“Big debut energy. It’s the spark you see in the eyes of a new author. Unlike me.”
He frowns. “You have a spark.”
“No, I don’t. Publishing beat it out of me a million years ago. And I’m off the clock.”
West drops a heavy backpack on my table and points to his watch. “You have one minute left.”
“Fine.”Sixty seconds.I fix him with my blandest expression and pretend it’s a chore. It’s decidedly not. Even when he was the skinny emo kid in eyeliner, I couldn’t stop looking at his face.I saw the vision. If West and I were together now, I’d feel like a genius, like people who bought Apple stock in the nineties.
West unzips his backpack and pulls out a stack of books.My books. He pushes them wordlessly toward me.
“What are you doing?”
He opens the beat-up copy ofTorchedand stabs the title page with his finger. “You write my name here”—he points to the top of the page—“and your name here.” He speaks slowly, an almost word-for-word repeat of the conversation we had twodays ago. But my brain can’t compute any of it, because West is somehow in possession of three very worn copies of my novels.
I pick upTorchedwith trembling fingers and thumb through the pages. It’s a librarian’s worst nightmare—full of highlighted passages and notes in the margins. It seems like half of the pages are dog-eared, and the spine is cracked.
This is a book that has been read.A lot.
“Where did you get this?”
West looks confused. “My house?”
I flip through the other books, and unbelievably, they’re all in the same condition. No matter how West’s opinion of me has shifted over the last decade, I can’t accuse him of being indifferent. “Why?” I say, unsure what question I’m really asking.Why did you read them? Why are you asking me to sign them? Why does it suddenly feel like there’s not enough air in this open tent?
“I went to your event at the Page Turner,” he says abruptly.
“What? When?”
“Right afterTorchedcame out. You were wearing a black dress with stars on it.”
I’ve done so many bookstore signings and events that most of them have faded to gray, but then it hits me. At the first event my family attended, I was distracted by a man who looked like West at the back of the room. “I saw you there! You disappeared.” My brain scrambles to make sense of this new information. “Why were you there?”
He throws his arms wide before letting them fall to his sides. “Why do you think?”
A beat passes in which we blink at each other in surprise. Before I can get another thought in, he changes the subject. “Will you get lunch with me?”
He leans his weight on his hands as he splays them acrossthe table, the taut lines of his arms mirroring the tension in his brow, his jaw, his mouth. Without thinking, I uncap my Sharpie and slowly color in the nail on his middle finger. If it weren’t so supremely weird of me, I’d do the rest. Anything to keep touching him.
“Why?” I ask again. Apparently, I can’t say anything else.
He looks at his hands for a long time. “We need to plan for this evening.”
I narrow my eyes; somewhere buried deep in the forgotten recesses of my mind—deeper even than all the events I’ve nearly forgotten about—is the sensible, responsible version of me, and she’s screaming at me to say no. But there’s something about seeing West’s handwriting in the margins of my book that makes my world tilt. It’s like I’ve been looking at life through a fun-house mirror and he just shattered the glass.
I sweep my markers into my bag and stand up, acting braver than I feel. “I’ll go to lunch with you, but I have to run an errand first.”
His eyes flash. “I’ll come with.”
“You’ll miss your interview.”
“No. The interview is off.”
My eyes fall to his copies of my books, knowing it’s too little, too late. But I find myself unable to turn him away.
We walk together to Gentle Ben’s, and the air around us is different. We’re both being so cautious. Watching what we say. Staying far enough away from each other that our elbows won’t bump. I feel like a freshman on a walk with my brand-new crush. It’s disorienting, like time has cast a spell on West and me in a way that allows us to be every version of ourselves at once. I miss him, and I hate him, and I’m over him, and I want the back of his hand to brush mine at least one more time.
Gentle Ben’s is busy with the lunch crowd. I tell West to wait for me outside, and I navigate through the tables back to the bar, where an unfamiliar face in a bartender’s apron asks what he can get for me. He has brown hair pulled back in a bun and tattoos down both arms.
