Sam lay awake, as was her new habit, marveling that this was her life, that she was actually living The Future Perfect. It was so much better than she could have imagined. It was companionship. Safety. Love. Home. It was the comfort of wearing William’s clothes, her own still in suitcases in the closet, her feet in his socks, his sweatpants falling off her hips. It was Thanksgiving morning, Sam streaking naked through the house gobbling like a turkey and daring William to catch her, then both of them being too weak with laughter to do anything about it when he did.
It was hiking out into the forest and choosing a pine tree, which William sawed down and dragged back and which they decorated for Christmas with white lights and cranberry-popcorn strings Sam taught him to make, which she’d read about as a child in theLittle Housebooks.
It was waking in the chilly house at night and running to the bathroom, then diving back into bed, where William functioned as a furnace. The cold eye of the moon peering through the skylights. It was waking to the gold tracery of ice on the windows and William bringing Sam coffee in mugs with bookstore logos on them after his predawn writing stint, sometimes pulling off his clothes and climbing back into bed with her, Sam squealing at his cold hands.Good morning, Pop-Tart, he said, grinning.
It was suiting up and snowshoeing the grounds while their morning muffins baked, checking to see if anything had changed during the night, noting the animal tracks William was teaching Sam to identify. The gray-and-white landscape punctuated by red-and-blue flashes that were birds.
It was going their separate ways to their writing desks and meeting in mid-afternoon to cross-country ski on the lake, something Sam was slowly getting better at, though she was still on her back more than her feet. It was her toppling over and yelling “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” William face-planting next to her, the two of them making snow angels and laughing. It was returning to the house with their thighs red as freezer meat and jumping into the shower, with attendant shenanigans. Drying each other off before one of the many fireplaces, then having Scotch and reading there together.
It was making dinner, Sam chopping onions and tomatoes and peppers while William tended the fish or chicken, him turning toZoop!her sweats down and set her on the counter and be inside her with one thrust. It was eating at the long oak table in the glow of the candelabra, woodstove white-hot and her feet on William’s under the table. It was never being in a room together without touching.
It was hot tub before bed, Sam sitting on William’s lap and herfloating breasts solarized silver in the moonlight. It was lovemaking before sleep, then drifting like Chagall lovers into the starry sky.
It was everything Sam had ever wanted and better than she could have dreamed.
There was only one problem, and it was this:
Sam wasn’t writing.
She had tried. Every day when William returned to his study, Sam went obediently to her desk in the Scriptorium. She took care of correspondence, opened a new document, and put her hands on the keyboard of her new and relatively unused laptop. Nothing happened. At first she wrote a sentence or two and erased it, starting and deleting, but eventually she simply sat dreaming, gazing out at the lake through the glass wall with her coffee growing cold in its mug beside her and her chin propped in her hand.
As far as Sam’s career was concerned, it wasn’t a problem—yet. Because she hadn’t told anybody. Her last email from Mireille read,Chère Sam, a little bird has told me you have flown north to live with Monsieur Corwyn. C’est vrai? Is this why you have been so quiet, you are trapped beneath a heavy man???This would not be my choice, but if you must stay in your love igloo, perhaps you can find out his secret of how he writes all those female-centric blockbusters.??As long as you are writing absolute genius for your new April 1 deadline, which as superagent nonpareil I have secured for you, ahem ahem you are welcome, all is well.Patricia hadn’t said anything at all. Hopefully she didn’t know.
As far as Sam’s identity went, it was a big problem. Sam could not remember a time when she hadn’t been writing. Her first memory was sitting beneath her dad’s desk making block letters with her Magic Marker, her childhood and adolescent mornings spent writing in her notebooks. Sam’s entire personal and professional life had been calibrated around her authorial striving, then success. But what if she couldn’t do it anymore? What if, as in the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the mermaid who gave up her tail so she could walk on land, every step aknife, to be with her prince—what if Sam had traded her writing for this happiness?
“What even am I if I’m not writing?” she asked William one night as they lay reading by the fire, William threading his fingers through Sam’s unraveling braid.
William tented the thick tome he’d been reading, a history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, on his chest and looked pensive. He had been giving Sam small assignments every day—what if you write this, what if you try that—but not pushing her.
“Happy?” he suggested.
“I’ll tell you what you are,” Drishti said, “you’re his little love ho.” Drishti had been bugshit ever since Sam told her on Thanksgiving she wasn’t coming back, which made their conversations rather unpleasant. “Ofcourseyou’re not writing. You’re totally dickmatized. You gave up your whole life. Your apartment, which PS probably looks like a frat house now because of that kid you rented it to. Our group. Your class, Sam!” Sam grimaced. She had tried at first to teach online, but William’s Wi-Fi was slow, and the novelists ended up freezing like war correspondents with bad connections, and eventually Sam said,Let’s all just meet for an in-person retreat in the spring!“You’re basically Codependency What Not to Do 101. You gave up everything that made you you. Remember you? The you who was a kick-ass writer? The you who wasn’t living in butt-fuck Nova Scotia or wherever you are with some guy who ghosted you and then fucked that poor dead girl in the bath? Not that he fucked herwhileshe was dead in the bath. But who even knows with him. He’ll probably chop you up in little pieces and make you into soup in his hot tub when he’s on to his next ho, and Jesus please us,” Drishti said in disgust, “I’m here for you, kid, text me the code if you need to, but what a balls-up stupid fucking idiotic thing to do.”
Drishti made some good points. And there were things Sam missed about her life in Boston: food delivery, wearing pants and lipstick, the moving postcard view from her apartment that had actual people in it.Her novelists. But those things didn’t add up to a life, and Sam had been so unbearably lonely. William assured her the writing might come back once she adjusted, and what if this one imperfection was the flaw in the design, the thing that proved everything else was real?
William murmured something into Sam’s neck and clutched her more tightly. She shut her eyes and willed herself to sleep. But she couldn’t, because this was the one other thing that was wrong, less provable than her writer’s block, an intangible that nonetheless felt like a certainty: They were not alone. Her skin crawled with the knowledge. They were being watched. Somebody else was in the room.
The Rabbit
They look so perfect, lying there asleep. William not on his back the way he used to be, snoring his invisible feather up off his lips, but engulfing Sam Vetiver as if protecting her. She curled in his arms like a stupid little naked cocktail shrimp. Scott and Zelda. Anaïs and Henry. Hemingway and everybody. The literary Valentines.
F*ck I hate this holiday, which in my store begins the day after Christmas. All through the start of the New Year we lug Romance to all the front tables, setting it out on the end caps. I gain fifteen pounds from the impulse candy, even the gross chalky hearts saying B MINE and UR LIT. I’m never so happy as I am on February 15, tearing down love and taping up shamrocks.
Suddenly I have a terrible thought.
What if this is for real?
William’s never let any woman stay for a weekend, let alone for months. Sam Vetiver has clearly moved in. They haveroutines.
What if I’m looking at William in love—with somebody other than himself?
What if this time is different?
But I cannot afford to think this way. I can’t even allow myself to consider it.
I need to take control of this situation before it gets worse.
I run my thumb over the release button of my trusty box cutter. It’s a good one, I got it my very first day as a bookseller and have carried it from store to store, as well as on other errands. I feel bad for it because of how I might have to use it here. It’s meant to slice only cardboard, to liberate books that will bring people joy. But it can do other jobs too.
