This should be interesting.
Chapter Ten
Elle
The heat of the day was baking the walls of my apartment. I was spread like a starfish on top of my bed sheets staring at the ceiling. All it needed was a fan going around like helicopter blades and I was basically in a seventies’ movie having a breakdown.
Beth replied to me an hour ago and woke me up, but I hadn’t read the message yet. I couldn’t remember what I’d textedherlast night when I was drunk and I was a little worried to check, since it was highly probable it’d been about Stephen.
Every ten minutes after that my phone pinged with notifications from Daisy requesting video chats and I had about six invites from my brother Sam to play Animal Crossing. Why didn’t they entertain each other? They lived in the same house, for goodness’ sake. Actually, that was exactly why they didn’t want to spend time together: they were sick of each other. I got on infinitely better with my siblings once I didn’t live with them anymore.
However much I did genuinely like them though, I had work to do.
After our fourth cocktail Keisha and I had started scribbling ridiculous ideas in my notebook about what to do with the love triangle and how it might fit the plot I already had with some tweaks. Newsflash – it didn’t. But if I came up with abetterplot – one that might just be within touching distance if I could get my head to stop pounding – it could work. It was either that or rewrite the whole thing and I didn’t have the time for that. Unless…I asked for an extension of my deadline.
I was not the greatest at hitting deadlines. My editor was used to me requesting a couple extra weeks, but I didn’t mindthat because I always delivered soon enough, and the extra time was for tweaking and polishing each draft. It was hard to stop fiddling sometimes.
This, however, was totally different. If I asked for an extension, how long did I ask for? Two weeks, a month, two months? I hadn’t even reworked my plot yet so how did I know which scenes would need the most work? Or how many new scenes I needed to write that didn’t even exist yet. It was a mystery. A mystery locked away in the depths of my own mind, and I needed to go at it with a chisel and brush like an archaeologist, scrape and scrape away until I found something real.
To do that though, I needed to move. I needed to get food, get dressed and sit at my laptop and work. Why did this feel like an enormous ordeal? Why was I terrified of getting this wrong? Hadn’t I always worked on the ‘you can’t fix a blank page’ method? What else was keeping me flat on my back on the bed, sweaty and pathetic?
The image of a dark-haired man with a wide, devilish smile filled my mind.
Stephen. He’d gotten the last word the evening before and it was driving me to distraction. Literally.
I blamed the alcohol for inhibiting my ability to give him a snappy comeback. Of course I’d expectedhimto be disappointed –he’dactually wanted me to go over to his apartment for sexy times, whereasI’donly been engaging in innuendo via text to trick him. I had no desire to be another notch on his bedpost – the thing was probably whittled to matchsticks by now. I was so done with men who drained my time and energy and gave me nothing in return. And he…he…
Well, he was perfectly infuriating.
I rolled myself out of bed and stumbled through my bedroom door, around the couch into the kitchenette, where I fumbleda pop tart out of the packet and into my toaster oven. Next I went to open the window by my desk to let in some fresh air. My A/C was on its last legs and until my next royalty payment arrived, maintenance on it had to wait. I wasn’t broke but cash flow for authors was a well-known issue given the sporadic way publishing liked to distribute funds. If things got too unbearable, it would be a job for my credit card.
‘Morning, darlin’,’ a husky voice called across to me as I pushed the swollen window up, the wood screeching.
‘Morning, Mr Biggins,’ I said automatically, not needing to check to see who it was.
Mr Biggins lived with his wife in the next building, which backed onto mine. He was always sitting by his open window, smoking cigarettes. Watching the alleyway, he said. Waiting to cop an eyeful of me in my underwear more like.
Once the window was open, I twiddled the blind so that he couldn’t see inside and went back to force my burnt pop tart down my throat. I should’ve gone out to source some better sustenance, my stomach was roiling at the thought of more sweet things after all those cocktails, but I couldn’t face the glare of the sun yet. Even with my blinds down, I was tempted to put on my sunglasses.
Blowing on my pop tart and still managing to burn my mouth, I collected my cell phone and notebook.
Beth:What happened?
OK, I scrolled back, blinking – I really needed to check what I’d written to her first.
Me:Hey, just bumped into Cartwright, Stephen Cartwright. He’s still an arrogant asshole, isn’t he?
Oh. Yeah. Now I remembered. I went to reply to her message:
Me:Any chance you’re free to Zoom?
She pinged me back almost immediately.
Beth:Gimme ten minutes and I’m there.
I forced myself into the shower quickly – it’s not like she could smell me, but it seemed only polite – and I’d just plugged my laptop in and sat down in front of it with a massive mug of coffee when she sent over the link.
‘Hello,’ Beth chimed once her image came into view on the screen, all big hazel eyes and shiny chestnut hair. I avoided looking in the top corner at myself. ‘How’s it going?’
