“Just cave exploring, apparently, and this.” I hold up my laptop. What started out as a spite goal (to prove my parents wrong) quickly turned into self-preservation. The minute I tell someone that I’m a creative writing major, I get a scoff or a sneer or a condescending lecture that boils down to one point:How are you going to make money doingthat?
It’s not like I’m a theater major!
My parents cloak their disapproval in concern for my future, but they’re the only ones. Strangers, classmates, and friends have zero filter when it comes to my job prospects, and I figure the best way to make them eat their words is to have a book on the shelves by the time I cross the stage in a cap and gown.
Huh, maybe itisstill a spite goal.
Or maybe I just love it.
Either way, I had to move the goalpost at the start of junior year. I’m nowhere near ready. My new goal is to finish a book and find a literary agent before the end of next year.
I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words in the last half decade, but none of them felt good enough. After I finished my latest novel, I planned to take a two-week break. Two days later, everything changed. One minute, I was curling my hair, thinking about what to eat for dinner, and the next, these characters were in my brain. A fae king, the mortal girl who falls in love with him, and their fight to protect his kingdom against warring creatures. It’s magical and whimsical and deeplyromantic. Or it will be, once I’ve transferred it from my brain onto the page. Small details.
“Are you working on something new?” West asks, and it’s the closest we’ve come to broaching the subject in months.
“Yes, and I’m so obsessed with it that I can barely sleep.”
“What’s it about?”
“Magical teenagers. What else?”
“Another weird story that should never be published?”
Oh. His words are a sucker punch. When it comes to my writing, I have my guard up around nearly everyoneexcepthim.
West takes one look at my expression, and his eyes widen in alarm. He rolls to his side and pushes his weight up onto his elbow. “Wait, hey, no—”
“Nice to know how you really feel.” I try to laugh it off, but my words come out hoarse and wounded.
“No! It’s a quote! Robert Pattinson said it aboutTwilight. You read it to me the first day we met.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “Did I?” I don’t remember that at all.
“Yes,” he insists.
We stare at each other as the silence around us rises in volume. His expression is one of forged steel.
“Okay,” I say eventually. He looks relieved as he flops backward. I want to believe him as badly as I want to believe that I’m not delusional for writing every chapter with his reaction in mind. But it might be too late for that.
Last semester, I asked if he had time to proofread a short story (emphasis onshort) for my Young Adult Lit class, but for the first time ever, he was too busy. He hasn’t asked to read anything of mine since, and the thought that he might havegrown sick of my silly magical teenagers makes me feel like the oxygen is being sucked out of the room.
“Remember when you used to color your nails with Sharpie?” I ask suddenly.
“What about it?”
“Just thinking about freshman year.”
“Do you ever miss it?” he asks.
“Your emo nails? Full offense, but no.”
He rakes a hand through his hair, eyes still fixed on the ceiling. “Living in the dorms. Hanging out on campus between classes because we had hours to kill and nothing else to do. I didn’t have a job or any stress or a—whatever.” His head falls to the side and our eyes meet.
Something close to longing crosses his face, and a small, chronically curious part of me wonders what he almost said on the other side ofwhatever.
I avoid the place in my brain that still feels the weight of West’s gaze on my lips or his hands on my waist. I don’t think about the days following spring break, when I cried my eyes out over a boy who went running straight into the arms of his high school sweetheart, and I sure as hell don’t romanticize what could have been. West made his intentions very clear: If he wanted to be with Bethany, he would. Two years later, he still is.
“I miss it,” I finally admit. My whisper might as well be a shout. His gaze grows pensive as our eye contact holds for longer than I understand, and I worry we’re tipping into territory that we can’t ignore. “But this year is good, too.”
