Merritt considered lying, but she was not a liar.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I’ve only written one book, and I didn’t finish it. And it might be terrible.”
“I’m sure it’s not terrible.”
She shrugged and pulled her laptop closer, watching Whit’s cursor move across their shared document to type the words “Chapter One.”
“It might be,” she said again, filling the silence.
Whit stopped typing and looked at her over the top of his laptop. “Why don’t I read it?”
“What?No.”
The words somersaulted out of Merritt, which was sort of surprising. A black hole seemed to have opened in her chest, out of which nothing, not even words, should have been allowed to escape.
“Sure, why not? Let me read it, and I’ll tell you, honestly, if it’s terrible.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Merritt managed to say. It was at that moment she realized she was sweating. Clad in a dove gray sweater that had suddenly decided to go full tilt into its job description, her skin was getting itchy and she was desperate to strip down to her T-shirt and step outside so the cool air could cover her.
“Of course you can let me read it,” Whit said.
“Of course I cannot. You are an actual, real novelist—”
“So were your professors at your MFA, right?”
Graydon was not her professor, but his face flashed across her mind.
“They were,” she admitted flatly. “And also, they were paid to read my stuff. And also I dropped out. So.”
“So, you’ve had a novelist read your work before. How about one who’s also afriend?”
He seemed to put all his weight into the cheesiness of that sentence, but she was not swayed.
“That’s even worse!” Merritt insisted. She closed her laptop and looked at Whit, willing him to understand.
“I don’t understand,” he said, reading her thoughts. “You want to write, don’t you?”
“I think so. Yes. And speaking of, we should really get to it with—”
“No,” Whit said, holding up a hand in a gesture that would have been condescending coming from someone else—coming from Graydon, if she were being honest—but Whit filled it with surprising gentleness. “You want to write, I know you do. And part of writing is being read. I would never make anyone share their work before they were ready, but the offer stands. I’d love to read it one day, once you get there.”
He held her gaze with his dark blue eyes, and Merritt tried to look as though that word—love—hadn’t set her whole brain spinning like a gyroscope. Would he reallyloveto read it? Or was that just something people said?
“What’s it about, by the way?”
“No,” Merritt said with an unexpected laugh.
He furrowed his eyebrows at her in a mock threat. “Come on. You can at least tell me that.”
Merritt gripped the seat of the kitchen chair and tried to decide whether the gurgling in her stomach was something excited or just pre-vomitous. This was a not-unfamiliar feeling, in two senses. First, of course she had done all this before: talked about her work, read her work aloud, had her work mercilessly critiqued with a metaphorical comb that was less fine-toothed, more Bond-villain instrument of torture. But second, she had felt this same way for the last several days. Being with Whit, doing the job ofan author with someone who had done it all before, had been quietly electrifying. She was doing something, really doing it, and she was being useful and creative, and Whit kept looking at her like she was well and truly saving his life one Greenwood Castle fact at a time. She loved every part of it: the outlining, the brainstorming, the breaks for tea. It felt more real than anything she’d done since leaving grad school, and possibly even before, and now here was this man, whom she only barely knew, asking her about a silly little story she had made up in her head and then had the audacity to try putting down on paper.
“Fine,” she said, exhaling. “It’s a take on the Narnia books, and books like them. But no one does those anymore—portal stories, about kids slipping into little pre–Modern European worlds, and this isn’t that, either. It’s about what it would be like to live in Narnia, or wherever, when these outsider kids stumble in like little accidental colonizers and suddenly they’re the kings and queens. What would that feel like to the Narnians, and so on.”
Whit’s eyebrows stretched upward. “So it’s an anti-colonial, anti-imperialistchildren’snovel?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Can you do that?”
