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Julian didn’t laugh. He reached over and put his hand, palm up, on my leg. I put mine in it and felt the last of the tension drain away. It took another thirty minutes to reach the commune, and when we got there, we weren’t sure we were in the right place. It was just a barren collection of long, low stone buildings with steeply pitched roofs thickly caked with snow. We pulled into a small lot that had been plowed but was already filling back up again.
“Fuck me,” Julian muttered, peering out the windshield. As soon as we turned the windshield wipers off, the snow rapidly patterned over the glass. The view was blocked entirely within a minute, and the car was plunged into a watery gray twilight.
“He’s expecting you?” I asked nervously, lowering my window a few inches to knock some of the snow off. A sharp wind cut in through the crack, bringing a flurry of snowflakes in with it. I hurriedly closed the window again. I wasn’t claustrophobic, but it was enough to make anyone freak out a little. Except Julian, who looked completely fine.
“He’s expecting me,” he replied, pushing his arms back into his heavy winter coat.
“And you’re sure this is the right place?” I pressed. What if these buildings were abandoned, and we were risking getting stuck out here in the middle of a snowstorm for nothing?
By way of answer, Julian showed me the email from Callum’s agent on his phone and then nodded toward the GPS. “This is the right place.”
Reluctantly, I shrugged back into my jacket, too. By the time I got it zipped up, Julian had come around to my side of the car. I held onto his arm as I climbed down from the Chevy Tahoe. By now, the icy sensation of snow seeping through my shoes, socks, and jeans up to my calves was as familiar as it was unwelcome. I slogged through, holding onto his arm for balance, the two of us taking turns staggering and catching each other.
From the rugged, rustic look of the place, I wasn’t sure what to expect when we finally stumbled through the door, kicking powdery white snow into what turned out to be an enclosed shoe room. Parkas hung on knobs along the short wall, and there were snow boots lined up beneath them. We struggled out of ours, showering the floor with more snow. When I managed to get my boots off, I stepped down into half an inch of snow. Luckily my feet were already numb, but the rest of me wasn’t. I was shivering violently by the time we stepped into the interior room.
The warmth of the place hit me like a wave, prickling through my windburned cheeks. My fingers and toes couldn’t feel it yet, but I exhaled with relief. It took a few moments to realize that we had just walked right into Callum O’Conner’s living room. He was sitting at a small desk that looked like he’d taken it from a one-room schoolhouse, his back ramrod straight because the back of the chair was lined with thin, brittle spindles and stopped short of his shoulder blades. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing forearms that were surprisingly strong. He must do more than jab away at that old-fashioned typewriter all day to have muscles like that.
I took all this in before I got to his face and saw that while he might have been expecting us, hehadn’texpected us to barge right in.
Julian realized half a second before me, because he was already saying smoothly, “Apologies, Callum. I didn’t realize this was your house.”
“You thought I invited you to someone else’s house?” Callum asked archly. Without taking his eyes off us, he banged the keys until the carriage hit one the end with a sharp, decisiveding.
“We didn’t realize it was a house at all,” I confessed, feeling Julian bristle.
The corners of Callum’s mouth turned down in response. His eyes traveled over me and then crossed the too-short space to Julian. We’d let go of each other when we got inside, but we were still within shoulder-brushing distance. I couldn’t tell what Callum was thinking. His gaze hadn’t missed a thing when he looked me over, but it didn’t feel intrusive. It felt more clinical, like he was deciding what about me was and wasn’t interesting so he could put it in his writing later.
“Is that your next book?” Julian asked, casually putting more space between us under the guise of walking closer to the giant hearth that stood nearly as tall as he did. He held his hands out to the flames that leapt waist high.
“You must be in league with my agent,” Callum said flatly. “He always asks the same thing.”
“No, definitely not in league with your agent, or I wouldn’t be here,” Julian disagreed. “Your agent is doing me no favors.”
“What areyoudoing here?” Callum asked me.
“This is Willow Laurier. She–”
“I was asking the girl, Lewis,” Callum interrupted. “You can speak, can’t you, Willow Laurier?”
“I can,” I said in the same arch tone he’d used when we first walked in without knocking. “I’m here with the rough cut of the documentary.” I pulled the USB out of the zipped pocket of my fleece coat, glad it had been protected by the parka.
“What the hell is that?” Callum asked, narrowing his eyes at it.
I didn’t believe for a second he had never seen a USB stick, but I played along. “It’s what replaced floppy disks. It holds more information. Bigger files. Like full length movies, when necessary.”
“I assume you need a computer to make that thing… work. Unfortunately, I don’t have one.” Callum looked inordinately pleased by this misfortune.
“I know you don’t. That’s why I brought one.” Julian picked up the hardback briefcase he’d set on the ground. The fire had rapidly melted the snow off it, but it was still damp when he laid it open on the stone floor and pulled out a slim MacBook.
“The snow didn’t get inside, did it?” I asked, kneeling down to trace my fingers over the chrome shell. If we’d come all this way for nothing, I was really going to have a grudge against this weather. A bigger one than I already had. Out of Callum’s narrow windows, I could see flashes of the snow still sifting down from the gray sky in big, fat flakes.
“No, it’s fine.” Julian took the USB and the computer to one of the long brown leather couches that sat across from Callum’s desk. I wanted to sit beside him, but I didn’t want to confirm what Callum already thought. Instead, I walked over to his bookshelf. I’d expected to see his venerated collection, but they were nowhere to be found. None of the books looked new enough to have been published in the last twenty years anyway.
I heard the desk chair scrape back and turned to see Callum stretching to his full height. He’d never developed the stoop that most tall, skinny guys did. He was so tall that his head was only a foot or so below the wooden beams that crossed beneath the ceiling. Looking wholly displeased, he lowered himself onto the couch barely close enough to see the computer screen. He leaned slightly away from it like he thought the blue light might be radioactive. His frown deepened at the series of upbeat tones that indicated it was powering up. Julian noticed, too, and plopped the computer into his lap.
I wasn’t sure what to do while Julian played the ten-minute-long cut that Miller had put together, highlighting the pillars of the film–minus the Olympics, of course. I’d seen it twice already, and I wasn’t quite comfortable settling on the couch on the other side of Callum O’Conner, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and leaning in to watch it a third time.
Instead, I picked up a book and took it over to the armchair closest to the fire. I had chosen the book at random, barely glancing at the cover and description. I just needed to kill ten minutes and I doubted my phone got service out here. To my surprise, though, the ten minutes flew by as the first chapter absorbed me, and then the second. I barely noticed when Callum thrust the computer back to Julian and said, “Play it again.”
