“Figured out what?” she prompted him.
“I don’t know.” He sighed. “Nothing, maybe. Except that I don’t always know myself as well as I think I do, that’s all.”
She looked no less confused, and he didn’t blame her. He also didn’t know what else to say, so the silence between them grew strained. Finally, she said, “Do you think it’s weird that we spend so many of our conversations apologizing to each other?”
“It’s better than not apologizing, right?”
A slow smile spread across her face. “Good point.”
“Anyway, I’m glad I finally caught you today. I’d started to worry that I had ruined this place for you after I showed up the last time.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ve just been either on campus or holed up in my house trying to get ready for classes to start next week.” She hesitated then said, “You could have texted. I wouldn’t have minded.”
“Except I don’t have your number.” A startled look followed by realization crossed her face. They’d never exchanged information. “I even tried to get your info through the agency, but Gary flatly refused, saying that was a privacy breach. And good for him. That’s just common sense, even though he knows me. So then I emailed Valeria to see if she’d ask you if you were willing to be put in touch, but she never answered.”
“I didn’t hear from her,” Emma said.
“I was beginning to feel like a stalker.”
“So you thought showing up where I might be would make it better?” But another smile tugged at her mouth as she asked.
“Let this prove to you that I’d go to the ends of the earth to find you and confess to being a tool.”
She laughed and it wiped out the last bit of tension he’d been holding in his shoulders as he relaxed into the sound. “Give me your phone.” She held out her hand, and he unlocked it and gave it to her. She tapped a few keys and then her own phone buzzed. “There. Now we’ve got each other’s numbers. You don’t have to lurk around here anymore.”
He glanced around it. “I’m finding I like it. Somehow the blankness in my mind is much louder in the quiet of my own house. How’s your writing going today?” he asked.
“Not great. But it hasn’t gone great in, oh, I don’t know, years. So same old, same old.”
“Why do you think that is?”
She tilted her head and studied him. “You have a prosecutor tone. Did you know that? It comes out when you’re trying to figure something out.”
He groaned. “Residual job hazard. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. And it’s not a mystery. I have this perfectionism thing. I have this ideal for how I want a scene to feel, and I can feel the huge gap between what I write and where I want it to be instead. I get really tired of living in that gap.”
“They say admitting you have a problem is the first step. At least you know why you’re blocked. I don’t have the faintest idea. Where do you think the perfectionism comes from? Is it a personality thing like being shy or funny?”
“Maybe a little. But mine’s obvious. Just read my mom’s second memoir, Mother in the Void, for a complete guide to me. That’s what perfectionism looks like, and that’s who raised me.” He took out a pen to note the title and she waved him off. “I wasn’t being literal. Don’t read it. And I’m tired of talking about my block, much less thinking about it. What about you? Why are you blocked?”
“Not sure,” he said, setting the pen down. “I haven’t dealt with this before. I don’t understand the bad guy in this book. To really make him scary, you have to show the aspects of a character that would draw other people to him. Kind of that idea of the charming sociopath. Then you have to figure out what he cares about losing so that you can take it away and truly make him suffer. It’s what gives the most satisfying ending: watching him suffer in the worst possible way, and that’s always at some emotional level. But this guy, he’s cold. Nothing matters to him. I can’t figure out how to get justice for this victim, even when I have total control of the story.” He pressed his hands into his eyes as if it would stop the replay of the killer’s face in his mind, the cold expression that had chilled him every day of the trial in the courtroom.
“That sounds hard,” she said. “Are you at the point that you have to know?”
“No. I’m in the first act of the book.”
“Maybe write it as it happened instead of worrying about how to make it come out right?”
He shook his head. “The problem is that this case left the family devastated. They’ve never recovered. I have to punish this bad guy in a way that gives them what they needed, because in real life that didn’t happen.”
“Sometimes I tell my students to write until they find the answer. If you write it as it happened, the answers might appear. Have you noticed that before? That you think you’re saying one thing, but the story takes over and something else entirely happens?”
Instead of answering, he tapped a few keys on his laptop and then turned it to face her. As she focused on it, her mouth fell slightly open. He knew it looked crazy. “This is my outline. Every single tension point, turn, theme, character beats, it’s all here. So no, not much takes over. This is nonfiction with a thin veneer of fiction laid on top of it.”
“Good image,” she said, with a slight nod. The quiet approval in that felt like winning an objection in a courtroom. “But I still think you should try it.”
He considered it. It was totally opposite of how he usually worked, but what did he have to lose at this point? “All right,” he said. “But let’s make it a game. How about for the next chapter you just write your story, the things that happen, and don’t write a single metaphor.” He smiled at the skeptical look on her face. “You can put a placeholder for any metaphors you have to put in later.”
“A placeholder?”
“Yeah. Like . . . okay, instead of writing the metaphor, you write some word that’s easy to search and replace later, like bazooka. Then you don’t stop the forward momentum of your story.”
