Page 24 of Philippa Flynn’s Year of Panic and Piracy

We’re lying side by side with our feet on the floor, having sat on the edge of his bed together, then flopped onto our backs to test his mattress. I have a new one picked out for myself, and the delivery and haul-away fee is the same for two beds as it is for one.

“How old do you think this bed is?” I follow Dylan’s gaze to a water stain on the ceiling. It’s brown, large, and a good reminder that I should prioritize the roof. Soon.

“I don’t know.” He rolls his head toward me. “Twenty years? Thirty?”

“Try seventy or eighty. My grandmother inherited a lot of her furniture from her parents. This bed probably has four generations of dead skin cells in it.” I pat the mattress. Even that light touch makes it squeak. It’s amazing Dylan and I haven’t kept each other up all night in a dueling chorus of screeching bedsprings. “Sorry. That was gross. But maybe motivating?”

He smiles, and just like that, his dimples appear.

My heart does a pinchy thing it’s been doing more and more often as weeks pass. A little squeeze that says, Take note. Pay attention. Something’s happening. I’m not particularly fond of the squeeze, and I’m pretty good at overriding it, but I should’ve predicted that lying elbow to elbow on Dylan’s bed would result in more than a Rorschach test of his ceiling stains.

Also, this is the first time I’ve been in his room, which is its own kind of intimacy. I now know he uses an old MacBook with a dented corner and a partially peeled-away sticker of an upright bear on the back. It’s plugged in by the bed, on the floor, suggesting his “writing desk” is his bed, or maybe the floor. A dark suit and two dress shirts hang in an open wardrobe, with a solitary pair of black dress shoes on the shelves below. A half-empty water glass and pair of big, puffy headphones sit on the bedside table, tucked against a gilded lamp with an oversize shade that dwarfs the other items. He also has a laundry hamper with its lid neatly closed, an adjustable pull-up bar currently resting against the hamper, and two pairs of completely destroyed running shoes. Anything else he owns is tucked away in the dresser or bedside table.

Whether Dylan Sterling is a minimalist by choice or circumstance, no one would walk into this room and assume he’s been living in the house for several years, and as its sole tenant for most of that time. He looks like he’s renting a room for a weekend.

“I got paid for today,” he says. “Will you let me buy the mattress?”

I shake my head. “It’s my house. My stuff. Updates are my responsibility.”

His smile drops away completely. “I don’t want to be your responsibility.”

I open my mouth to quip back, but the words die in my throat as something in his eyes tells me his statement runs deep, so I take a moment to put myself in his shoes, metaphorically speaking, since even he shouldn’t put himself in his shoes, given their state of disrepair. While I know almost nothing about Dylan’s upbringing and why he’s so averse to accepting basic human kindness like a cookie, a thank-you dinner, or a decent surface to sleep on, I do know how it feels to have simple kindnesses braided with a sense of obligation or a sense of shame. And how hard it can be not to assume everyone will do that, just because some do.

“Can I dare you to let me pay half?” I ask.

He smiles again, but only a little, like a half smile for a half offer.

“Okay,” he says.

I smile full-out. I thought we’d be arguing about this for ages.

“Okay,” I say. And when my smile draws out more of his smile, I have to fight, fight, Fight the urge to take his hand and give it a celebratory squeeze. It’s right there, inches from mine, resting by his hip the way mine rests next to my own hip, pinkie almost to pinkie. And it is one of the great ironies of life that sometimes the smallest distances are the hardest to cross.

He inhales deeply as he rolls his head away, gazing up at the ceiling again.

I follow suit, lacing my hands over my belly to reduce temptation.

For several minutes, we lie together in relatively comfortable silence. Comfortable because we’ve tacitly agreed to keep lying here, without a need to do so. Relative because this mattress still sucks and because I can’t completely ignore the sweetly unassuming and unfairly attractive man lying next to me. I try, making pictures out of the stain—a hulking cyclops, a map of Scotland, a cat eating its tail—but my thoughts drift as I follow the motion of Dylan’s Adam’s apple, bobbing with a swallow, or the slow bat of his enviable eyelashes. Closed. Open. Closed. Open. His tousled black curls curtain the tips of his ears, longer now than in July, and his dark stubble’s more pronounced than usual. I wonder if it would feel abrasive against my cheek or if it’s softer than it looks. Then I lock my eyes on the stain again, this time seeing only a stain.

Dylan’s first to break the silence. “Twenty-two.”

I roll my head toward him. He continues staring at the ceiling.

“Twenty-two what?” I ask.

He taps his laptop with a sock-clad toe. “Since I’ve been living here alone, I’ve started twenty-two novels, hoping to do better than the one I shelved fifteen years ago. I get to chapter three. Maybe four or five. Then the story loses momentum, I’m not invested in the characters, or the plot lacks a commercial hook, and I have to start over.” He closes his eyes, inhaling slowly. “You were looking at my laptop when we came in. And you’ve asked how my writing’s going. That’s the truth of it. Six years. Twenty-two chapter threes. A hard drive full of dead ends.”

I blink at him in surprise, afraid to otherwise move. It’s a big truth, a huge truth, and I’m terrified that if I do more than breathe, he’ll regret telling me. And he won’t say more.

He exhales as he laces his hands over his stomach, his eyes still closed.

“I was twenty-seven when I met your grandmother, even though I’d been posing for the covers for five years by then. A journalist was interviewing her. They’d been in touch with her publishing team and learned about the upcoming cover shoot, so they arranged a visit to the studio, with your grandmother consulting on the shoot.” He pauses there, and I use the pause to imagine the scene. I know that art directors—not authors—are responsible for cover designs, but my grandmother probably had a blast picking out costumes and arranging props, even if it was all staged for an article about her. Her flair for the theatrical would’ve lent itself well to such tasks, her enthusiasm infectious. I make a mental note to track down the article, even if it’s one I’ve read before. I would’ve been twenty at the time and unlikely to have fully appreciated it.

“We got to talking,” Dylan continues. “I mentioned that I’d . . . taken some writing classes.” His jaw tightens, and as is often the case, I sense that he’s carefully editing as he speaks, hiding one truth inside another. “She asked what I’d written. I told her short stories, mostly. That I’d placed a few in literary magazines. That I’d written a novel, but an editor helped me see it was unpublishable, and I’d never let anyone else read it. I told her I was eking out a living delivering takeout food and picking up the occasional modeling gig, so I wasn’t really a writer.”

Another pause, a long one, a hard one, but eventually, slowly, he rolls his head my direction, letting his eyes travel around my face as I listen to his breathing, and my own, both of which seem wildly complicated for something we do all day, every day, without thought. It’s as if even the air between us knows this isn’t an ordinary moment. It can gust, drift, shift, dissipate, dance, eddy, lurch, or slip out in the gentlest possible exhale. Anything but just be.

“Your grandmother told me I was wrong,” Dylan says. “She said I was a writer, that she believed in me, and one day she hoped she could help me believe in myself.”