How Sweet It Is

by Dylan Newton

  But his favorite days were the pages full of empty checkboxes on her spreadsheet.

  On those days, he could convince her to eat lunch with him in the kitchen. He’d determined, early on, what her favorites were, and stocked his virtual cart with those grocery items, having them delivered fresh a couple times a week. He used his writing breaks to prep and chop her favorite lunch staple: Cobb salad. He’d even called his mom, asking for a good homemade dressing recipe for it, and while his mother was suspicious, she gave it to him without forcing him into an awkward confession.

  Those lunches—where she oohed and aahed her appreciation for his limited culinary skills—were made even more gratifying in that they’d usually have almost a half hour privately together to talk about nothing, and everything.

  Drake discovered, to his delight, Kate loved to be asked questions. It didn’t matter the topic—she’d give her opinion on everything from the proper way to put on a toilet paper roll (with the paper coming over the top toward you) to what could be done to encourage more girls to enter STEM careers (a multi-pronged approach involving teacher funding, a revamp of toy development and marketing, and big corporation involvement and investment in education). What’s more, he found Kate was widely read, her mind a sparkling treasure chest of details and facts she’d accumulated. He loved playing archeologist in her mental wealth.

  Of course, he didn’t squander that alone time, either. He couldn’t afford to. His historical romance was churning out of him at an unprecedented rate, and he anticipated being done with Memory’s Lane by mid-November. Yet he was ever-conscious of his dwindling access to Kate as his muse, and he often peppered her with questions directly related to his heroine’s circumstance, scribbling her answers in his longhand scrawl as she rattled off various thoughts.

  Sometimes, he’d have her act out snippets of scenes—never telling her that when he’d asked her to scream, “Noo!” and fall to her knees in his living room, it wasn’t for a gruesome dead body scene in Twisted Twin, but so he could capture the moment Ingrid discovered Sam’s amnesia. Kate was always a good sport, often volunteering to do a scene a few different ways, as if she were enjoying the playacting as much as he was enjoying the kick to his creativity. His time with her always left him emotionally breathless; unable to do anything else, he channeled all of his feelings into his manuscript, rushing before the Kate-sparkle wore off.

  But time with Kate came with a downside.

  Most days, his house was filled with vendors and various workers measuring, taking pictures, or building support structures for various spooky displays. The constant hubbub of people talking, and saws, drills, and paint-sprayers operating had been a difficult change from his home’s typical, tomblike quiet. Kate attempted to keep the distraction to a minimum, giving vendors wireless headsets to communicate with her, as she bustled around, giving direction and taking charge in her classy suits and upswept hair. But no heels. On the first day of her plan, she’d come in with a black pair of ballet slippers, keeping them by the door so she could change out of her heels and proceed, cat-quiet, with her inside duties. He secretly loved that she had a conniption if anyone came in the house who dared keep their shoes on. He’d have been able to fund a dozen other veterans’ charities if he had a dime every time he heard her yell: “Shoes off! These floors are over one hundred and thirty years old, and we will not be the ones responsible for ruining them!”

  Drake wasn’t the only one who’d had to adjust to daily life in an extrovert’s world.

  Poor Sasha had given up greeting everyone at the front door. The parade of people was just too exhausting for the tiny shih tzu, who gave a valiant effort every morning until around lunch, when she curled up on the floor underneath whatever table, desk, or boards on sawhorses had been set aside for Drake to use as a writer’s desk that day.

  The latter had actually happened this morning, when Kate made good on her word to stick him in the attic to write.

  “First off, we’ll all feel better giving VIP tours of your attic writing space if you’ve actually written there. Second, today is the perfect day for it, because we’ll be in the kitchen, parlors, and in and out of the front and back doors today moving your furniture to the storage unit so nothing gets damaged or ruined. It’s best for you and Sasha to be up here for a little while,” Kate said, wrinkling her nose in anticipation of his reaction to being relegated to the attic. “But don’t worry. I’ve got a plan.”

