‘So you moved back to London.’
He nodded. ‘New York is an incredible place but it’s very easy to play Peter Pan for way too long. As long as you take your career seriously, you don’t really have to take life seriously, and my New York decisions were not always that smart.’
‘But you’re different now?’ I said. I hoped.
‘How come you went into teaching?’ Joe asked, deflecting my question with a question. ‘Your whole family is in publishing one way or another but you’re a teacher. Why?’
Sinking into the chair behind the desk, I rested my chin on my clasped hands. If he didn’t want to answer my question properly, I didn’t have to answer his properly either.
‘Because I’m only teaching kids until I find a rich husband,’ I reminded him. ‘I must still be looking.’
Maybe I was imagining it but even in the low lightof the stockroom, I thought I could see a pink tint take to his complexion. ‘I might have been wrong,’ he replied. ‘But you aren’t easy to read, Sophie Taylor.’
The chair behind the desk was very comfortable, a heavy wooden frame with old, soft leather cushions. Once upon a time, I imagined it might’ve been too firm, too overstuffed to stay in for long, but now, when I sat back, the cushions gave and I sank into them with ease.
‘The truth is, I don’t really know why,’ I confessed, meeting honesty with honesty. ‘When I was younger, I really wanted to be a writer. You should see theTwilightfanfic I wrote when I was a teenager, actually, no you shouldn’t. No one can read that ever.’
Joe laughed softly but let me carry on speaking.
‘You’re right though, it should’ve been easy. Both of my parents, my godfather and my brother were already in the industry, any of them would’ve helped me find a job.’
‘You wouldn’t have been the first publishing nepo baby,’ he agreed. ‘What stopped you?’
I traced the patterns in the surface of the desk. The grain of the wood had been smoothed out over who knew how many years by people sitting here doing who knew what. Maybe great novels had been written at this desk. Or love letters. Or maybe it had only been used to do the accounts and play snakes and ladders. There was no way to know.
‘I was scared,’ I told him, surprised at how easy it was to say out loud in front of him. ‘Everyone thought I would graduate with a great literary novel in my back pocket. Mum was convinced I was going to be the next Donna Tartt, Dad was always bragging to everyone at work about how talented I was, but all I had were adozen first chapters of a dozen different books and they were all terrible.’
‘I bet they weren’t, I bet they were good.’
‘They weren’t good enough for Hugh and Pandora Taylor’s daughter.’
I thought back to all those nights I spent in front of a laptop, trying to construct clever sentences and create bold imagery, always imagining my parents reading over my shoulder. I desperately wanted to write something important and literary but my heart just wasn’t in it.
‘When I gave up trying to write something they would approve of, the thought of taking a job in publishing felt like punishment. I didn’t want to move home so there wasn’t a lot of time to come up with an alternative career path.’
‘Sophie, no one expects a twenty-one-year-old to have it all figured out,’ Joe said. ‘You’re being incredibly hard on yourself.’
I shook my head and looked around the room. ‘Charlotte is only eighteen and look at this. If I didn’t have something else, I would’ve been dragged into one of their offices by the scruff of my neck and I couldn’t stomach the thought. Teaching seemed like a good back-up plan.’
An unseeable cloud passed over the sun somewhere high above us and filled the whole room with shadows. I rested my chin on the boxful ofButterfliesand sighed.
‘I thought it would be easy but it isn’t. All those people who think teaching is a cop-out ought to spend one week dealing with a bunch of ten-year-olds, preferably two weeks before the summer holidays,’ I said, opening the door to happier memories. ‘But I love it. Obviously not the admin or the bureaucracy, and I swear,some of the parents were put on this earth to test my will to live, but every day is different. I like the creativity and yes, I know it’s a cliché but the kids are so great. Mostly because they leave our school before they’ve been ruined by hormones and social media – but that’s a secondary school problem, not mine.’
‘But do you love teaching more than writing?’ Joe asked, still holding his position. His face was completely blotted out now, his body outlined by what little light made it through the window.
‘I don’t have an answer to that yet,’ I admitted. ‘They’re so different. With teaching, I’m surrounded by people all day. When I’m writing, it’s just me. I don’t know if I would like that all the time.’
‘It can be a lonely career,’ he acknowledged. ‘Most writers I know are introverts, they prefer their own company.’
‘Maybe most writers you know are psychopaths,’ I suggested and he smiled.
Outside, the clouds passed and Joe’s features slowly emerged from the shadows. He was staring intently, not at me but at my book.
‘When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer too.’ He let go of the ceiling beam and came closer to the desk to pick up his own copy ofButterflies, tapping it against his open palm like he was trying to shake something loose.
‘Really?’ It was difficult to imagine. CJ fit the stereotype, Joe didn’t. I couldn’t imagine him tearing back into his dorm room, hanging up his lacrosse boots and settling down to pour his thoughts into a Moleskine journal. If there was such a thing as lacrosse boots. I needed to read more sports romances.
Thumbing his way through the pages, Joe’s eyes scanned my words before settling somewhere in the middle of the book. Somewhere that looked dangerously close to chapter seventeen.
