AllFreeNovel
Share Us
4:30 p.m.
ESSENCE QUILL DUCKED out of the office of her editor-in-chief, head down, shaking her head.
“Just five hundred words or so on it. You can knock that out in no time,” he called after her. His name was Ned, and she usually liked him, except when he was giving her assignments that were going to intrude on her weekend.
With a name like Essence Quill, she always knew she was destined to be a writer. For some time, she considered that she was going to be a poet or a novelist, but neither of these things ever seemed to work out. For one thing, they seemed to require something that Essence didn’t have a lot of, namely internal motivation.
She’d tried to write things, and sometimes, she even got started. But finishing? Going back to a thing after she’d begun it? Becoming interested in it again?
That was beyond her.
No, she needed deadlines, imposed from outside of herself, pressure coming down on her head, people and institutions counting on her, before she could possibly make herself do anything at all.
Here was the deadline, coming down on her from on high, and she wasn’t happy about it. But she smiled at Ned, nodding. “Yeah, I’m on it. I’ll have it for you Monday.”
“Excellent,” said Ned. He was an orc. He ran his tongue absently over one of his tusks and shut the door of his office.
She worked at The Martinsburg Tribune, a daily paper in the panhandle of West Virginia. To most people, Martinsburg would seem to be a sleepy sort of town, but for West Virginia, it was a bustling metropolis. There were actual homeless people here. She saw them sometimes when she was coming in to work. Sometimes, even sleeping in front of the office. So, you know, big city in relative terms.
The Tribune did not have what might be termed a robust staff. Newspaper work had never been particularly lucrative, but it was downright difficult to make a living at it now. So, it was essentially her and two other writers plus two sports guys. Even though the sports guys only covered high school sports, it was probably the biggest reason that the paper still even had subscribers, so there it was.
One of the sports guys, Decker Naggs, was hovering near her desk in the news room. It was a big open room where everyone worked. They weren’t even divided by departments anymore. One of the advertising staff had a desk right next to hers.
Decker was a gargoyle. He stood hulking even as he hunched his gray shoulders and his massive wings.
Shit. Last thing she wanted to do was have this conversation right now. She’d successfully avoided Decker all day, a feat, considering that his desk was diagonally located from hers, over there in the corner, and that they usually spent all day, every day, talking to each other.
They were good friends. Decker was probably her best work friend, not that she had a lot to pick from, considering not many people worked here.
She considered turning and going to the bathroom and hoping that he’d have disappeared by the time she got out. It was quitting time.
Leave, Decker, she thought at him. Just go home.
He looked up at her, peering at her through his wire-rimmed reading glasses. Then he tore those off his face and looked at the floor, probably reading everything he needed to see in her expression.
She groaned inwardly and headed over to her desk.
He didn’t look up again.
She began picking up pens and pencils on her desk and putting them away in the little cup where she kept them. Her desk always seemed to look like a hurricane hit it. She wasn’t great at organization. “So, Ned’s sending me to cover something in the parking lot of the Spring Mills Walmart this weekend. They’re selling crafts for world hunger or something. I don’t even know. But it really intrudes on my plans to become surgically connected to the cushions of my couch, so I’m big annoyed.”
Usually, Decker would have laughed when she said something like that. He’d have said he was watching some game—and she would have pretended she didn’t know what sport was in season—even though everyone knew the Super Bowl was coming up. Instead, Decker coughed. “Uh, we need to talk.”
She cringed, shoving a pen into the pen-and-pencil cup. “Do we, though? What if we just, I don’t know, pretend it never happened?”
He looked up at her, hope dawning in his expression. “Oh, yeah? You’d be okay with that?”
All right, wait. He was way too happy about that. She folded her arms over her chest.
He glanced at her, cringed, looked away, and rubbed the back of his neck. His neck was massive and gray and looked sort of like it was made of stone, except that it wasn’t. She knew, from personal experience now, that his skin was very warm and giving and fleshlike, despite the rough texture under her fingertips.
She flashed on his body over hers, totally bare. It had been dark, so she hadn’t been able to see things super well, but the feeling of them, well, joined, that came through. It took over her, all over. She felt herself blush, and it felt like a full body blush, roots of her hair to the tips of her toes.
“Not here,” he said, sighing.
“Parking lot,” she said.
“No!” He was appalled.
