CHAPTER 75
Two weeks later
I walked up to Mike and handed him the manuscript I’d been working on for an entire two weeks. The weeks had passed in a kind of dazed, confused, caffeinated sugar haze. There is this strange place that writers go to sometimes, where at least one liter of their blood is replaced by pure sugary caffeine fuel, and where they totally disappear and time becomes meaningless, as days blur into nights and nights blur into weeks.
I’d stayed at Sugar Manor after Mike insisted that I come back with him and work there. I stayed mainly indoors, emerging every now and again to eat something that was kindly offered to me by Emelia or Ash, or when Mike brought in a bag of wasabi-flavored crisps from his private stash.
Mike and Ash had also started renovating another room in the house for guests, and sometimes I would sit in the corner with my headphones on, listening to some soundtrack, typing away, while I watched them paint the walls and polish the wooden floors.
In the evenings, after my work, we would all have dinner together, mostly crowded around the fire, as the evenings got colder. We all talked and laughed, and I don’t think I had ever talked and laughed so much in my entire life. And then Mike would walk me to my room, we’d say a slightly strange goodnight, and then he would hand me an espresso as I headed back to write into the night again. We’d all fallen into this strange and comfortable routine, and I felt like I belonged here. In a way, I felt like I had always belonged here, but I just didn’t know it.
And then the day finally came when I typed those two words that I had been heading towards like a high-speed train:The End. But I didn’t stop to bask in it; I rushed to the video-shop-come-internet-cafe-come-printing-mecca, and I printed out my entire book. I’d sat on the veranda all day, waiting for Mike to come home from work.
I heard his car pull up on the gravel driveway and my heart started beating faster. What I was about to do . . .What I was about to do . . .The thought terrified me and excited me, all at the same time.
“Hey,” I said, as he walked up to me with a small smile.
“You’re not in your room.” He climbed the stairs and stopped in front of me. “Does that mean . . . ?”
I nodded. “It does!” I pulled the manuscript out from behind my back and held it out for him to take.
“Oh my God!” He pulled me into a half hug, making sure not to squish the papers between us. “Well done—I am so proud of you.” He kissed me on the forehead and I closed my eyes and relished the feeling.
“You are?” I asked.
“Of course I am,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I be? My God, what you have done, and in two weeks! You’ve finished an entire book! It’s insane. Not that you will tell me what the book is about yet, but I bet it’s going to be amazing, like your last one.”
“You’re proud of me,” I harped.
He nodded and then looked confused. “You look like no one has ever said that to you before.”
“No one has,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“No one has told me they’re proud of me for writing anything,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I guess I don’t surround myself with that many people who can tell me things like that.”
“Well, now you’ve surrounded yourself with people who are proud of you, I can’t wait to tell Ash and Emelia, they’ll be . . .” Then he paused. “In fact, we should all celebrate tonight! We should go out and have dinner and drinks, and celebrate this success.”
“No, really, it’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. What did you say? ‘When we tell you not to make a big deal of something, we really mean you should make a big deal about it.’ ”
I smiled. “The girl code,” I said, and nodded my head. “Okay. That sounds cool—unless, I mean, Ash and Emelia might be busy tonight.”
“Are you kidding? This is important. I’m sure they’re not busy. Or, if they are, they will cancel their plans for this.”
He started walking towards the house. “Come. Let’s get ready. I’ll tell them.”
“Wait!” I said, almost forgetting my reason for being here.
“Yes?”
“I need you to read this,” I said, handing him the manuscript.
He took it and looked at it. “I’d love to.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand. Ineedyou to read this.”
“Okay,” he said. “I can’t wait.”
“And neither can I; you have to promise you’ll start tonight,” I urged.
“Sure, as soon as we all finish celebrating.”
I nodded. I wished I didn’t need to wait that long to tell him what I needed to tell him. Maybe I was being a coward, not saying the words out loud, but rather putting them down on paper for him to read. But it wasn’t justthose wordsthat I needed him to hear; I needed him to hear all the words. The ones that aren’t necessarily said out loud, that happen in the moments of silence. The words that happen in the bits in-between. But, sometimes, those are the most important parts. Because it’s in those silent spaces that the magic and the unexpected happens. It’s in those silent places that you realize you have fallen in love . . .
