“I mean, would your parents have been cool with paying for your education, only to have you park it in favor of something you don’t even need a high school diploma to do?”
“I wouldn’t know,” he says. “My mom could never have afforded higher education. She’d probably have been happy if I didn’t have to pay off so much student debt.”
Shit.“I shouldn’t have assumed. I’ll check my privilege.”
“Nothing to apologize for.”
“Well,” I say, “I didn’t exactly apologize.”
He smiles—his first full, unguarded smile. Goddamn, it’s a sight. “No, I guess you didn’t.”
I bite my lower lip.
“Anyway,” he says, looking at his shoes, “I’d have thought you were a scholarship darling.”
“Well, Maral’s parents paid through the nose.” She’d gotten a little help from MIT, but not the full tuition. Her parents were in a better position to help financially than mine would have been—her dad was an engineer himself, had moved to the States for grad school, and was the reason my parents got a timely sponsorship to immigrate here themselves, so he made a decent living. Mine would never have been able to send me to college, let alone med school, letaloneat Harvard. “But you’re not wrong. I got a full ride.”
“Why am I not surprised?” His tone is tender somehow, and he’s looking at me like he’s trying to puzzle me out.
“What about you?” I ask. “How did you go from writing to publicity?”
He puffs out a breath. “Publicity paid the bills.”
“Did you want to be a writer?” I ask.
“It was an interest.”
“Was?”
He hesitates a moment before amending, “Isan interest.”
The plot of Ryan’s life story thickens. “Why didn’t you pursue that?”
“Oh, um. I need to eat. And live somewhere?”
I laugh. “You want to achieve both of those things, in New York? Amateur.”
He nods. “It was a pipe dream.”
“Is it hard, spreading the word about other people’s books full-time instead of working on your own?”
“Not in the way you might think. I sought a career in publishing because books have always been meaningful to me. If my efforts get more of them into more hands, all the better. And Woodsworth is a good employer.”
“They meet your greatest needs?” I ask, raising a brow.
He gives a single slow nod. “They do.” There’s something in his voice that’s almost…resigned?
Questions pile up in my mind like grains of sand in an hourglass, but I do an admirable job of tamping down my natural tendency to railroad him and choose just one. “What are you writing now?”
He seems genuinely surprised at the question. “Why do you assume I’m writing something now?”
“Just because it’s not your job doesn’t mean you aren’t doing it on your own time. Writers are always writing something. They can’t not. It’s a compulsion.” I know this from research, having interviewed countless people who don’t have their parents’ blessing to pursue artistic endeavors but can’t stop themselves from expressing themselves creatively, even if it’s not in a professional capacity.
He watches me as I speak, eyes twinkling. “It’s…commercial sci-fi,” he says finally.
“About…”
“About two people separated in the multiverse. Trying to find each other again.” You’d think I had him by the throat, the way the words come out strangled.
