“Sure?”
“Yeah.” I look down at my notebook. At the words that came out of nowhere after Delilah walked away. “Why not.”
“Great. Text me your address. I’ll bring coffee.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I’m engaged to Michelle’s best friend. If I show up without coffee, they’ll both know, and I’ll never hear the end of it.”
He hangs up before I can argue.
I text him the address and spend the next twenty minutes trying to figure out if I should clean up or if that would make this weirder than it already is.
I settle for shoving the dirty dishes in the dishwasher and hoping he doesn’t look too closely at anything.
Scott Avery looks exactly like what you’d expect a real estate developer slash secret romance novelist to look like: expensive shoes, nice watch, and anexpression that suggests he’d rather be anywhere else.
“Nice place,” he says, handing me a coffee cup. “Very...beachy.”
“It’s a rental.”
“I figured.” He steps inside, scanning the room with the practiced eye of someone who’s evaluated thousands of properties. “Good bones. Terrible art.”
I glance at the generic seascape above the couch. “Came with the house.”
“I assumed.” He settles onto the couch like he’s conducting a business meeting. “So. Writer’s block.”
“Straight to it, huh?”
“I’m not great at small talk.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “Jessica says it’s one of my many character flaws.”
I sit in the chair across from him, cradling my own cup. The coffee is perfect—because of course it is. Michelle’s probably trained him.
“I don’t really know what you expect me to say,” I admit. “I’ve been blocked for months. Nothing works. I’ve tried everything.”
“What’s everything?”
“New locations. Different instruments. Writing prompts. Meditation. That app where you write three pages every morning. A very expensivesongwriting retreat in LA where a woman named Starlight told me to ‘release my resistance to the flow.’”
Scott’s mouth twitches. “How’d that work out?”
“I resisted.”
“Sounds about right.” He sets down his coffee. “Can I ask you something?”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“What did you write about? Before the block?”
The question catches me off guard. “What do you mean?”
“Your songs. The ones that made you famous. What were they about?”
I stare at my coffee. “Love, mostly. Loss. The usual.”
“Anyone specific?”
The silence stretches long enough to become an answer.
