By the time I’d changed into some clean clothes and repacked my bag of notebooks and laptop she’d messaged me back to meet her at the library.
*
‘Oh my God, Elle, this is sooo good,’ Keisha whispered to me as we sat side by side at her usual table by the copier. She was on her laptop, reading through the manuscript I’d emailed her with track changes on and I was reading backwards through a paper version I’d printed out.
‘You’re not supposed to be looking at it for story,’ I murmured back, turning another page and adding it to the pile. ‘Just basic sense, so Patti doesn’t think I’ve been suffering from heatstroke.’
‘I can’t help it.’ She deleted a word on the screen, eyes still glued to the page. ‘I’m actually a little upset with you for making out it was in such bad shape. There’s no way it was as awful as you were saying, and it got this good in a few weeks.’
I wrinkled my nose, trying to contain a smile. ‘Cut it out. D’you mean it?’ My heart lifted with hope. ‘Does it work now?’
‘Work? The love story, Miss-Noelle-Kingston-who-isn’t-a-romance-author — ‘ she grabbed my elbows ‘— is the most delicious slow burn. The yearning. The tension. Oh my days.’ She sighed. ‘I mean the mystery is great but myheart.I’m falling in love with Kit. If Patti doesn’t think he is a million-billion times better than that sleazy James, I think she has issues.’
‘You have no idea what that means to me.’ Tears of relief touched my eyes and I hugged her. I felt like I’d hit a groove with the story once the inspiration came to me that night in my sister’s garden when we’d been babysitting. But I made all the changes in such a frenzied blur, I had no distance from it to figure out whether it was genuinely an improvement. Keisha was only one reader, but she was an experienced author and a fan of cosy mysteries and romance and thank God,thank God. ‘Thank you.’
‘You don’t need to thank me. I didn’t do anything.’
‘You’ve helped me loads, Keesh. Can I take you out for drinks tonight to celebrate?’
‘Did you not see the message from Caitlin? She’s back in the city with Donall and they’re playing at the bar. Boyd and I are going. It’ll be perfect.’ She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. ‘You could invite Stephen. He’s been a part of this too, right?’
At the sound of his name a wave of nervous excitement crashed over me, as though he was about to walk around the corner. Shit. This was becoming less of a crush and more of a maceration. Every thought I had about him was tantamount to pouring lava over my internal organs. I was one big molten bag of limerence. This wasn’t healthy.
‘Elle?’
‘Oh.’ I forced a smile. ‘He definitely has…’
‘But…?’
‘I don’t know. We’ve only ever seen each other when we’ve been on our missing persons mission.’
‘Other than when you spent the last day at his house?’
‘Sure but…that was more because Beth had sent him over to check I was OK, and then he just offered me a place to work because my place is an inferno at present and he’s irrepressibly polite.’
She raised an eyebrow as she regarded me, but then shrugged. ‘If you say so…’
‘OK, your turn. But…?’
‘You clearly like spending time with him, Elle. Maybe don’t over-think it?’
Don’t over think it? The idea was so absurd I had to laugh. She looked at me quizzically for a second and then nodded, and started laughing too. ‘Yeah, OK, I just heard that back to myself. Telling a fellow writer not to over-think. Going to go tell some fish to try not to get wet next.’
*
After we both finished our read-throughs, I practically bounced home. Or I would have done if the stack of A4 held together with elastic bands that I was carrying wasn’t so heavy. It took me another few hours to correct the errors we’d both found, sitting at my desk in the suffocating heat but I finally hit send at around six-thirty in the evening.
‘Woohoo!’ I flicked on one of the songs from the playlist Beth sent me and did a dance around my living room. Perfect timing to get changed — if I could find any suitable clean clothes — and head over to the bar to celebrate with my friends. As I rummaged through my closet, Keisha’s suggestion about inviting Stephen rose to the forefront of my mind.
It wouldn’t really be that big of a deal to ask him. I was the one who said I wanted us to be friends, and he had helped me get this book to the line. It wouldn’t be broadcasting my desperation for his company, would it? The way I was already feeling itchy, not knowing when I would see him next, or obsessing about how brief the text exchange we’d had this morning had been, when I sent a quick message to thank him and let him know I was leaving his apartment and he’d responded simply that it was “his pleasure”.
Skirt and top selected, I chewed on the end of my hair. The real issue was not whether asking him out like this would signal something to him; it was that if he accepted and was there, within touching distance, once I’d had enough alcohol to shut the sensible part of my brain up, there was an enormously high likelihood that I would make a move on him. None of the facts I’d been listing before my back seized up last night had changed. They were just getting underscored in heavy marker.
In the time honoured tradition of writers everywhere, rather than deal with a difficult decision, I procrastinated by turning the volume down on my music and checking out some of the other messages I’d received. There were the ones from my familygroup chat asking if I was coming to the picnic. Oops. I sent off a flurry of apologies to them. There were the ones from the writers group too about drinks this evening. No real need to answer that one as Keisha now knew I would be there, with or without a sexy-Brit. And there…oh shit….there was one directly from my dad.
Dad:I have a current address for Trevor Moorcroft.
I bit my lip. I guess I was going to be calling Stephen after all.
