Booked Up

by Harper Logan

  Booked Up

  Harper Logan

  Contents

  Newsletter

  1. Cam

  2. Serge

  3. Cam

  4. Serge

  5. Cam

  6. Cam

  7. Cam

  8. Serge

  9. Cam

  10. Serge

  11. Cam

  12. Serge

  13. Cam

  14. Serge

  15. Serge

  16. Cam

  17. Cam

  18. Serge

  19. Cam

  20. Serge

  21. Cam

  22. Cam

  23. Cam

  24. Serge

  25. Cam

  26. Serge

  27. Cam

  28. Cam

  29. Cam

  Epilogue

  Coming Soon

  Also by Harper Logan

  Our Reunion

  Driven

  Bromantic

  Newsletter

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  Copyright © 2016 by Harper Logan.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  1

  Cam

  When you’re the assistant for a bestselling author, there’s nothing quite like the day you get that first bundle of reviews on the newest book. To Cam, it was a little like Christmas. His boss, famed novelist Madeleine Stevens, hadn’t yet descended to her office on the first floor of her townhouse, so he was all alone with his excitement. Here in his hands was the manila envelope just delivered by the messenger service, full of all the praise Madeleine deserved, and it was his job—his privilege, really—to prepare the reviews for her to read, when she woke up, slipped into her famed lavender robe, and joined the world.

  He smiled to himself as he unsealed the envelope. This job had been such a coup. While his friends were struggling with publishing internships or poorly paid web design jobs, he’d landed a spot with one of the most respected authors of the decade. Back in high school he’d fallen in love with Madeleine’s first book, To Swim with Swans, which had taken the nation by storm with its portrayal of a young girl in war-torn Europe coming of age in a family of miners. He’d written her a shy but gushing fan letter, and had been over the moon when she wrote back, encouraging him with lists of books to read.

  When Cam was in college she’d come out with her second novel, Mirrors of Grace. His senior thesis had been a fifty-page analysis of the book, and when he was done, he’d sent her a copy. He hadn’t been the only one excited by the book; the movie options on it had secured Madeleine’s financial future, and had paid for this townhouse that served as both her home and office.

  When she mentioned, in a response to one of his letters, that she was losing her old assistant, he’d worked up the nerve to ask if he could try out for the job. She had shocked and delighted him by inviting him up here to Rosebridge, the university town where she lived. She was putting the finishing touches on her latest book, and he had come at the perfect time to field all the phone calls, emails and fan letters she received. When he realized how many people were trying to contact her every hour of the day, he felt even more proud that she’d taken the time to encourage him early on.

  And now was her moment of triumph. Her latest book, Dona Quintana’s Long Illness, was a 1,200-page exploration of how malaria affected a young woman’s wedding plans and married life. Dense, rich, and beautiful, the novel would be discussed in literature classes centuries from now, Cam knew. To have his own small part in creating it felt like taking part in history. He hadn’t finished reading it just yet; since starting this job, he’d often found himself too busy to read anymore (or to do his own small writing, or go out, or have friends), but he’d made it to the thirty-ninth chapter, where the young Felisa Quintana implored the ghost of her kindly but recently departed grandmother for tips on making the family’s traditional wedding cake during the great almond famine.

  He removed the reviews from the manila envelope. The pages did not glow with a heavenly light, but they might as well have, for all the joy they brought to him.

  He gazed down at the first page. The first phrase that caught his eye was, “bloated, overlong.”

  Cam blinked. He turned to the next review. “A turgid melodrama that never succeeds in holding the attention.”

  He gasped. The next one was no kinder, and the one after that, harsher still. He glanced behind him, at the staircase leading up to Madeleine’s room.

  She was going to be so hurt. And mad. Mostly mad.

  He flipped to the last one. This one was from the Rosebridge Review of Books. At least it was local. Surely they knew Madeleine’s importance and power, and would say kind things.

  “…like reading a dollar-store version of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez while guzzling cough syrup.”

  “Oh my god, that’s awful,” he said, and glanced at the byline. The review was by Sergio Faletti. He knew that name from somewhere. But now was not the time to try to remember where, because the review only got worse as it went on: “Whatever goodwill Maddy Stevens earned from her tearjerker tales of sad young girls in her first two books, she has burned it up here. This book is nothing but trauma tourism for jaded bourgeois whose only pleasure is to feel bad about poor foreigners.”

  He had to hide these. There was no way Madeleine could be allowed to see them.

  Just then he heard the creak of ancient floorboards above him. Madeleine had arisen. He looked around frantically for somewhere to hide the reviews. He tried shoving them back into the manila envelope, but they had somehow gotten wider while he read them, and wouldn’t fit, as hard as he tried to get them in.

  Now her footstep was at the top of the stairs. He slid the stack onto one of the high shelves of the bookcase in her office. But when he stood back, he saw that they were too eye-catching up there; her housekeeper kept the bookcase very tidy. He grabbed them back down.

  “Cam, darling, are you here yet?” she called. “Is today the day?”

