by Zoe Chant
Determined to leave worry behind, she moved toward the door, just as she heard Doris saying, “Nikos, did you see Jen anywhere? It’s time to go.”
Jen walked inside, and was glad to hear her voice coming out natural as she said, “I took a little walk in the rain. So lovely.”
Bird and Doris chorused, “We don’t get enough,” and laughed.
Everyone began putting on jackets and finding belongings. As Jen buttoned up her suede jacket, she could feel where Nikos was in the room, though he wasn’t speaking. She hugged to herself her secret joy, a bubble of laughter fizzing up. She still didn’t know exactly what he did—but that was okay, because first, they had talked and laughed so much that it seemed they would never run out of subjects, and secondly . . . ha ha (she gloated to herself), they had all night to look forward to. Alone. With no interruptions.
“There you are,” Godiva said. “Doris has the car warmed up.”
Jen glanced up, startled. She would have liked to ride with Nikos, and laughed inwardly at how very much she was reminding herself of her teen crushes. Only now, unlike the misery of high school, the guy she liked actually liked her back.
She buckled herself in, wondering how Bird and those two tall men were going to fit into Joey’s small sports car. Did it even have a back seat?
“Everyone got your manuscript pages?” Doris asked.
“I do,” Godiva said. “Ho, I’m like a kid in a candy store. I think this is the best one yet . . .”
It only took a few minutes to get to the bakery. As soon as they walked in, Jen sensed something off. She wasn’t the only one—Godiva paused in her usual spry sprint. The three turned to Linette, who had plastic gloves on as she put the last of the day’s pastries onto a tray for the writing group’s refreshments.
One look at her scowl made it clear something was up. “Hi, Linette,” Jen said. “We brought a visitor. This is Nikos.”
Linette cast Nikos a distracted glance—then did a doubletake that almost made Jen laugh. She blinked up at him, and Jen reveled in her open appreciation. “Hi,” she said. “Welcome!”
“Thank you, Linette,” Nikos said.
Doris went to the counter. “Anything we can do?” she asked quietly.
Linette turned away from Nikos. Her shoulders slumped as she sighed. “Oh forkballs! I’d better hurry before Bill and Cassandra start World War III. Cassandra is doing the thing again.”
“Thing?” Joey asked, coming in the front door right then, Nikos and Mikhail towering over short Bird between them.
Linette smiled an absent welcome. “Cassandra proposes we start an online magazine, or a classy print one, or a poetry and fiction blog. And of course she’s to be the editor. If you ask me, I think it’s because Tomas just sold a poem to that snobby magazine she’s always going on about submitting stuff to, how hard it is to place anything there, if she can’t, nobody can, yadda yadda.” She sighed again, and pointed to the back room of the bakery, where the meetings always took place. “Go on in. The coffee is ready, though I should probably spike it.”
Godiva’s expression had shuttered, her black eyes narrowed as she led the way.
Years of learning to read a room full of people who might not speak her language caused Jen to scan quickly. Sure enough, here and there were the tight angles of people trying not to argue, though they wanted to. The writers had instinctively grouped themselves into two camps, exactly the way it had happened the previous times the subject of publishing a magazine had come up—though not all the same people were in each camp.
Everyone was talking in low, intense voices. On Cassandra’s side of the room, Jen heard a longtime member saying, “I don’t know why it always gets voted down. I know if someone just saw my poems—”
“My niece could do the illustrations! Everybody at her school says she’s a real artist—you’d never know she’s only in first grade!”
“—which are all hand-calligraphed, with the story behind each poem included, and I never send more than ten at a time, carefully selected. I figure surely one will ‘fit their needs’—”
“ . . .and there are so few short story markets. Not like thirty years ago! But I’m afraid this would be another non-paying gig. Everyone says ‘for exposure,’ but I’ve been so exposed it’s a miracle I don’t get arrested . . .”
And on the other side of the room:
“Not this again! I thought we voted it down once and for all.”
