I fiddled with my straw for a second, wiping away the smile I’d accidentally allowed to slip across my face. “No, I had a late lunch, I...”
Tyler nodded. His eyes darted back to his stack of required reading as Selma’s email echoed in my ears.I don’t know what’s going on between you and Tyler, but whatever it is, set it aside. I want a publishable manuscript, and I don’t want to discuss this arrangement with either of you ever again.
We had so much work to do, and zero time to waste. And maybe it wasn’t so great, professionally, that I’d left him alone to read all day. After all, it wasn’t only Tyler’s reputation on the line. Mine, suddenly, was equally fragile—and I really did love my job.
I had seen the stress and unpredictability that came with chasing your own career in publishing, especially right out of college, and frankly, I didn’t want that. You get one shot, maybe two, and then what? Your title flops, and you never get a chance to write a book again. But with Selma, I had security. I could pay my rent, Icould get my stories into the hands of millions of eager readers, and then I could turn it all off and go thrifting in Brooklyn. Go fishing for a cute boy in FiDi. Just set it all aside and be a normal, twenty-five-year-old girl.
And so, I pushed my hair behind my ears and thought it through. I could be nice, right? I could act like it didn’t matter—like this was just work. Like I really didn’t care. Like every time he looked at me, I didn’t have to remind myself to breathe.
“I, um... I could maybe get a soda, though?”
Tyler capped the highlighter and rose to his feet. “I know just the place.”
We wound up at a pizza shop a few blocks south, a no-frills New York parlor with giant pies covered in broccoli, pineapple, and what someone—who, exactly, it remained unclear—claimed to be meatballs. I had just completed a fifteen-minute lecture on the importance of intimacy rituals when Tyler, halfway through his second slice of mushroom, cracked open a can of Coke.
“So,” he said. “Your date was... seven hours long?”
“Is that unusual? Most of my dates last at least a week. Two, if I’m ovulating.”
He rolled his eyes, then set down his drink. “Who’s the lucky guy?”
“His name is Danny. You wouldn’t know him. He’s normal.”
“Oh, so, like, an opposites attract thing?”
Now it was my turn to roll my eyes. “Also a trope.”
He laughed, dug back into his remaining slice, and proceeded to pepper me with questions about his reading list while I nursed mycherry soda.Why are so many women desperate to open bakeries? Why are everyone’s parents always dead? Why are the love interests always named Josh?
“That,” I said, “is the beauty of romance. We don’t let the fact that things are a little implausible get in the way of a good time.”
“Is that what you tell yourself when you get dressed in the morning?”
“I don’t dress for men, Tyler.”
“Obviously,” he said, but when he said it, his head tilted just a bit and his mouth dropped open half an inch, and everything rewound. We were outside my house, and our bodies were slammed against the lattice beneath my bedroom window, and it was pouring, and we were dripping wet, catching our breaths, and all of a sudden, my hips were in his hands and my hands were in his hair and—
I pulled a folder out of my bag.
This couldn’t happen. That wasn’t him. That Tyler, he wasn’t real. He never was. I was here to write a story. I was here to pay my rent. I was here to make sure Selma didn’t change her mind about me—and that I didn’t turn the gold star next to my name into a permanent red line.
“We need to get back to work,” I said.
Tyler looked down, his jaw twitching as I opened the folder and handed him a printout.
“Those are the tropes,” I said, still steadying my voice as he flipped over the page. “It’s pretty much an exhaustive list. I highlighted the really big ones—there are about fifty. Since we’re short on time, I think we should pick at least five or six for our book: friends-to-lovers, hot bodyguard, marriage of convenience... And then there are some random ones, too, that you don’t see asmuch, but we could still use: stepsiblings, amnesia, meddlesome ghost.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And this is the backbone of your literature?”
“This,” I said, “is the backbone of the genre single-handedly keeping publishing companies alive. Who do you think pays for your depressing-as-shit, experimental pseudo-novellas? Not everybody wants to read McCarthy.”
“Actually, nobody wants to read McCarthy.”
“Don’t speak ill of the dead.”
His eyes twinkled, and my breath caught. How long could we possibly do this? This back-and-forth? This hot and cold? How long could I possibly pretend I hadn’t needed him? That our final summer hadn’t shattered me?
He scrubbed a hand over his face.
