Caleb Miller holding someone he absolutely hated.
As if she was everything they had imagined the love of his life to be.
Then
She knew full well she shouldn’t have said it. Something about the word just seemed to make him react differently, despite how small it was compared to the other insults she’d leveled at his work over the last two years. He had lobbedpreposterousandunbelievableat hers; she had lobbedstiltedandcoldback at his. He had accused her of using too many flowery adjectives; she had accused him of being allergic to long sentences.Your work reads like a machine uniformly stamped each one, she had once said—so surely, surely this didn’t matter.
It was just the relatively okayphony.
And she hadn’t even thought it was really true. He’d read aloud something just as dry and emotionless as always, and then he’d gotten to the part where the main character started extolling the virtues of living an austere, macho life, and somehow it had just popped out of her.
As if she suspected he didn’t really mean it.
Even though she couldn’t imagine how he didn’t.
He was like that himself. It was who he was.
And yet he jerked, as if caught red-handed. His lipsparted; he went to argue back like always, and failed. It was the strangest sight she’d ever seen—and not just to her. Everybody else in the room seemed to be staring at him suddenly, too. All of them so trained to anticipate one of Miller and Emmett’s explosive arguments that they didn’t know what to do when it wasn’t delivered.
The lack of it happening just hung there, an unpopped balloon.
And the balloon was getting bigger. It swelled as they stared at each other, always seeming a second away from explosion. By the time he spoke she was almost holding her breath. Hell, hehadbeen holding his, because his words had to work their way around his thirst for oxygen.
“What do you mean by that?” he demanded.
While her mind raced, explanation-less.
“Nothing,” she finally said. But of course he wouldn’t accept it.
“You think I secretly deep down don’t believe that? Say it if you do.”
“It just sounded like it didn’t ring true. Like you were just—”
“Like I was just what? Come on, spit it out, Emmett. You usually do.”
She hesitated. But now it wasn’t because she didn’t know what to say.
It was because she did, and didn’t like it. It sounded too… she didn’t know.
Like something she was secretly hoping for, something she was still clinging to, instead of the truth. In the end, though, it had to come out. Like lancing a wound. “Onautopilot. Echoing things you think you should write but maybe don’t want to anymore,” she said, a little shrug on the end just to make it seem casual.
He didn’t take it casually, however.
“That’s ridiculous. How dare you.”
“I don’t know why you’re saying that, I’ve dared worse.”
“Like hell you have. Telling me that I long to let go and be like you.”
“Wait a minute, I never said tha—”
“Well, not in so many words.”
“In no words. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about you thinking your way is right, but it isn’t. It isn’t. It can’t be, I don’t want it to be. I’m going to make it not be and everything will work,” he said, words rising and rising until finally it almost sounded like he was out of control. Like he was babbling, the way she had after one particularly scathing critique of his.
Then even stranger: he stood up, abruptly.
