Like hell he’d regret his choices.
Come up here, Emerson sent.
His phone, and his room, returned to darkness. Emerson strained his ears, blood still thrumming, to hear any sounds of movement from downstairs. Only when he heard the quiet thump of feet on the stairs did he sit up. He leaned against the headboard, tried to keep the smile tamped down on his face.
Luca knocked so quietly at the door.
“Come in.”
He slunk in equally quietly, leaning back against the door after he’d closed it behind him. He wore basketball shorts, a threadbare t-shirt.
“Sorry,” he whispered. He ran a hand over his head. “It really is dumb.”
Emerson laughed. Patted the bed beside him. “Comehere.”
Reluctantly, Luca did. Emerson held up the sheets, made sure Luca got fully into bed with him so he couldn’t scamper away. Both his shorts and his t-shirt were ratty, but Emerson was pretty sure Luca had never looked hotter. Every single time Emerson saw Luca, he couldn’t believe how hot he was. Made less and less sense that he was here, in Emerson’s bed.
“So?” he prompted. “What happened?”
Luca had been sitting next to him against the headboard, but with a sigh, he sank fully under the covers.
“So when you’re trying to get an agent, you have to send your book around, right? But you don’t just send out your book; you have to send what’s called a query letter first. Where you’re like, here is this thing I’ve spent years of my life on, condensed into a paragraph.”
“Okay.” Emerson slid back under the covers too, but he kept himself propped on an elbow, looking down at Luca as Luca stared straight at the ceiling.
“Writing and sending out query letters is like, the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done. It’s all so cheesy and forced. But that’s the game. You have to sell yourself on a pitch first before anyone will talk to you.”
“How many query letters have you sent?” Emerson asked after a pause. It was clear Luca hated talking about this. His jaw was clenched, face unreadable.
He was silent another moment more, either trying to calculate the amount or deciding what to say.
“A lot,” he eventually said. “Too many.” Another pause. “Most of the time you don’t hear anything at all. Sometimes you get a straightforward rejection; other times there are like, standard lines they all say to soften the blow. But if they’re interested, they’ll either ask for you to send them a partial of the manuscript, or the whole thing.”
“Okay. I’m following so far.”
Luca blew out a breath. “I stopped sending out queries like, many months ago. I still check my writing email just to see?—”
“You have a writing email? Like a separate email for this stuff?”
“Yeah. That way a query rejection won’t, like, bam,hit me out of nowhere when I’m just like, double checking when my next dentist appointment is.”
“What is it? The email address I mean.”
Luca shifted under the sheets.
“Why?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Ljywrites. At gmail.”
“LJY?”
“Luca James Yaeger. It’s a horrible email.”
James.Luca’s middle name was James.
“Why do you look so delighted by this?”
