Page 107 of Fate Fiction

Kimberly smiled gently at me, the strongest reaction she’d had during this entire call. “It does, thanks, Dani. Have a good afternoon.”

The call promptly ended and I found myself staring at my reflection on my computer screen.

All the nights I’d spent typing until my fingertips were sore, all the mornings I woke up with dry eyes and a headache from too much time at my laptop and not enough water. It all might have ended here.

Someone knocked on the door of the conference room, my time in here was up. I severed the line between the life I desired and the real life I still had to manage and walked back into the hallway with a stiff smile plastered on my face.

Hours later on the train ride home my gaze darted around to anything but that poster. I asked myself how much I could bribe some teenagers to deface it with permanent marker. Somehow Evan and Sir Erwyn remained entangled with any other emotional ailment I had. Sir Erwyn was the reason I wrote “Ice on the Turret,” Evan was the reason I wrote this book.

His taut abs stared me down from the poster as the Red Line passed over the Charles River. They were airbrushed and edited to pop out of the loose linen shirt he had on, but I remembered the way the ridges felt beneath my palm.

This must have been how Evan felt, each of his waking moments surrounded by the very thing he wished to avoid.

My phone buzzed over and over with texts from Andrea and Caroline asking how the call went.

I don’t know. She’s impossible to read.

Andrea sent another series of texts of empty promises and asking for more details. I didn’t know what to say. Kimberly asked a question, I answered it—wrong, apparently—and it was all over. Something about my aura must have been so rancid she could sense it through the screen. I wondered if there’d be a warning about me sent out to all other agents, “beware,

I swiped out of the group chat and hovered over a different message thread.

I wanted to talk to the one person I wanted to avoid. The brain was a funny thing, indeed. My cursor blinked as I contemplated.

That’s what friends did, right? They asked one another for advice.

How do you handle rejection?

I fired off the text and kept walking. Evan called less than a minute later. I reluctantly answered, ignoring that incessant fluttering in my chest from the sight of “Maybe: Evan” on my screen.

“Are you asking me because of the last time we saw each other?” He didn’t give me a chance to greet him. His sweet accented voice alone sent a jolt up my spine. My body had some lingering familiarity that couldn’t be helped. His tone was easy. Lighthearted. As if that last conversation hadn’t ever happened. As if things ended between us at camp the way they were supposed to.

I hadn’t put two and two together. Me rejecting him plus the ambiguous pact we made with each other.

The text I sent maybe ninety seconds ago, asking how this whole rejection thing felt. He knew. Of course he knew, he was on the receiving end of it a few weeks ago.

What the fuck was I thinking reaching out to him out of the blue?

He was the one who initiated the feeble friendship blooming between us. Evan sent me a link to a Bigfoot erotica book and asked if it would be my next camp read.

I bought the ebook and read it in a single night, then sent him a few choice highlighted passages. It sparked a long distance game of texting volleyball. Memes. Videos we thought were funny. Dogs we saw on the street.

We didn’t talk about deep real life stuff. We were casual pen pals at best. Now, I’d sent a verbal scud missile built to blow apart this fragile dance we were doing. I couldn’t end the conversation now, not when I’d peeled back a layer of my protective armor with him. What was it about him that made me put my guard down?

“I meant, like, professionally,” I corrected. “You know, failing auditions. Agents not wanting you. Thinking you’re the worst at your craft.”

He laughed. “I didn’t realize you were considering a career change into my industry. I don’t recommend it, if I can sway you.”

“No, no. I…wrote a book. I’m trying to get it published,” I sounded like an imposter saying it. “I wrote a book,” wasn’t something real I had done, it was still a pipedream.

He was quiet. I crossed a line. When he agreed we could be friends he probably meant in the sense that we’d keep things superficial and lighthearted, not consent to random emotional dumping. I’d kept up my imaginary end of the bargain until now. Apparently I didn’t know how to maintain normal boundaries with Evan McLeod.

“Is it your tell-all of the week you spent with an extremely clingy actor?” He chuckled. Maybe he made a mental note to make me sign some retroactive NDA.

“No, definitely not.” Because there wasn’t a damn chance I wanted to relive the events of that week over and over again in some version of a literary “Groundhog Day.”

“Is it⁠—”

A frenzied laugh burst out of me. “Fuck, no, it’s not fanfiction. Or related to fanfiction. It doesn’t even have the word fanfiction in the manuscript. It’s speculative horror romantic fiction. A fucking word salad that apparently is unmarketable. I had a meeting with an agent and it didn’t go according to plan. I’m bracing for the inevitable ‘thanks but no thanks’ email.”