  By rolling the stack of reviews up, he was able finally to jam them into the envelope. He hid it under a stack of papers on her desk, where they were too obvious. He put them in the trashcan, but the housekeeper had emptied the can yesterday, so it was obvious there, too.

  “I’m so excited!” she said, walking through the great room, growing closer by the moment. “I’m especially interested in what the local press had to say. I understand they had that bright young writer do the review, Sergio Something-Something. Very well-respected young man. Cam, are you here?”

  “Yeah, I’m in the office,” he said, his heart sinking. Finally, he grabbed the envelope and shoved it behind the heavy curtain that hid the room from the outside world; when she was deep into writing, Madeleine needed to be shielded from all distractions, so the drapes were thick, and the envelope was completely concealed.

  Now she was in the doorway, wearing a long silk robe in her trademark shade of lavender. Her eye-mask was pushed up to her forehead, and she had already begun the first cigarette of the day. It was also dyed lavender, in a long black holder. A smile creased her face; it was the kindest, most hopeful look he had ever seen on her. “Are they here? My agent said he would messenger them over.”

  “I…um.” Cam looked around. “No, I guess they haven’t come in yet?”

  She raised an eyebrow, and the smile left her face. “Disappointing. Call him, please
. I don’t want to be kept waiting on what should be my day of triumph.”

  “No problem. I’ll give him a call this morning.”

  She stared at him.

  “Let me just get through some of these emails,” he said, “and I’ll—”

  “Cam.”

  “Yes, Madeleine.”

  “Call him.”

  He bit his lip. Clearly he couldn’t call her agent. He’d signed for the package. There was evidence! He’d be caught in a lie, and it would be all over for him. She’d have his head. His thoughts spun like a tire in the mud, until finally he had a bright idea. “The thing is—”

  “Cam, are you hiding something from me?” She pointed her cigarette at him. “You have one of those sweetly naive faces, all cheer and honesty. So the fact that you are blushing and stammering, and your brow is frozen into a furrow, lead me to believe you are lying about something.” She returned her cigarette holder to her mouth, inhaled, then allowed a tendril of smoke to creep from her lips. “Come now. Where’s the bright boy I hired? The one who told me I could trust him?”

  Finally his shoulders dropped and he sighed. He glanced at the drapes, then pulled the envelope out from behind them.

  “Are these the reviews?”

  “I wanted some way to prepare you.”

  She snatched the envelope from him and pulled out the roll of papers. Glancing suspiciously at him, as though he were still hiding something, she smoothed them onto the desk and looked at the first one.

  Her face went pale. “The Northeastern Review of Books said that?”

  He closed his eyes. “It gets worse.”

  “The New York Weekly Literary Supplement called me turgid?”

  If he could have disappeared into a crack in the floor, he would have.

  “Dollar-store…cough syrup… What is this madness, Cam?”

  When he opened his eyes, he was shocked. She’d run her fingers through her hair, mussing it and causing it to stand out at all angles. Her cigarette holder was gripped between her teeth. Her skin was powder-white except for two bright spots of color on her cheeks, and a flush at her throat. Her eyes were wide. “Did you read this?”

  “I did.”

  “They are trying to destroy me, Cam! They will not be happy until my name is ground to dust!” She picked up the papers as though to rend them apart, but ended up throwing them onto the wide table that served as her desk.

  “They were pretty bad.”

  “Bad? Bad? Have you lost your grip on the English language, Cam? These are not bad reviews, they are a poison-tipped arrow aimed straight for my heart, and by extension, the heart of American literature!” By now her cigarette was out, and she crushed the butt, then removed another from the box on her desk. When she lit it, his nose wrinkled. He no longer sneezed at her second-hand smoke, but it took an effort to control his reaction. His fingers had begun to fiddle with the buttons of his cardigan, and he forced them to stop. Never show anxiety around Madeleine; that was the most important rule he’d learned.

  “I don’t know why I bother, I simply do not know!” Madeleine picked the sheaf of reviews back up and waved them around. “Don’t these reviewers know the damage they cause me? Each one more vile than the last. But this one, this!” She took Sergio Faletti’s in hand again. “Listen: While Stevens wants to attain the heights of her first best-seller, her latest door-stopper is too heavy to fly. Bombastic language combines with foggy, unspecific description that clogs the reader’s mind. She has something she wants to say, but one cannot hear her over the words. What does that even mean, Cam? Unspecific? I spent three months studying Argentine decor so that I could get the dinner party scene exactly right!” She lifted her hand to her forehead and sighed.

  “Do you know who would write such an attack? Would you believe the viper is in our midst? Right here in Rosebridge?” Madeleine inhaled sharply, then turned to the window, yanking the cord of the drapes, as though she could spot the reviewer right outside.

  “Yes, you mentioned he was local. I saw the name, but I’m not sure who he is.”

  “Sergio Faletti. You’re not familiar with his work? Consider yourself pure and untainted. The man is a bastard and a fraud!” She began to pace the office. “One book. He has written one book. Some mystery. Now he thinks he can write this about me?”

