‘I mean, obviously he’s an arrogant sod, and he is rude and unappreciative, and he doesn’t understand the importance of the romance genre and thinks he is superior because he writes literary fiction …’
Fine, so shehasbeen listening after all.
‘But, like, Jess, what an amazing opportunity! You’vealways wanted to write a book! This is definitely a step in the right direction.’
Jess was afraid of this. Afraid of herself, too, and her own propensity to cave, especially when something new and fun is involved. Especially when that something new and fun is a man whom, despite her misgivings about his personality, she quite enjoyed looking at.
‘He clearly doesn’t want me to help. When I think about having to be in a room with him, trying to convince him that I know what I’m talking about, that my ideas are good ones … well, the wordsbloodandstonespring to mind.’
‘It’s not like you to shy away from a challenge.’
Lily knows how to push all Jess’s buttons. Words likeshy, words likechallenge. She is right, of course. Jess had just let her irritation with Alex momentarily cloud her judgement. She takes a sip of wine, tries the idea out in her head. Of course she can do this. She is more than capable of rising to this particular challenge. Of wearing Alex down, if that’s what it takes, until he holds his hands up in surrender and utters the magic words, ‘Fine! We’ll try it your way!’ And he’ll see, Nathan will see, the world will see, that she actuallydoeshave what it takes. That her hours of reading books weren’t just about escapism – there’s nothing wrong with escapism, anyway; she lives for it – but that they were teaching her something, making her into a great writer.
By the end of the evening, she and Lily are toasting Jess’s imminent success. Alex’s, too, of course. But mostly Jess’s.
Chapter Six
Alex
Alex’s feet take him back to his favourite London Bridge café almost against his will. Certainly against his better judgement. But he’s been summoned by an email from Jess to discuss their working arrangements. and while he’s still not so much on the fence about them working together as firmly on theno, thank youside, he has to admit that he wants to see her again. He’s fascinated by her, in an academic sense. And character study is vital for a writer.
The more he has thought about Jess, the more intrigued he has been. Intrigued about whether all that carefree jollity is a front, or authentic but living in her alongside deeper, more complex emotions. (He has seen her Instagram posts and read her Substack, and surely nobody can be that enthusiastic about everything all of the time.) Intrigued about why Nathan thought that Jess, of all people, might be a good match for him (purely authorially speaking, of course). Intrigued – and despite himself, impressed – by her strength and passion when she defended romance novels in conversation with him, sure in her convictions, even if he does still thinkthose convictions are misguided. He’s always preferred people who have that kind of determination, especially when they can back it up with their own internal logic, even if that logic is a little bewildering. All of this is infinitely preferable to people who just glide through life seemingly unaffected by anything, even though deep down he aspires to be one of those people. It just seems as if it would be a lot easier, somehow. Probably less suited to being a writer of renown, though. So here we are.
And here, also, standing at the counter, waiting for her coffee, is Jess. A cardigan shot through with embroidered daisies that would look ridiculous on anybody else. Her honey blonde hair swept up in a messy-but-classy bun-like style. Big hoop earrings last seen on his parents’ Kylie Minogue tapes from the Eighties.
He clears his throat next to Jess.
‘Hello,’ she says. Something behind her usual cheerfulness: resignation, maybe.
It’s fair enough, in a way. He hasn’t exactly been kind to her so far. It’s not, after all, her fault that his first complete draft was a depressing mess, drastic times calling for drastic measures – and it’s not her fault that Nathan deemed her to be the appropriate drastic measure. And Nathan has so often proved to be wise, in life and in writing. Maybe he should give him a chance with this seemingly crazy idea.
But for now, how to keep this conversation going? To avoid an awkward silence, or worse, tedious small talk about the weather, Alex reaches for observationalhumour. ‘I don’t mean to alarm you,’ he says, ‘but there’s a pencil in your hair.’
Others may have smirked at this line. But she grins, seemingly all joy. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I put it there myself.’
‘I see.’ He nods. But he has to ask. ‘Why?’
‘To hold my bun together.’
He feels himself frowning, his forehead creasing. From his years growing up with many sisters, he is all too familiar with scrunchies and hairgrips and multicoloured multipacks of elastic bands designed for ponytails. He’s even done his fair share of hair brushing and, at the peak of his pseudo-parenting, French braids. He always admired the ball girls at Wimbledon, though, how tidy their hair was. He never quite got it that even on any of his sisters. But then, that would have required them to sit still.
In all his years as a makeshift hair stylist, though, he’d never come across the pencil as a hair accessory. At the bookshop, it had seemed as if the pencil had been stuck in her hair just for somewhere to put it between markups of a book she was reviewing. This time, though, it seems more complex than that, more deliberate.
‘How does that work?’
Flat white for Alex, the barista calls. He nods, but does not take it. He is very distracted. Because Jess has taken down her bun. She’s holding the pencil, and he very much hopes that isn’t so that she can stab him with it.
She shakes her head, as if to dispel that notion, andher waves of blonde hair fall around her face, brushing each of her shoulders in turn, then her neck, then her shoulders again. He is, somehow, transfixed. Unable to swallow, though he desperately needs to. This close to her, he notices her freckles for the first time, a dusting across the bridge of her nose and along her cheekbones. He clenches his fists, defending himself against the instinct to reach out and touch them.
She turns to face away from him, so he can watch as she puts her bun back together. He grits his teeth together, further defence for his heart and his hormones – this time against the curve of her neck, more freckles where it meets her shoulders, as she puts the pencil in her mouth and lifts her hair into a ponytail. She wraps it around her finger – and he sympathises. In this moment, it feels like she could easily do the same thing to him. She twists her hair up, threads the pencil in, out, in, out.
Jess spins around to face him. ‘See?’ she says, brushing back the strand of hair that has fallen out and now frames her face. ‘Easy.’
‘I see,’ Alex squeaks out, like a teenager whose voice is still in the process of breaking. He clears his throat, finding the lower register. ‘Thanks for … that.’
Flat white for Alex, calls the barista again, in the tone of someone who is trying hard not to sound irritated because of having to repeat herself.No, no, no, he thinks.Don’t break the spell.
And it does, in this moment, feel like a spell. True, he was attracted to Jess when they first met in the bookshop. But that wasthen. That was before she hadbecome an instrument of torture. Is it possible that her hair alone would be capable of entrapping him like this?