“ . . .it’s fine for the short story and poetry writers, but all of us writing novels are shut down before we even get started . . .”
“ . . . everybody’s taste is so different, but you know whose taste would be the only one considered, and she’ll surely fill half the magazine with her own poems . . .”
“Cassandra’s rich enough to buy her own print shop,” Godiva muttered. “Last time this came up, we told her to start her own magazine, but what she really wants is everyone submitting stuff to her, so she can pick and choose. She’s like the Bridezilla who lives for picking and dumping bridesmaids.”
Cassandra, a small woman with short, frizzy blond hair, approached wearing her usual clashing bangles and beads. She said in a chirpy voice, “And here is our resident best seller!” She sidled up toward Godiva. “Several of us are taking another look at our idea of our own magazine. I was thinking, if you started our first issue with an interview between your detective and—”
“Nope,” Godiva stated. “There are plenty of online zines popping up and failing. It’s a lot of work putting out a magazine, work that would take away from actual workshopping.”
“Not these days,” Cassandra cooed. “We have so many talented students from the university who have access to the most amazing software—”
“It’s an excellent idea,” Bill Champlain put in, as usual pushing himself into the middle of someone else’s conversation—especially if women were talking. “What it needs for success,” he stated, “is a professional touch. I could talk to my agent about it. Make sure we begin with professional standards. Before Mindy, my idiot ex-wife, selfishly bailed on me, she used to type all my work, but I still have the templates she used . . .”
“If this was high school, I’d know what to do,” Doris muttered. “Or even if I were still group leader. Where’s Linette? Still out front getting the food, I expect.”
Jen said, “I last saw her loading the trays. Doris, you used to be moderator. If this was an actual fight, I’d walk between the two leaders and try to bring things down a notch. Seeing as it’s our group, I think they’d take your influence over mine.”
Joey smiled at Doris. “Let’s give that a try.”
Doris opened her hands and said, “Hey diddle-diddle, right down the middle.”
She and Joey began walking between the groups, addressing people to either side. “How are you doing?” and, “Looking forward to your pages tonight. How much did you get written last week?”
Nikos sat down beside Jen. “I’ve used a similar technique when trying to defuse tensions. They are doing it well.”
Jen murmured back, “Doris is using her High School Teacher Voice on them. She only breaks that out when certain elements in the group start pulling the room into high school mode. It’s rare,” she added quickly. “They’re a great bunch. But you know, when you get a lot of different personalities in one place . . .”
“I do know,” he said softly. “So tell me more about what you write?”
She hesitated, then reminded herself that guilt was no longer an option. Yes, writing fantasy wasn’t saving the world, but it, like cake, had its place. “I tend toward adventures. With magic. I’ve seen amazing places all over the world, and I love imagining what-ifs.”
She hesitated, studying Nikos closely. His pupils had changed, and his lips parted. That was not boredom. Encouraged by this sign of his close focus, she rushed on. “I love the idea that the world, the universe, is far bigger than we can imagine. So I play in that pond. This new one . . . well, ho
w about if I let you hear it? I’m afraid if I tell you, it’ll be boring if you have to turn around and hear it all repeated.”
“You couldn’t be boring,” he said, on such an earnest note that she felt in her bones that he meant it.
“Here’s the food!” The swinging door banged open, and Linette entered, carrying a heavy tray from which the fragrances of pastry wafted.
As if she were a magnet, she pulled the rest after her. Within seconds the last holdouts in the two groups had melded into one, talking and laughing as they got coffee, tea, and pastry. The atmosphere began to ease.
Once they all sat down, Linette said, “Who would like to read first—”
Hands went up midway through her question, but Bill cleared his throat loudly, rattled the pages already in his hand, and glared at Linette, whose voice dropped into blandness. “Looks like Bill is ready.”
Jen winced, wishing that Nikos’s first exposure to the group wouldn’t be through Bill.