  Now he remembered. Faletti had come out with a book a few years ago. It had been all the rage in a certain set of guys at college. Usually straight boys who thought they were smarter than everybody else. They’d talked about the “lyricism” of the violence in the book, the way it crossed over into “real literature.” He’d rolled his eyes and avoided it at the time.

  “He is a recent arrival here in Rosebridge,” said Madeleine. “He has just taken a writer-in-residence position at Beasley. Can you imagine? A crime writer?”

  “So you’ve met him?”

  She pursed her lips. “Never. And now the little enfant terrible will get invited to all the parties no one invites me to anymore, now that I am vilified and hated. I can picture him though, a bloated, sweating, cigar-chomping ass. Laughing as he taps out his sickening little reviews. Gossiping about me to our mutual friends. How can I face any of them, with this review being on everyone’s minds? It’s not enough that he is trying to destroy my reputation with the entire world; he’s trying to ruin me here at home!” She calmed herself, stubbing her cigarette out. He wished she’d open the window. “The worst part is the timing,” she said, finally. “The panel next week. We are both on it.”

  Cam gasped. The creative writing faculty of Beasley University had invited Madeleine to a question and answer session about her new book and her writing process, along with a few other local writers, including some Madeleine didn’t like. That wasn’t a problem; there were plenty of people Madeleine didn’t like. But if this Sergio guy was there? And he was this intent on destroying Madeleine’s reputation?

  “We’ve got to solve this,” he said.

  “Solve it? How?” she asked. “It’s a review. It’s not as though we could tell the publisher to retract it.”

  “But he’s clearly got some sort of vendetta against you!” He thought harder.

  There was some pressure to come up with a good solution. For months, he’d heard tales of Angela, Madeleine’s former personal assistant, who honestly sounded like a psychopath when Madeleine described her. She would do practically anything to settle Madeleine’s petty scores against other writers, critics, or anyone in the community she felt had disrespected her. Cam knew he couldn’t flatten anyone’s tires or put a brick through the window, but surely there was something he could do to heal the wound this review had caused.

  “Can you…can you write a rebuttal?” he asked.

  “Well, of course the best revenge would be to respond in kind, and write a scathing review of his latest book…but where is it? People tell me he’s still hard at work on it. Probably a nightmare. All that intellectual showing-off. His detective starts as some small-town cop who just happens to know five languages, and ends up solving the case by remembering a fragment of ancient poetry, the same poetry scribbled on the end-paper of a book found in…oh, it’s just convoluted and awful. People lapped it up because it made them feel smart. But there is no new book to review.”

  “Fine. I’ll go to him directly, then. I’ll tell him this is ridiculous, that it really hurt.”

  “What!” she shouted. “Do not speak of my feelings! I will not have the man rubbing his pudgy, sweating hands together with glee, delighted at having hurt me. No. If you must speak to him, speak of my readers. How horrified they are.”

  “He’s new in town. He won’t want to alienate everyone on the panel. I’ll put it that way. He’s got to say something nice about you—about the book, I mean.”

  “When you see his bristled boar’s face, confront him with his vileness. He used the word bombastic, Cam. Bombastic is a word for spelling bees, and certainly does not apply to Dona Quintana!”

  “
Yes, Madeleine.” He sensed there was even more coming.

  She slid into the great leather chair behind her desk; he could hear the horsehair in the cushions crinkle beneath her. “Did you find Dona Quintana bombastic, Cam? Did you find her turgid?”

  He cleared his throat. “It was a serious subject,” he said. “The inner life of the mind—”

  “Yes, yes, but when you finished, did you immediately pick it up again to start over?”

  “I didn’t exactly start over, just flipped through to my favorite bits.” This time he kept his brow perfectly smooth so she wouldn’t catch him in a lie.

  She slumped, laying her head on her hands. “My next book must be lighter, Cam. It must be froth. It must float above the world, as Dona Quintana’s dreams floated gently above the wedding flan! That is what the world wants! Only the froth, never the flan!” Then she looked up. “Tell him that these words hurt my poor readers in a way they have never been hurt. Tell him it was like reading slander about a lover. It brought you rage and pain.”

  He wasn’t sure those were the words he would use. Dona Quintana had not been a great book. But he would never admit that aloud. Not when he had worshiped Madeleine all these years. He was her personal assistant, and that meant something to him. He was, in a sense, her protector, the strong and sturdy wall that stood between her and the cruel outside world. Now, he finally had a chance to defend her—and against a writer he had first detested, then forgotten.

  Cam wasn’t a violent person. He rarely raised his voice. But the idea of confronting this fraud on Madeleine’s behalf made him stand tall, shoulders back, like he was ready to do battle.

  “Oh, and Cam dear, while you are out—”

  “Wait, you want me to go now?”

  “—would you stop by the bakery? I need two whole-wheat bagels with cream cheese.”

  2

  Serge