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I should never have said anything. If I’d deflected or lied, I could have kept avoiding the situation I’d put myself in.
Rolling over, I groan into my pillow.
Maybe it’s for the best. The whole point of moving home was to take this leap from a safe space. Because if I’m going to try and fail, I want to be able to crawl back into bed and know that Morgan and Aiden are close by.
Somebody will have to bring me snacks.
Despite promising Sebastian I wouldn’t, I hide in my room until his truck rumbles down the street.
It’s time to stop avoiding this.
Maybe if I step back a little, treat it like I would any other project, I can make some progress finally. The manuscript makes a dull thud when I drop it onto my bed. I pull a red pen out of my jumble of stationery and then think better of it. Too many essay flashbacks. I swap it for purple and settle in.
It’s… rough. There’s no way to sugarcoat it.
It’s less cringe inducing than I was afraid it would be, but not by much, and boy, does it need work. There’s a ton of exposition in the first few chapters—standard fare for a first draft, since I was brain dumping every idea in fear it would flee and I’d never get it back again—and it’ll all need to be toned down or spread out. Or both.
The world building is solid, but it’s obvious I was in the middle of writing the biography of an architect at the time. My main character would never use the wordportico. She’s a twenty-one-year-old orphan turned assassin in a city so corrupt that the mayor’s campaign was “I’m rich and I lie.” This girl knows how to disassemble and clean seven types of shotguns, including the two her foster dad made himself; she doesn’t have time for dormers or colonnades.
I squeeze my eyes shut and rub my temples. If the beginning is any indication—and in my experience, it always is—then I have a lot of work ahead of me. But this is why I’m here.
By the time Sebastian walks through the front door,I’ve re-outlined the first three chapters. It’s not much, but it’s enough to feel some sweet with the bitter.
“Hey, how do you feel about…” Sebastian trails off as he walks into my room, and I rush to stop the music.
Fuck. My heart is racing. Closing my eyes, I take a few deep shaking breaths until I think I can move without crumpling.
“Shit, I didn’t hear you come in.”
And here I was, worried about the book.
I get lost sometimes when tasks become overwhelming. It didn’t make much sense when I was in school. Why is it that math homework was always easier than English, yet I lived for writing?
Then I started focusing on other people’s words, and it clicked. When I care, a task stops being simple. Suddenly, it matters.
And then it overwhelms.
Music helps. Dancing. Cleaning. A two-hour long YouTube video about the history of an abandoned theme park. Coloring in books. Distractions.
It’s too much to hope that he’ll be gone when I open my eyes, and yep. There he is, leaning against the doorframe and looking all too good there.
He smiles bright and wide, making my knees weak. “Don’t stop on my account.”
Yeah right. I’ll have a one-way ticket to my mortification, please.
When he doesn’t leave, I follow his gaze to my bed, ormore accurately, the box of cleaning products on top of my bed. Shit. How the hell do I explain this? It’s a bit more than what one would call a “usual” amount of stuff. And that was before I went and waved off his comments about the bleach smell.
It was silly to think I’d get to keep any secrets in this house.
“That explains the bathroom,” he says, taking a step inside my room. He leans against the wall now, slipping his hands into his pockets and turning a smile on me.
Somehow that’s worse than getting caught.
Here’s the thing. The outside me, the one everyone sees—oh, Bee, she moved across the country to follow her dreams, and now she’s a successful writer—that me? It’s only half the truth. The reality is that when I’m not being that version of me, I’m a mess.
I’ll burn out from working too hard and then count up all the ways I haven’t been working hard enough. I’ll lose hours researching, only to realize I haven’t eaten or gotten dressed, and what grown adult who has their shit together sits in their pajamas eating cereal at two p.m. on a Wednesday?
There are very few people who know this side of me, if anyone. Aiden moved out when I was still in my teens, and I’ve never lived with anyone else before. The fact that Sebastian might become the first is probably the most terrifying part of this whole situation. Because if I ever had a chance of impressing him, then showing him the real me will definitely ruin it.