“It’s an interesting strategy. Except I write about bazookas a lot, so I’d get confused about which ones I meant to use and which ones were placeholders.”
“Fine. Then use ‘volcano.’ Do you write about volcanos a lot?”
“More than you’d think,” she murmured.
“I’m not helping you anymore.”
She grinned at him. “I get your point though. All right, instead of stalling at every metaphor, I’ll put the word ‘armadillo’ instead of a metaphor on the condition that you write one whole chapter based on an event that isn’t in your outline. Make up a scene where we see an ordinary day in the killer’s life. Figure out how he’s living it.”
“An ordinary day? There’s no tension in that.”
“Only if you do it wrong. Some of the most ordinary moments are actually our most fraught if we’re looking at them closely.”
“You’re on,” he said.
“How about we each work on it for an hour and report to the other?”
He nodded, and she set a timer then turned to her manuscript. He didn’t know what she was working on, exactly, but after a minute or two, she typed out a word, and when he looked up at the sound of her keys, she gave a small smile and mouthed the word “armadillo.”
He grinned, took a deep breath, clicked closed the document that held his story brain—his outline—and opened a new blank document instead.
What did a conscienceless killer do on an ordinary day?
Maybe he bought groceries? And without letting himself think about it too hard, he started the first sentence of this creative exercise. Donovan Whittaker strode through the sliding doors with the confidence of a man who knew they would open at his appearance. And of course they would, because that’s what automatic grocery store doors always did. The thing was, he walked through every door like that, and all of them opened too. The literal and the metaphorical ones.
Huh. That was interesting. Even the way this guy walked
into a grocery store door said something about his personality. Curious now, he followed Donovan Whittaker through the store, fascinated as he experienced it through his character’s eyes.
He’d lost track of time when a quiet beeping broke in from Emma’s phone. “Has it been an hour already?”
She shook her head. “I just knew that was going to be a torturous hour, so I figured we’d better check in after a half hour to see how it’s going. Was that as hard for you as it was for me?”
Not at all. But he didn’t want to make her feel bad, so he said, “Yes, definitely.”
“Bull.” But her tone was mild. “I can hear you typing, you know.”
“I was just typing, ‘Aidan Maxwell is an insufferable braggart’ a million times.”
“Weird. Samesies.” She didn’t even look embarrassed by his teasing, and he liked that. “But I think we’ve each earned a fifteen-minute brain break.”
“Can I get you more tea?”
She shook her head and slid a novel from her bag. “Is it going to seem so rude if I read for the next fifteen minutes while you’re sitting right here?”
“Nah.” It was an announcement that she was comfortable with him, even if she didn’t recognize it. “I’m going to grab some more coffee and check the box scores.”
When he returned to his seat with his drink, she was reading, her brow furrowed. This was different from her thinking furrow. It was her upset furrow. He’d seen it directed at him often enough to recognize it. He wanted to reach over and smooth it out even though he knew he hadn’t put it there this time.
He glanced at her book cover. It was a Swedish crime thriller by an author he was scheduled to appear with at a huge publishing conference in New York the following month.
When she turned a page, sighed, and shifted her gaze to stare at something invisible in the distance, he quietly cleared his throat.
“Do you not like the book?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Not as much as I hoped. Luther recommended it to me, but it’s not grabbing me even though I’m really trying.”
“I never try to like a book. I figure it’s the book’s job to get me to like it, and if I don’t, I leave it and move on.”
“He’s reviewing it on his podcast in a week or two. I want to see what Luther sees in it.”
Aidan tried not to tense at this. She owed him nothing, and she could mention Luther’s name all she wanted. Yet he couldn’t refrain from probing to see where her feelings toward the other man stood. “You guys are pretty tight, huh?”
He had her full attention now, and she regarded him as though he’d asked if she were an alien. “Not at all. I just met him at the retreat.”
“Oh. My fault. I saw you two at the bar one night when I went down to get a beer. I guess I read the body language wrong.” He was careful to say it with casual interest. He didn’t want the slightest hint of accusation in his tone because he didn’t feel accusatory. If anything, now he was confused.
“There’s no body language to read,” she said. “We were discussing some common acquaintances, a bit of literary theory, things like that.”
He studied her. She honestly believed what she was saying. So now what? Did he clue her in that there was definitely body language to read when he’d observed them? He had no idea how to communicate that without sounding like he’d been spying on her. It was just the way he read every room. Old prosecutor instincts again.
“Is it possible that his interest in you was a little more than academic?” She gave him a flatly incredulous look. “So that would be a no.”
“That would definitely be a no. The man is old enough to be my father.”
Aidan shrugged. Luther was significantly older than Emma but not that old. “He’d have to have started pretty young for that to be true.”
“He’s got at least ten years on me.”
“Fifteen if it’s a day,” he muttered.