  Ten minutes later, dressed in a thick coat and fingerless gloves and with Sasha positioned in his lap both for her warmth and his, Drake was left to pound out words. At the beginning, armed with only one cup of coffee, he’d glowered around him, truly resenting the intrusion for the first time since Kate had worked her magic on him and his creativity. Here he was, a big-deal bestseller, and he was writing on a few boards balancing on a pair of sawhorses in an attic that had to be, at best, forty degrees Fahrenheit? Where was the justice?

  But then his fingers had hit the keyboard, and he’d been transported.

  For five hours straight.

  A quick glance at the word count, and his eyes bulged. Sparked by this change of scenery, he’d just written five thousand words in his historical romance, right up through the climax and black moment where his hero’s memory is finally restored, and Sam realizes the woman he’s just arrested is Ingrid—his true love. His hero’s worst fear is realized, and now he must decide between his love for his country and his love for this woman.

  Of course, Drake knew that for this to be a romance, his hero must choose the woman, but he still hadn’t figured out the dire consequences resulting from that choice. The scene he’d written was set next to a frozen lake in the dead of winter—the whole thing concocted by his own cold and discomfort. The last time he remembered typing a sentence was when he’d typed the opening for the scene.

  Cold nipped at him from every angle as he sat motionless in the fork of the tree. Unyielding wood pressed into his backside and legs, morphing from uncomfortable to torturous as minutes turned into hours, but he dared not move anything other than his eyes. Sam scanned the lake’s surface, which winter had transformed into a dune-swept tundra, looking for any sign of the enemy.

  Just like that, Drake was transported. He’d no longer heard the workers hammering outside or Kate’s directions as she buzzed around his house. The entire world vanished, and he’d been fully immersed in the misery of Samuel Shelton as his main character waited to see who it was—man or woman—who had betrayed him and his country.

  If it weren’t for the knock at the attic door and the smell of coffee, Drake would have likely stayed on that frozen lakebed, feeling Sam’s heartache and desperation.

  “Drake?” Kate’s face appeared around the doorframe, and she bustled toward him in a forest-green pantsuit, an elegant silk scarf protecting the exposed part of her neck from the house’s chill. She set the steaming mug of relief on the makeshift desk. “I thought I’d bring you some coffee. Brr! It’s colder in here than I thought. You must be an ice cube! We’re done in the backyard area, so your kitchen is safe from distraction if you want to move there.”

  Drake cupped the ceramic mug, a gift from Ryker a few Christmases ago, and he was careful to use his hand to block the words that Kate had likely already noticed. It was hard to miss the figure of a man, dropping it low, next to the bright red letters reading Whistle While You Twerk emblazoned on the front. He was so grateful for warmth, though, that he barely registered the embarrassment.

  Sipping, he sighed into the cup. “This is perfect. Thank you. I’ll grab my stuff and move down there—I hadn’t realized I was cold until now. I hit the word-count jackpot, thanks to this change of scenery.”

  “Really? Let’s see.” Kate grinned, and moved to look over his shoulder.

  Drake would normally have blocked her view. He hated anyone reading his manuscripts in first draft, always sticking to his rule that nobody laid eyes on the book until he’d done at least one round of edits
, but she’d moved so unexpectedly, he didn’t have time. If he were being honest, he didn’t mind her reading his rough draft, even this rough draft, which wasn’t the one he was supposed to be working on for his publisher. He was astonished by the realization he actually wanted her to read the pages. It was as if crafting the real Kate into his fictional heroine, he knew her better somehow. Knew that she wouldn’t judge his book. It was absurd to jump to such an illogical conclusion, after only knowing the woman for less than a month. Yet it seemed after casting Kate as his book’s heroine, he had found it impossible to see her as anything else in real life.

  He held his breath as she scanned the page, her mouth moving slightly as she read. Drake was struck by how adorable she looked, leaning over him, her face rapt in concentration with her lips caressing his words. His hands twitched—not to write that description down, but to cup her face in his hands and tug her to him, tasting those lips, basking in her sweetness…

  “Looks like you captured the frigid temperatures really well.” She touched his arm, and Drake froze, afraid to move, lest she take it away. “I’m so sorry to have stuck you here for so long. I’d only wanted you here for a half hour or so, just so that we weren’t lying to your fans that you wrote in your attic, and I lost track of time. Your fingers…they’re not frostbitten or anything?”