Wilhelm Stryker lifted his double-action Smith & Wesson Model 29 44-cal Magnum, and sighted down its length. The Russian hit man dropped his wimpy nine mil and threw his hands up, squeaking, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
The little blonde the hit man had taken as hostage fixed pleading eyes on Stryker as she struggled futilely against the ropes, her enormous breasts rising and falling with every panting breath.
In the background, Stryker’s monster of an ex, Cindy, screeched like a banshee. Too bad, you brought this on yourself, hiring incompetent mercs to take me out, Stryker thought as he pistol-whipped the hit man, who dropped unconscious to the ground. Stryker bent over the chesty hostage, who whimpered gratefully . . .
Jen was afraid to look at Nikos. A second later, he touched her hand. When she turned to him, he gave her a wincing smile and wrote on her palm, letter by letter, “A.L.W.A.Y.S. L.I.K.E. T.H.I.S?”
She loved holding his hand. It was well-shaped, callused like hers across the palms. She wondered what it would feel like caressing her body . . .
Suppressing a delicious shiver (when this is over, we’ll get to be alone, she promised herself) she wrote back, “J.U.S.T. B.I.L.L.”
Nikos shot her a tiny smile of relief. She smiled back, feeling like a kid passing notes in school as he wrote, “N.O.T. M.Y. T.H.I.N.G. H.O.P.E. Y.O.U. N.E.X.T.”
He then let go of her hand, though with a glance of regret, and settled into a mask of polite endurance. Jen cast a quick glance around, noting the usual fixed stares of patience from every female there, and more than half the men, though Bill did have a couple of followers. She resorted to her usual way of coping by counting the pages as Bill set them aside, then breathing a quiet sigh of relief when he reached the last page.
People clapped politely. Nikos did too. Whatever he was thinking, he had excellent manners, another wonderful thing she was learning about him.
Jen made a private bet with herself that Linette wanted to move past that disaster, and sure enough, she called on the two best poets in the group. Tomas read an arrestingly beautiful poem about the reflection of the sky in a puddle on a rainy morning. Jen exulted in every well-chosen word, imagining them washing away the toxic residue of Bill’s macho-fest.
The second poet read something she had written in Spanish then translated into English. Jen exulted again, on behalf of the group, when she side-eyed Nikos and saw his expression lighten to interest and appreciation.
The poets got more genuine applause, following which Linette said, “Jen?”
Jen jumped, and almost yelped “Me?”
Linette smiled her way. “You almost never get a chance to be among the first ones, and you’ve brought a guest. How about you go now?”
“Okay.” Jen took out her papers, doing a couple of quiet deep breaths to quiet the thump of her heartbeat. Then, “I read the beginning last time. This continues the same scene. It’s a fantasy, set on another world. The protagonists are in a library, trying to decipher a magical text, and . . . well, let the story speak for itself.”
She began reading, only letting herself glance toward Nikos when she finished the first page. Was it confusing or boring? Did he think fantasy a waste of time? His smile of appreciation reflected in his eyes, and it struck her that he was going to like whatever she read. Not pretend to, which was a different matter. He was going to like it because he liked her.
Her nervousness fell away, and she began the second page with a lot more enthusiasm.
EIGHT
NIKOS
The first reader had filled Nikos with a weird mix of hilarity and dread.
The hilarity was sparked by the impression that this Wilhelm Stryker character was supposed to be the villain—the author piled on so much obnoxiousness that Nikos wondered if the story was aimed at young teenage boys in particular, who were not best known for picking up literary clues. But then the real villain showed up in the story, cowering before the swaggering Stryker, and Niko rapidly lost what little interest he’d had.
This human Wilhelm Stryker in the story seems to want sex, his unicorn commented, but despises the human women he expects to get it from.
Nikos agreed silently. There is more care and interest given to his projectile weapons than to the living objects of his desire.
The unicorn promptly dove down and closed the vault to shut out the word flow.