“What?”
He sighed. “I don’t know how to say this without it coming out wrong, but any ADA becomes an expert in body language. We study it from the judge to the jury to the defendants and everyone in between. Luther was definitely not there for the academic conversation.”
Her expression closed against him as surely as if she’d slammed a physical door. “Are you suggesting his only interest in me would be physical? I’ll have you know that some people actually respect me for my mind.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Heck, no. I’ve already run up against that sharp mind of yours. I absolutely think that people respect you for it. I think Luther was angling for a different kind of connection.”
She’d relaxed a bit until that last sentence. Now she tensed again. “You’ve got him wrong. He’s just a bigger nerd than I am for literature and deconstruction.”
There was no way that Luther had leaned toward her and kept touching her because he loved what she had to say about literary theory. But Aidan said, “You’re probably right. I only glanced that way. I wasn’t exactly studying the situation.” That was because he hadn’t needed to. That glance had given him a perfect snapshot of the dynamic.
“If you had, you’d have seen it for what it was.”
He didn’t bother repeating that he had. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to press on a bruise. Hey,” he said, his expression brightening. “That was a good metaphor.”
She wagged her finger at him, and it made him feel like one of her students. “Good in that it expresses an idea well. Bad in that it’s been said before. A lot.”
“What? I just thought of it.”
“Low-hanging fruit.”
He scowled at her. Then he dropped it. “Fine. It did feel a little too easy to come up with.”
“Are you done mansplaining me? Can we get back to finish our writing assignments?”
“I didn’t mansplain you. I hate mansplaining.” Both of their tones were light, but he sensed that she meant it as much as he did.
“What you did is the literal definition of mansplaining: you told me as a woman that I was wrong about what my experience was with another man because you’re claiming to be a bigger expert. But I’m a bigger expert in being a woman.”
“Yeah, but—” And then he clamped his mouth shut. He was a bigger expert on picking up a predatory vibe, but she was right. Any contradiction from him would sound like he was invalidating her perceptions and feelings. “Okay. I’m sorry. You were there. I was only passing through, trying to figure out why you left me in the middle of an incredible kiss to hang out in a bar with that guy.”
She studied him, her expression calm. “You’re jealous.”
“No. Just suddenly deeply insecure about certain abilities I’ve never had a reason to doubt.”
She dropped his gaze for a second to close her book. “You still don’t have any reason to doubt.”
The hint of shyness in her words surprised him. The constant puzzle of her delighted him. He could never predict how she would react next, and yet each reaction was so perfectly her when it came. “If you say so.” Mainly he really wanted her to say so again.
“I do.” She picked up her phone to set a timer for them. “Ready to finish the other half of this challenge?”
But Aidan had started packing up his laptop, already focused on a different challenge: figuring out Emerson Lindsor.
“Uh, are we not doing this now?” she asked.
“You can if you want to. I’m going to go home to do it, and then I’ll text you and let you know how it went.”
She looked at him in some confusion, then gave him a quiet, “Okay.”
“I don’t want to scare you with how much cursing I’m going to do while I work through the rest of this assignment, professor.” It won him a reluctant smile, but it wasn’t the truth. He was going home to read her mother’s memoir immediately. Emma had practically offered it up as the key to understanding her, and though her tone had been a touch derisive toward the book, he sensed there was more truth to that statement
than she even recognized. So he would take that key and use it, because he suddenly had a strong desire to understand everything about the way she worked.
Maybe if he figured her out, she’d quit preoccupying his thoughts. Because he was beginning to worry she was permanently lodged there.
Chapter Thirteen
Emma didn’t understand Aidan. Not even a little bit. She didn’t ever share her writing spaces. Not with Maggie, not with anybody. Not since David. And the first time she was willing to, Aidan up and walked out.
Had she offended him with her accusation of mansplaining? He’d taken it in stride, apologizing as if he meant it. They’d even moved on to some flirty talk about the kiss they’d shared. Emma wasn’t a natural flirt, but that moment had felt good between them, a sense of invitation and remembered connection in the words. She didn’t think she’d imagined it.
Well. She couldn’t do anything about it now, so she might as well get to work and at least finish her half of the challenge regardless of whether Aidan did or not. That had a little to do with hating to back down from a challenge. But to her surprise, it had even more to do with the way the writing had flowed for the first half hour. She wanted to see what happened when she got more of the story down and littered her manuscript with armadillos as she went.
The answer, she discovered two hours later, was that she had a far better idea of what Victoria was up to than she’d had for the last month. Maybe even since she’d started the book.
She packed up her stuff, left a fat tip for the baristas who had put up with her hogging the table, and headed home.
Who cared if Aidan had walked out halfway through the challenge? It had done more for her than she could ever have guessed. She was done trying to figure out him and his abrupt departures.
Always & Forever: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection, Books 1 - 4) Page 11