Page 91 of Her Rival

What I had instead was a coffee I hadn't yet had.

What I had instead was a sentence in my head about the inside of a kitchen on a Friday night in November in a glass house in the hills, and the sentence wanted out.

"I'm getting up," I said.

"Okay."

"I'm going to write."

"Yeah."

"You're going to make me eggs."

"I'm going to make you eggs."

"Soft."

"Soft."

We got up.

He went down to the kitchen. I went into the bathroom and washed my face and put my hair up and put on the t-shirt of his that was still folded on the chair from Sunday morning, and I came down the stairs barefoot in his clothes for the second time in two days, and the smell of coffee was already coming up the staircase to meet me.

He had two mugs out. The laptop bag open on the island where I'd left it the night before. A small notepad next to one of the mugs and a fresh pen.

He'd been thinking, while I was getting dressed, about what a writer needed at a kitchen island on a Tuesday morning, and he'd set out the materials.

I sat down. I opened the laptop. I opened a fresh document.

I wrote a sentence. I read it back. I added a comma. I read it back again.

The morning was just starting. The coffee was hot. The eggs were going to be soft. The man across the island hadn't asked me what the sentence said.

I wrote another one.

22

JETT

She wrote for three hours.

She didn't look up once. Didn't touch the second toast I made her at nine. Didn't touch the coffee I poured at ten. Didn't notice me hovering by the counter like a busboy waiting on a plate. She sat at the island in my t-shirt with her hair up and her feet hooked over the rung of the stool and she typed the way I hadn't seen anybody type in years. The way a writer types when the inside of her head has finally synced up with the outside of her hands.

I did not interrupt.

I went out on the deck. Read on my phone. Took a call from my agent I'd been ducking for three weeks and got him off the line in nine minutes by promising him a thing I wasn't actually going to do and that he'd forget by Thursday. I came back in at eleven. She was still typing. I made myself a sandwich. Made her one and put it on a plate next to her elbow. Went back to the deck.

What the agent wanted, under the nine minutes, was for me to say something. The defending champs were sliding, the city had noticed, and the beat guys had started using the word everybody uses, which is slump, and somewhere in the building a decision was getting made about whether one of the team's stars needed to stand at a podium and account for a three-week goal drought.

I was playing the worst hockey I'd played in years and I could not have explained to one living soul why I didn't care about it the way I was built to. I had never in my life been this happy and this useless at my own job in the same week. The two things were not unrelated. I knew exactly how related they were. I ducked the call anyway, because the only person I wanted to account to was three feet away in my shirt, typing the truest thing either of us had ever made, and she hadn't once asked me to account for anything.

At one in the afternoon she came out and stood next to me at the rail. She was holding the half-eaten sandwich. She'd eaten it in front of the laptop and forgotten how it had gotten there.

"How's it going," I said.

"It is going."

"Yeah?"