I shouldn’t be revealing more than I need to in case it ends up being ammunition for him.
“Business?” Evan questions as he carefully takes a handful of fries and places them perfectly in his mouth, not a single grain of salt left on his fingers or his lips.
“Cleaning business,” I clarify, sitting back against the red pleather of the booth seat.
“Tell me more,” he prods.
And I really shouldn’t, but for some reason, I feel like he needs to know a little bit more than just the facts on paper.
“They clean vacation homes,” I finally say, looking out the window to the street that has become dark over the last thirty minutes. “Most people who own houses don’t live there. They put them on VRBO or Airbnb. They then hire out management and cleaning services. My parents set up their business years ago when rentals started being built everywhere around us, and it’s never stopped. It’s big business, and yes, I cleaned houses all through high school, when I wasn’t working at the corn dog stand.”
Now both his eyebrows raise up, wrinkling his forehead in three flawless lines. Yes, flawless. Evan Michaels makes wrinkles look like perfection.
“You cleaned?” he asks.
“Yes,” I grumble, knowing exactly what he is thinking, and that his thoughts are back to my room at the hotel. “Just because I cleaned vacation homes does not mean I am a tidy housekeeper on my own.”
He sits back in his booth. “So, do you visit often?”
“No,” I say straightforwardly.
“Why not?” he asks.
I may be willing to reveal some things, but Andrew is not one of them.
Mostly because it’s been six years and tectonic plates have moved apart more quickly than I’ve been able to move on from thatrelationship. And it’s not that I don’t want to. I do. But every time I go back home, it’s like I step back into high school.
My family has not moved on. The small town of Magnolia Creek has not moved on.
My grandma always said that small minds will never think of anything but small things, so until I make something bigger of myself than being Rachel Louisa Perry, Andrew’s pretty little girlfriend who writes fun little stories…they’ll keep focused on Andrew and me and ‘what we could have been and could still be’.
“So, how’d you get your big break?” I ask, attempting to redirect the conversation.
“Just got my manuscript to the right people,” he replies.
“On the first try?” I question in disbelief.
“Second, actually,” he answers, unfazed, like getting someone to notice you on the second try isn’t a huge case of extremely good luck.
And it irritates me how he can just sit there like it isn’t a big deal, when it’s averybig deal. I’d gone off to the city to chase my dreams of becoming a bestselling author, but here I am…sitting across from one while writinghisfanfiction.
I’ve read the statistics. I know the probability that I won’t fulfill my dreams. The odds aren’t exactly in my favor. Eighty-one percent of Americans want to write a book someday. Only three percent complete a manuscript, and only one percent of those completed manuscripts actually get published.
I’ve finished four manuscripts.
None of them are published.
I’m in the three percent, but I can’t seem to get farther than that. No agent for me. No book deal for me. No name etched into a spine that I can rub my finger over in a bookstore in awe.
But that is going to change.
It has to.
But it does also make me wonder. Why was Evan Michaels so much more favored than me? Why him? What was so special about his writing? I mean, I do have almost a million followers, who mostly love my fanfiction more than his books. At least, according to the comments. But love from readers doesn't pay the bills when it's not books they are buying. When it's just free words they are reading.
Dreamers want to believe that the dream is enough, but dreamers have to eat, have to save for retirement, have to pay for reality.
My phone buzzes in the pocket of my dress. I pull it out seeing BarrettBeyondTheBadge has a new message. I open it.