  Drake reached up, squeezing her hand. He told himself it was just to prove that he was fine, but he held her small, warm hand in his for a beat too long before he forced himself to be the one who backed away.

  She was working, here.

  A professional.

  Not his heroine, or his…whatever his mind had been fantasizing about. The real Kate wasn’t in distress. She didn’t need Drake to save her or romance her. All the real Kate needed was his approval of her ideas to win her award, and all he needed was to keep his distance from the living version of Kate, while still hijacking scene ideas from every encounter to get this damn romance book out of his head.

  He manufactured a smile, pinning the corners of his mouth up as if he weren’t really dying inside.

  “Don’t worry. My fingers and toes are fine. Nothing will have to be amputated today. At least not here. In my book—well, that’s another story. Actually, that’s a good idea.”

  His previous discomfiture momentarily forgotten, Drake turned to his laptop. Setting down his coffee, he positioned his fingers above the keys to type a note to himself in the manuscript, and then remembered he wasn’t alone in the room. He winced, removing his hands from the keyboard.

  “Sorry. I get so caught up sometimes wanting to write down a detail, or a bit of conversation, or a metaphor, I forget where I am and check out of reality to scribble it down before I forget. An old girlfriend used to accuse me of being obsessed about my writing. She said I cared more for my characters than real people. It’s not that, though. At least I don’t think so. It’s just that experience has taught me it’s freshest if I get it down right when it comes to me. If I wait until later—”

  “You might forget those little nuances.” Kate laughed, nodding her head. “Happens to me all the time. If I don’t write down details, I will forget. It’s not a question of ‘if’ but of ‘when.’ So, jot it down. I’ll wait.”

  To Drake’s surprise, she stopped talking, her smile patient, as he pecked out two sentences on his laptop. For her benefit, he read them as he typed.

  Might be a nice bit of added drama to have my hero, or my poor heroine, lose a finger or toe from the cold, or at least be in danger of frostbite. If not, having Samuel check Ingrid for black spots on her fingers/toes might provide a nice transition to the next scene.

  Drake finished typing and put his laptop to sleep, closing it up. “Thanks—it’s nice to have someone who—”

  “—gets how crazy it is when your mind moves faster than your fingers can type?” Kate nodded. “You’ve seen my spreadsheets. They contain that level of detail so I can fall asleep at night. If I don’t write everything down that needs to be done—and I mean every little, teensy thing—I will obsess about it and lose sleep. Speaking of which…” Kate paused, lifting up her printed spreadsheet. “I need to move a few things around in here to amplify the creepy factor.”

  Drake looked around the attic’s dusty boxes, trunks, and stacks of original moldings and baseboards that had been saved when his grandfather had repapered the walls. The only thing creepy was the broken-down baby carriage with its dingy-haired doll and the cobwebbed figure of the gray squirrel that hung in the corner. Apparently, one of his ancestors had either bought or stuffed the creature himself, decades ago, and the squirrel was perpetually frozen on a branch in the corner of the attic, staring down at the floor below as if he’d just spotted a cobra lying in wait next to the old box containing the entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1970. Unless you had a phobia of stuffed squirrels or outdated information, it didn’t look particularly menacing to him.

  “What are you going to do? Looks like an average attic to me. Only the exposed knob and tube wiring gives me the heebie-jeebies. The electrician said they weren’t live, but I make my living off asking questions that begin with ‘What if,’ so I know how the best-laid plans are set aflame.”

  “They aren’t live. The wires have long since been disconnected,” Kate said, reaching above her head to grab an exposed wire with a bare hand and shaking it twice for emphasis while she scrolled through her phone. Drake winced, but she didn’t get shocked and seemed oblivious to any sort of danger, never glancing up from her device. “Nothing to worry about there—that one was checked off last week. What I’m hoping you’ll give me permission to do is go through some of those trunks, maybe push them around and set things up in a more…helter-skelter manner?”

