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If I’m to lose my job, why postpone the inevitable? May as well just get it over with. Put an end to the agony.
My relationship with Levi, Wyatt, and Henry is another matter, one that I and only I can salvage. There’s no one coming to the rescue on this one and if Levi has decided he’s done with me because his identity has been leaked, then I have no doubt the guys will side with him.
Which will leave me without a job, and without them.
The thought hits me hard and I feel tears threatening again. But when the elevator door opens to Wyatt’s place, I suck it up. This is no time for bellyaching. I’ve got to save… whatever can be saved here.
I kick off my shoes and rush across the apartment to find Henry sitting with his head in his hands, Wyatt sitting on the kitchen counter swirling what looks like a glass of bourbon on the rocks, and Levi pacing so fast he’s practically a blur.
“Oh my God, Levi,” I say, rushing up to him.
I stop in front of him and take his arms. But he shakes me off and stomps in a different direction.
It would have hurt less if he took a dull knife and speared me right in the heart.
It’s over. Everything that was coming together is over, thanks to a few words in a trashy-ass gossip column that everyone in New York regards as sacred word.
“I am fucked. So completely and totally fucked,” he says quietly, his voice almost drowned out by the loud clicking of his shoes on the concrete floor. Seems like Wyatt didn’t ask him to take them off for once.
“Levi,” I start to say, hoping I don’t sound like I’m begging, “we can handle this. I know we can. Let’s just think it through.”
Okay, that sounds pretty desperate.
“Cameron called before you got here,” Henry says quietly.
Oh God, no. He didn’t. He couldn’t.
“We lost the book deal. Cameron cancelled it. Said Levi would be the laughing stock of the literary world, having penned a dirty romance,” Henry adds.
What the actual fuck? Cameron cancelled Levi? How dare he? And how dare he call his book a ‘dirty romance?’
I’ll strangle that man. I swear I will.
Typical book world snobbishness. I am so over this bullshit. Fuck all those high and mighty assholes. That’s the bottom line here. Levi wouldn’t be so stricken and Cameron wouldn’t be so reactive if romance received the respect it deserves.
Assholes, all of them.
“You know,” I start to say, addressing all the guys, “this wouldn’t be an issue, not in any way, shape, or form, if romance books weren’t looked down on. But no, you get a genre primarily read by women, and the world decides it’s somehowless than. I’m sorry you’re mortified, Levi. I’m sorry you feel like your career is over?—”
“You don’t understand,” he growls, pointing a finger in my face.
He’s angry, like scary angry. And he’s blaming me.
But I’m not about to be his punching bag.
“Levi, I do understand?—”
“No, you don’t!” he shouts. “I’ve been working hard, year after year, and my work is finally getting the credit it’s due. And in minutes, it’s gone. Wiped away, like it never existed. Like I never wrote a book that people loved and am not capable of writing another. My speaking engagements have been cancelled and my book deal is gone.”
The anguish in his voice breaks me. I’d do something to take it away if I could. I consider telling him I’m probably going to get fired over this, that I’ve got my own problems, but this moment is not about me.
Even so. I did nothing wrong. In trying to save my job, maybe I did pressure Levi into letting me publish his book, but he consented. No one forced him. He’s a grown up, and he agreed to publish Ryder Night.
“I don’t know who leaked this information,” Levi says, looking at me.
Of course he doesn’t know, none of us do, but it’s clear he believes I did.
“Levi, it was not me, you have to believe?—"
