Arthur glanced over, intrigued. “Often.”
That surprised me. “Really?”
“Yes. Admiration works best at a distance.”
I laughed. “Okay, then. Which British author would absolutely ruin your life if you met them?”
He didn’t even hesitate. “Byron.”
I burst out laughing. “Of course you’d say Byron.”
“He would be insufferable,” Arthur continued calmly. “Brilliant and charismatic, but utterly irresponsible. One would follow him into ruin simply to see what happened.”
“That’s not an argument against him,” I said. “More a warning label.”
“I’m aware.”
“What about Austen?” I asked. “Safe choice? Or secretly devastating?”
He thought that over, his lips twisting to the side a bit. “Devastating. She would observe everything without saying a single word. Then write about you in a way that exposed your worst traits with surgical precision.”
“Oh, absolutely, not unlike Taylor Swift,” I said. “You’d spend the rest of your life wondering if every polite smile was an indictment.”
“She would destroy me,” he agreed serenely.
I paused. “You do know who Taylor Swift is, right?”
Another pause, longer this time.
“No,” he said. “But I’m already wary.”
I grinned.
“Dickens would just trauma-dump at you for six hours, then ask for money.”
Arthur actually laughed at that. A real laugh. It did something alarming to my chest, and I was grateful when he spoke.
“What about you?” he asked. “Who would undo you?”
“Virginia Woolf,” I said instantly.
He nodded.
“She’d look straight through me,” I went on. “Say something devastatingly kind. Then I’d spend the next ten years questioning my entire inner life.”
“Worth it,” he said.
“Completely.”
We fell quiet for a beat, the radio playing along softly now that I’d turned it down a notch.
Then he added, casually, “Shakespeare would be intolerable.”
I gasped. “How dare you?”
“He would speak entirely in metaphor,” Arthur said. “Never answer a direct question. And if you challenged him, he’d put it in a play and make you a fool forever.”
“That’s his right,” I said. “He earned that.”