But politeness demanded that Nikos endure. He began to dread that the entire evening would be like this—except of course for whatever Jen wrote. He could not imagine such a peculiar view of humanity from her, even in story form.
To distract himself, Nikos reached for Jen’s hand, and spelled out his question, keeping his eyes front. Her ready response said a lot about her own opinion of that text.
But the next two readers, both poets, reassured him. As Jen had promised earlier, this group was a mix of people. As you’d expect.
Then it was Jen’s turn at last! His unicorn emerged when Jen began to read.
At first he was entranced simply by the sound of her voice, though he could sense that she was a little nervous. Gradually he found himself drawn into the story. The fictional grand library reminded him of the ancient library he had once seen at Melk, a beautiful monastery above the Danube river. Only she had added magic to it.
She finished a page and laid it down, as he thought: Magic. What would she make of qi? He wanted so badly to tell her! But he had to wait. He looked forward to the pleasure of introducing her to the shifter world. Not all at once, of course. He didn’t want to overwhelm her, or frighten her off altogether.
She picked up a new page, and his attention snapped back to her story. As her magician character tartly remonstrated with a hapless young apprentice, he thought he saw glimpses of the little elder Godiva. The apprentice, so good-hearted, surprisingly brought Cleo to mind, and he wondered if he was reading his own life and people into Jen’s text—or had she written these pages recently?
He found himself sinking into her imaginary world. It was over before he was ready for it to end. He clapped harder and longer than anyone, stopping only when she sat down next to him, her cheeks pink. “I want to read the rest,” he whispered.
“There isn’t any more,” she whispered back. “Did you really like it?”
“I did!”
“Maybe I’ll finish this one,” she sighed. “I start them, and I love everything about them, but somehow I find myself running into a wall. I don’t know what keeps stopping me . . . later.” She stopped as another person began reading.
Nikos sat back and bent his attention on the new reader. Intellectually he was aware that the writer deserved her fair share of attention, but he found his mind wandering. His thoughts were all on Jen. Did her writing about magic mean she might be accepting of the hidden world of mythic shifters in particular, or was she merely writing in a genre that had proved to be popular, and she would be like most humans, denying anything that didn’t fit into the human worldview, and attributing it to tricks of the eyes, to tiredness,
to anything but the truth?
He found himself counting the pages until the reader finished. He clapped along with the rest of the group, but under cover of the noise, leaned over and asked Jen, “Is this later enough? I’d like to know what keeps stopping you from finishing your stories. If you want to talk about it.”
Jen sighed. “If I knew, I’d fix it. Just, at some point, I fall out of the world. And there I am, sitting in my chair, mentally throwing plot ideas at the screen. I know it might sound stupid,” she whispered quickly, “when I’m writing about magic and the like, but it’s like . . . it’s like it ceases to be real.”
Another reader rattled papers and cleared his throat, as the baker Linette slipped out of the room, carrying empty trays piled with dishes.
The new reader began to read anyway.
What is a stock market crash? the unicorn asked plaintively. No, I do not wish to know. And once again he sank below the surface.
Nikos found himself wishing he could follow his unicorn, as the reader embarked on a long catalogue of physical attributes of what he called a “Wall Street Warrior.” At first Nikos strove to comprehend, until he glanced at Jen, to catch the same out-of-focus expression she’d worn when Bill was reading.
It seemed they had similar tastes. Suppressing a grin, he was about to reach for her hand when the crash of broken glass sounded from the front room.
Jen dropped her purse on the chair next to Doris’s as she whispered, “Excuse me. I’m going to go see if Linette needs help.”
Doris whispered, “I can come . . .”
“You haven’t had your turn yet.” Then she turned to Nikos, just as he was about to offer to go with her. “I’ll be back in a moment,” she whispered. “If a lot of us go, it’ll disturb everyone.”
Jen slipped out, followed by a wispy young woman sitting close to the door.
Nikos sat back, and did his best to pay attention to a chapter about baseball.