‘Maybe not just yet,’ he says, and her heart sinks. But he puts his arm around her, and she relaxes into him. He kisses the top of her head.
She stands, leaning into Alex, for what might be five seconds or might be five years. She tries not to think about the implications of what he’s just said. Part of her is tempted to kiss him, but part of her thinks he doesn’t deserve it, not after these mixed messages.
He shuffles against her, and she knows the moment is over. They pull apart and pretend to study the index cards laid out in front of them. Or at leastsheis pretending. Perhapshereally is studying them.
‘Anyway,’ he says after a while. ‘This is the publicity that Nathan wanted, right? Weren’t you supposed totease our collabwith Instagram posts?’
That had been the plan. But also, what she had with Alex felt too new, too precious, too murky and hard to describe to risk putting a name on it or exposing it to the world. She wants to keep it close to her heart for now.
Her phone lights up on the table.
@allthemanybooks has tagged you in a comment.
Before she taps, she already knows what’s coming.
This you, @Jessandherbookobsession?
She’d met Allie of the All the Many Books blog at London Book Fair one year, in the queue for a talk by Taylor Jenkins Reid. They’d followed each other for a long time, exchanging book recommendations and mutual eye rolls on the ever-cycling social media discourse –Are audiobooks reading? Is a three-star rating good or bad? Why is selling advance review copies such a terrible thing to do?Jess used to earnestly join in – some of her responses, in fact, had gone viral and helped raise her follower count into the six digits a couple of years ago – but now she can’t scroll past the threads fast enough. Instead, to scratch the itch, she’d DM Allie:Do these people think they are the first person to ever have that thought?And Allie would respond with similar snark.
She’d thought they were friends, but tagging her like this, so publicly, doesn’t really seem like something a friend would do.
She stuffs the phone in her pocket. Out of sight, out of mind: if she does that, the problem goes away. At least for now; at least until she next opens her phone and the tags and DMs have bred like proverbial rabbits. The bookfluencer world in the UK is not all that big. The number of accounts with more than 100,000 followers is surprisingly small. Over the years, Jess has had her fair share of slightly passive-aggressive comments, or DMs that state admiration but smack of envy. She knows many others would love the paid partnerships with publishers, the limited-edition tote bags, the exclusive author events Jess is invited to. Like many fandoms, Bookstagram is kind and gentle on thesurface and gives off a we’re-all-in-it-together kind of vibe. But, just like with any fandom, there’s competition and jealousy. More than the free stuff – possibly even more than the opportunities to rub shoulders with the author of the moment – everybody wants to be The Chosen One, the Big Name Fan, and many people would shock themselves with how eagerly they would tread on others to get there.
And, let’s face it: everybody loves gossip. Everybody loves drama. Including Jess, usually. It would only be karma if she was at the receiving end of it for once; she knows that, but it still doesn’t feel good. She can see it already: the speculation she only has a book deal because of whom she’s dating. The assertions – true, as it turns out, but still – that her follower count was what got her a book deal, and that isn’t fair when there are so many writers out there who are just as talented, maybe more talented, but don’t have theplatformand so get overlooked. She can already see the opinion piece inThe Bookseller:When will we start valuing talent over influence? How the publishing industry lost the plot …
‘I’m not sure our collab needs teasing,’ she says. ‘Your next book is going to fly off the shelves with or without a co-author’s name on the cover. But first we need to write it.’ She shakes her head to free herself of these uncomfortable thoughts. ‘Let’s get back to work.’
‘Okay,’ he says. Relieved, no doubt, to be off the hook on the girlfriend thing for now.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Alex
It goes on like that for a while: a couple of times a week, Alex and Jess meet up at her flat, or at his, or in a coffee shop – his preferred option, far from a bed, far from temptation. In between, they work on their own pages, their own characters. They swap pages and then edit them. Alex spends a few days with each set of parents. His stepmum wants to know about his next book; his brother asks about his love life; his dad scratches behind his ear and just wants to check Alex is okay and doesn’t need any financial help. To all these things, he answers evasively, and not in a subtle way:Look at the timeorNice weather for the time of year, he jokes, and they leave him alone, continue to tiptoe around the contours of his life. Imagine if they knew about his therapist, he thinks. Let alone Jess, or the book: this book that he is beginning to believe could be the Next Big Thing in his career, maybe even also the Next Big Thing on the British book scene. He knows he shouldn’t get his hopes up, but it’s a challenge. He’s not proud of this, but he misses the good old days when he was a literary darling: thepeople he got to hang out with, the events he got invited to, the thunderous applause of the crowd in a Hay Festival marquee. He is daring to believe that he could have some, if not all, of it back, and the thought of sharing the limelight with Jess is a surprisingly pleasant one.
And through all of this, he tries, really hard and very unsuccessfully, not to think about Jess during every waking hour: her laughter, her intensity, her quick humour. He tries not to think about the disappointment on her face when he teased the wordgirlfriendand then ripped it away from her.It’s for your own good, he wishes he could tell her.You deserve better than me.He’s brought this up in therapy. His therapist asked, ‘Don’t you think that’s up to her to decide?’ But he is protecting her by not giving her the option. Once he is sorted, once he is on the right dose of medication, once he feels like he’s on an even keel and ready to be a worthy boyfriend – then, he’ll seek her out. And maybe he’ll have missed the boat by then, maybe she’ll have found someone else. But it’s a risk he’s willing to take. She deserves to be happy, to be with someone stable. And if he messes this up, he’ll never forgive himself – for hurting her, for causing emotional turmoil, for ruining a fruitful creative partnership.
In the meantime, he’s enjoying getting to know her as a friend – a friend with an always-surprising wardrobe and a never-ending supply of different glasses. Or even a friend with benefits, if those benefits include apple-scented hair and the thrill of being near someone who admires him despite not having been easily won over byhis name and his sales figures. She’s told him about her family; he’s told her about his.
‘You know,’ she says to him one day, as he drapes his summer jacket over the back of his chair in their favourite coffee shop. ‘I keep expecting you to have a technicolour coat.’
He looks at her blankly. Not because he doesn’t know the reference, but because she doesn’t seem to see the irony: she’s wearing her own multi-coloured clothing, a playsuit with asymmetric patterns that almost hurts his eyes to look at.
‘Like Joseph,’ she clarifies.
Ah. This is a common mistake. ‘Joseph wasn’t the oldest. He was the favourite. There’s a difference.’ And doesn’t he know it. If anyone among his siblings was going to have a coat of many colours, it would be David, the baby of the interminable family. He who, in the eyes of just about all of them, can do no wrong.
She scrunches up her face.
‘So who’s the oldest in the Joseph story?’
‘Reuben. The boringly responsible one, who stops his brothers from killing Joseph and decides for some reason that throwing him into a cistern is the way forward.’
She looks at him intensely. ‘Is that how you see yourself? Boringly responsible?’
He would have thought this was obvious. ‘Yes.’ He twirls his pencil, deciding how much to tell her. ‘Remember how you ribbed me once for going to America to do an MFA when there are perfectly good courses here?’
She nods.