  Drake rolled his eyes. “What happened to not making me a sideshow freak again?”

  “Not like that,” Kate said, holding her phone up to him. She’d screenshot a picture of an old attic with dolls set up on trunks facing the camera, things mysteriously draped in white sheets, and random debris set up in a haphazard, almost demented, manner. “I want it to seem as if you gaze around this space when you’re looking for inspiration. I want your fans to picture you here, writing, and for that picture to align with how they believe a horror writer seeks inspiration. We’ll do it classy and tasteful—just an old attic, which their imagination will transform into something way more sinister than it is in real life.”

  “Sort of like how they view me,” he said, nodding in understanding, taking a drink of his coffee and ignoring her sound of protest. “No, I get it. That’s fine. There’s nothing of any real value up here—just a bunch of junk that nobody’s gotten around to getting rid of yet, like the rest of the house, I suppose.”

  “Your house isn’t filled with junk, Drake. It’s filled with memories, and coming from a family who’s moved a dozen times over the years, bringing along only those mementos that hang in diploma-size frames, I like the vibe you’ve got in this Victorian. It’s anchoring. It gives off the feeling of…loving security. Belonging. Personally, I wouldn’t change a thing.” Kate gave him a bright smile, brushing past him as she investigated the trunks next to the window. “In fact, I could live all day long in your front parlor, curled up with my laptop in that pink needlepoint ladies chair next to the fire. This house is synonymous with happily ever after, in my book. I’m going to miss these daily visits.”

  Her words hit Drake like a sucker punch.

  Mentally, he calculated the day—it was October 22. In only nine more days, this woman would roll up her decorations, her bright enthusiasm, her positive attitude and badass planning…and she’d be gone. Snatched from his life, leaving him rattling around in this big house like the last penny in a big, empty piggybank.

  Her light perfume wafted by his nose in the breeze of her passing, the same sweet, floral scent she always wore that made him want to lean in to smell deeper. Not for the first time, he wondered what she’d say if he were to ask her out. On a real date
. Not a research date, where he’d scribble notes while she screamed, acting out scenes for his book. But a real one where he’d take her to dinner, pamper her, shower her with his undivided attention while he basked in hers.

  He could ask her now…

  Instead, he set Sasha on the floor and reminded himself that Kate was here in his employment. Well, technically, in his publisher’s employment, but the fact was, she was working. Yes, they had an agreement that allowed him to borrow her as a prop to his writing, but he refused to put her in a position where she felt uncomfortable. He’d wait until after the launch. By then, he’d have figured out a way to do it.

  He slugged his coffee and started gathering up his things to move to the kitchen and warm up. He needed to take his mind off the gorgeous woman standing before him in real life and focus more on the fictional woman in his book. The former was off-limits—the latter was, in theory, more accessible. He could write a romance. Living it? That was a completely different story.

  And not one where he was a bestseller.

  “Ms. Sweet?” A voice boomed up, echoing in the attic. “Can you come down here? We need to know how high you want the spider to crawl, exactly.”

  Kate, who’d been crouched down, unlatching a trunk, spun and stood, the trunk lid thunking closed behind her. Her mouth was set in a thin line as she sped by him in those quiet, black ballet slippers.

  “I’ve literally told them three times where I’d like the track to be placed. Three times,” she muttered and tossed him a smile as she lingered at the attic door. “I’ve got lunch catered in today from your mom’s café, so don’t be surprised if a bunch of bags appear in the kitchen from PattyCakes soon. We’re bribing the workers with food to keep them here for eight full hours until we get the outside set up. Shall I bring Sasha with me? She’s got to be chilled to the bone. Come here, girl! Let’s get you a treat!”

  Sasha’s ears perked up at her name, and she completely abandoned Drake at the sound of her favorite word: “treat.” She trotted away, following Kate out of the attic and down the stairs without a backward glance.