Jess and Alex make eye contact for the first time since the beginning of the meeting. She can see her own horror reflected in his eyes.
‘A weekend seems like plenty of time to get all of that done,’ she says quickly, to assuage the fears of both of them.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Nathan says. There’s a twinkle in his eye that seems to indicate he is enjoying this far too much. ‘I’ll email you both the address.’
With her peripheral vision, Jess tries to decipher Alex’s body language. He’s picking at his cuticles. He opens his mouth several times as if about to protest, andthen closes it again, having presumably found nothing to say – or at least nothing that he is comfortable saying in front of Jess. She almost feels sorry for him in this moment, until she remembers that she is trapped too.Forced proximity, Lily will no doubt say when Jess reports this conversation.I love it.
Jess loves it too. It’s one of her favourite tropes. Inside the safety of novels, though. Not in real life. Especially nothers.
Chapter Twelve
Alex
Alex waits for the door to close and stares hard at Nathan, hoping to communicate with his eyes what he doesn’t want to risk saying out loud, in case Jess can still hear him. Though why he should care what she thinks is beyond him. And it’s not as if they aren’t aware what they think of each other at this point, anyway. Her email didn’tsayshe found him pompous and arrogant (just his Latin), but it may as well have done. He knows how to read between the lines, particularly when the lines are practically jumping off the screen and punching him in the face. And as for what Jess knows of his opinion – well, it’s not as if he has been subtle.
Nathan pretends not to be able to translate Alex’s stare.
‘Are you enjoying the romance novels I lent you?’ he asks, all innocence, as though he hasn’t just lobbed a grenade into Alex’s creative life, into his hard-earned sense of order, into what’s left of his inner peace or whatever it is that the therapist is trying to get him to achieve.
Truth be told, he has not given the novels a second thought. He’s dumped them in a heap on his bedroom floor; he isn’t sure they’re worthy of the effort of re-arranging his bookshelves so that they will fit there. The only time he remembers them is when he trips over them on the way to his sock drawer, cursing himself for his uncharacteristic messiness.
‘I haven’t had much of a chance to look at them,’ he says.
Which is not quite true, and Nathan knows it, and Alex knows that Nathan knows it.
‘How about in between bouts of staring blankly at your computer screen, hoping inspiration strikes? Would that be a good time?’
The truth is, Alex has been too overwhelmed to do much beside stare at the screen. He’s finding it hard to focus, having to read even the most basic sentence two or three times to fully grasp its meaning. A layer of undefined emotion hovers somewhere above his head, raincloud-like, whether he’s sitting at his desk or pouring milk on his cornflakes (even spilling it! Which he never does! He has been pouring milk on cereal his entire life; how is it that he is suddenly unable to do so without splashback?).
It could be that he’s annoyed at Jess for all her criticism of his novel. Or that he’s found himself unable to draft the scenes Jess has suggested, and that he’s irritated with himself for succumbing to writer’s block, the scourge of inferior writers. Or that he’s disconcerted by the discomfort and the disorder of delving into his emotions with his therapist. He hates the messinessof that. He’d thought he was above letting emotions interfere with his writing, with hislife. He’s always been very good at compartmentalising: accessing memories and feelings from his childhood when at his desk, bringing messy families to life, then stuffing them back in a metaphorical suitcase that he zipped up tightly until he needed it for the next writing session.
But now, he seems to have no control over any of it. He wakes up in the morning – or, worse, the middle of the night – remembering a dream involving his parents throwing things at each other in his childhood kitchen, or his stepsiblings measuring the exact dimensions of their bedroom so that each one had precisely the space allocated to them. Or he catches a scent on the Tube, and it reminds him of the strong perfume his stepmother wore when she first entered their lives, and his stomach curdles – a visceral reminder of the confusing mix of emotions from back then: he liked her, but he felt guilty that he liked her, and also felt guilty that he felt guilty. In those moments, he is angry: angry for the child he was, who just needed someone to listen to him, to help him parse all the changes in his family; angryatthe child he was, for bottling it all up; angry, shamefully, at his siblings, because they were the reason he bottled it up, so that he could hold it together for them, be strong for them, be there for them.
All of this is messy. He doesn’t like mess.
And then there’s Nathan’s insistence on these romance novels, on his working with the distracting presence that is Jess. And now on putting her name on the cover alongside his, their literary fates foreverentwined, as a romance novelist might put it. How is he supposed to concentrate when she’s so infuriatingly pretty? And, worst of all, when she’s so infuriatingly right about his novel?
He stares blankly at Nathan, willing his brain to form a coherent response that doesn’t make reference to any of this.
‘I’ve been busy,’ he says eventually, all too aware of how ridiculous and faintly pathetic it sounds.
‘Busy sulking that I’m imposing a co-author on you?’
It’s a reasonable guess. Alex nods.
‘All right. Well, I’m not having this conversation again, so I suggest you get over it.’
Alex opens his mouth to argue, but is rescued by his phone ringing.
‘Do you need to get that?’ Nathan asks, nodding towards the corridor, signalling, perhaps, that their conversation is at an end and it’s time for Alex to step out.
Reaching into this pocket, he brings out his phone and a quick look at the screen confirms what he suspected: his sister Louisa needs him for something. ‘Probably not,’ he says, for no good reason. But then the reason occurs to him.You’re punishing her, says the voice of his therapist in his head – and maybe that’s true.
Alex thinks often about what would have been different if Louisa hadn’t called him that time, right as he was about to kiss Elodie, to tell her he loved her for the first time. His phone rang, as it always seemed to, and Elodie couldn’t take it anymore, and who couldblame her? Always playing second fiddle to his needy family, so large and sprawling that it was like a constant game of whack-a-mole: as soon as you’d dealt with one problem, with one person’s neediness, up popped another. These are all things Alex understands now, thanks to the therapist Nathan convinced him to try. He couldn’t have put any of this into words at the time.
‘Okay,’ Nathan says now. ‘Well, I should probably get on.’ He gestures vaguely at a pile of paper next to his laptop. ‘These manuscripts won’t edit themselves.’
Of course. Nathan’s other authors. After all, he doesn’t just sit around all day waiting to read the latest instalment of Alex’s brilliance.
