“The thing is, friends with benefits works that way, butfriends-friends doesn’t.” She was gathering steam, talking faster and more loudly. “And friends with benefits are usuallyactuallyfriends, are they not?
“So, yeah,” she said, not leaving space for him to answer her question. “I guess we’re not friends or friends with benefits.”
Right. What had he expected? A lifelong friendship with Blair Kellermoon? Occasional visits during which they would have sex? He regretted that he had ever started down this path, that he had opened the door to any kind of relationship, or association, withBlair. It wasn’t too late, though, to nip it in the bud. He looked right at her and said, “So then we’re not anything.” He thought about the last time they’d argued, and parted ways. She’d told him to fuck off and finish his book. He wanted to say something similar.Fuck off and finish your movie.But the fight had left him.
“So then we’re not anything,” she echoed, and for a moment he thought her eyes had gone shiny, but he was mistaken. She was still standing inside, with the top of the door open. “I’m going to go now. I’m going to close this door.”
And then she did: closed the door, and the pop shop, and left him standing there wondering what the hell he had just done.
But then, historywasrepeating itself, apparently, because the top of the door opened again, and she said, quoting his own line back to him, “I’m here if you need me.”
And then she left. She really left.
He was still holding the leaves.
Part 3
State of Grace
Chapter 29
A Good Day
Two months later
It was a good day.
Blair wrapped up her last meeting of the day and repeated her refrain.It was a good day.
She had taken to reminding herself this at the ends of days, when they had, in fact, been good. And most of them were. If she’d been the kind of person who kept a gratitude journal, she would have made more extensive lists.Today I had a productive meeting. Read a great book. Went shopping with Esme. Attended Double Gin Night next door.
Today the hurricane shutters worked.
If you looked at Blair’s life from the outside, you saw progress. An upward trend line. She was seeing her friends, both at home and out in the world. Esme had just gone back to school for her sophomore year, but she’d spent a lot of time over the summer at Blair’s house. Moonpics was in preproduction forGreen Light.
With a script she had written.
She had finally done it. It hadn’t even been that hard. She had “writing” built up in her mind as a mysterious, rarefied gift that she didn’t have. She would have liked to say she wrote the script triumphantly, with great fanfare, but it had been a big anticlimax. Shejust… wrote it. It was like the story was inside her, and all she had to do was sit down and let it come out through her fingers.
She’d removed herself from Allie’s cabin in a daze of heartbreak tempered with the need tomove. She’d called a taxi and paid the driver handsomely to take her back to the Twin Cities. She’d had most of her stuff. Whatever was left at Jack’s condo was part of the price she had to pay for…
For what?
For having made a mistake?
For having given the wrong person her… what? Regard? Friendship. Trust. Yes, all those things.
She’d started the script on the plane ride home and finished it the next day, by the pool. It had been a marathon session in which she’d gotten up only to feed herself and the crows.
Those damn crows were still coming.
The question was, Why was she still feeding them? Why was she still collecting the trinkets they were leaving for their long-lost love?
Everybody loved the script.Lovedit. Tiffany. Bjorn, who was turning out to be a thoughtful dude in addition to a money tree. Ava Gustafson, whom they’d gotten to direct.
So if writingwasa gift, apparently Blair had it after all. But she didn’t think it was. It was a skill a couple of men had once told her she didn’t possess, or couldn’t develop, and she had believed that lie for far too long.
But no more. Blair had written something that Angela would have been proud of. Even ifGreen Lightwas a one-off, Blair was done saying she wasn’t a writer.
