Adriel looked away, cheeks warm. He reached for his water, took a sip, set it down.
"The Harlow ending," Landen said, settling back in his chair. "What did you think?"
Adriel looked up. "It doesn't work."
"No." Landen picked up his fork, turned it over once. "Why not?"
Adriel considered the question.
"She spent two hundred pages building toward something and then stepped around it at the last moment," he said finally. He turned his own fork over, looking at it rather than at Landen. "The whole book is pulling in one direction and then the ending just doesn't go there. "
"A scared choice."
"Yes. Exactly."
Landen nodded slowly.
"I've been trying to work out how to tell her that without losing her entirely," he said.
Adriel looked up at that.
"I think she already knows," Adriel said. "You can feel it in the writing. The way she approaches the ending and then pulls back. She knows."
Landen looked at him for a moment. Something in his gaze shifted; warmed, maybe, or sharpened, Adriel couldn't tell which.
"That's perceptive," he said.
Adriel looked down at his plate. "It's just what I thought."
"It's what you thought because you pay attention." Landen's voice was matter-of-fact. "That's rarer than you think."
Adriel didn't know what to say to that. He picked up his fork instead, took another bite of the food he'd barely noticed he was eating.
They ate in silence for a moment.
"I know what you mean," Landen said.
Adriel looked at him. "I'm not describing it well."
"You are." Landen leaned forward slightly, elbows on the table. The movement brought him closer, made the space between them feel smaller. "There's a writer; Celia Hart. Mid-nineties. Have you read her?"
Adriel shook his head. "No."
"I'll find you the book." Landen said it like it was nothing. Like offering to share his books, his time, his attention, was simply what you did. "She does this thing; she sets up an expectation and then subverts it, but not the way you're expecting. She doesn't pull back. She leans in. But the thing she leans into isn't the thing you thought was coming."
"I'd like that," he said. "To read it, I mean."
Landen nodded. "I'll put it on the desk. You can take it when you go."
Adriel turned his glass on the table. Watched the candle flame shift in the small current of their movement.
"My roommate Jenna would have a lot to say about the Harlow ending," he said.
Landen looked at him. "What would she say?"
"That the author is a coward." Adriel smiled slightly. "She's more direct than I am."
"What does she read?"
