes.
“Seriously. You’re like... a magnificent stag or something.”
And this woman calls herself a writer? I pantomime barfing into the bushes.
