by Amelia Wilde
I have to keep this momentum going.
The house she arrives at is an old Victorian. In the rain, it looks haunted. Haunted as fuck, I write, which is surprising, because I normally don’t write “as fuck” anything, but I won’t muzzle my muse. I can finesse that description later.
The girl who enters the door looks like another student in the best kind of way. Preppy. Clean. Dark hair that falls in a shining sheet to her shoulders. They could be friends, or at least cordial. She ushers her back into the kitchen and gives her a dishtowel to dry her hair. The dishtowel appears clean at first glance, but the heroine thinks she sees the ghost of a stain on it. That’s not weird, is it?
It must be the weather, the stress of the financial aid office, getting her down.
The other student is running through the details of the house. They’ll share the main floor. The home is owned by an old woman named Gladys, who lives on the upper floor. All utilities are included in the rent. They just need to be there in order to keep up the house, though Gladys hires a couple of different services that come in for lawn mowing and sidewalk shoveling. The responsibilities are minor and the first floor of the house is nice. When can she move in?
The heroine is surprised.
She hasn’t said very much. She’s laughed a few times and leaned against the kitchen island and sipped some hot cocoa, and now this other student wants her to live in the house?
She remembers the motel, and the way the couple three rooms down screams at each other all night. And how afraid she is that the deadbolt won’t keep anything out, not with such a flimsy door.
She agrees to move in. She’ll be there tomorrow, she tells her new roommate. Desperate isn’t a good look on anybody, so she’ll live one more night in the motel.
The next day, what will she do?
She’ll go to school. In her first class of the day, she’ll meet a chatty new friend, Elizabeth. Elizabeth will ask her which dorm she’s living in, and for some reason, she won’t lie. Elizabeth will frown at the address she names. “What?” she’ll ask. “Have you heard something weird about it?”
Elizabeth’s face will brighten. “No, it must be a different place. You know how places are in the city. One bad year of renters and everybody thinks they’re cursed. Do you have plans for between classes? I’m dying for a latte.”
With the stress of finding a place to stay lifted from her shoulders, my heroine has become...approachable.
Usually, she works every spare second, but today the stars align. Today, she has no mini shift between classes. She can go for a latte with her new friend. Well, not a latte. Whatever the smallest, cheapest black coffee is.
Her name is Chloe.
That’s what she’ll tell the barista, my heroine.
That’s the name she’ll give when she orders the coffee.
Chloe will run into her new roommate on the way out of the coffee shop, and that gorgeous dark-haired girl will be surprised to see her. “You’re here? What are you doing out here?”
Chloe will lift the coffee, feeling the eyes of Elizabeth her classmate ping-ponging between the two of them. “Coffee,” she’ll say tentatively. “Before my next class.”
The new roommate narrows her eyes and then, without another word, moves past them into the coffee shop.
“What the hell was that?” Elizabeth says, laughing.
“My new roommate,” Chloe tells her.
“Maybe I had the right idea about that house after all.”
Yes. Yes. That’s creepy. That’s foreboding. That’s a damn good start. And that’s—
That’s a thousand words.
I surface from the page like I’m coming up from deep water, and when my head breaks the surface I can tell by the light coming in from the kitchen window that time has passed, but how much? I have an app on my computer that blanks out all the clocks so it doesn’t stress me. Obviously, none of that was working until now.
Ben leans against the counter by the kitchen sink. His eyes catch mine across the space and he grins then lifts a final forkful from his plate to his lips. Then he lets the plate fall into the sink with a clatter.
“You started without me?”
“Do you think for an instant I was going to interrupt you? You were in the zone, Eva.”
My stomach growls and I have a more pressing concern. “Is the food cold?”
Ben laughs then turns to the microwave tucked into the corner of the counter. “I’ve been reheating it every five minutes.”
“Every five minutes since when?”
“For the last hour.”
I blink at him.
“It’s slightly creepy to stand there and watch someone writing for an hour.”
He takes a full plate out of the microwave and opens one of the kitchen drawers. It’s only when he turns that he responds to what I’ve said. “You know I like to look at you.”
See, I’m pretty sure my face had returned to its normal color. Eight words from Bennett Powell, and it might as well be on fire again.
“But I didn’t stand here for an hour. I ate my first plate—” He reaches out, nudges my laptop aside, and puts the plate in front of me, following it up with a fork and a napkin. “—and then I went and worked outside. You must have really been in it if you didn’t hear me coming in and out to tend to the food this entire time.”
“I was in it,” I admit while I pick up my fork.
I say it casually. As if being “in it” has come naturally to me for the last...forever. The words slip out of my mouth like it’s no big deal. Like I have been talking to Bennett Powell about having a good writing hour for all my life.
“You were,” he says.
“I was...in it.”
He’s an angel descended from heaven, because he didn’t actually close my laptop when he moved it; he just pushed it aside. It’s like he can see right through me into my secret fears. One of those fears is that if I close my laptop before I’ve hit save on a document, it will disappear before I can get the screen back open. And before you think I’m paranoid, this has happened to me more than once.
Wait.
I reach over to the laptop keyboard with my left hand and delicately, so delicately, scroll up to the top of the page.
“I was in it,” I whisper to myself.
It’s a little rusty, for sure. There are things that Kayla’s going to mark for rewrites—I absolutely know it. And it was pretty slow going. Usually, when I have a solid grasp on an idea, I can write two thousand words in an hour, maybe even more. When my heart is pounding and the horrible twist is about to be revealed, there’s no telling how fast I can get those words out onto the page.
“I was in it!” I shout, throwing my arms into the air.
“Damn right you were,” Bennett shouts back.
I wheel on him. “You.” I jab a finger at him. “This is because of you.”
He raises his eyebrows at me. “Is this a bad thing? I was under the impression that—”
It takes me four huge steps to get around the kitchen counter to where Bennett is standing. He looks down at me with those steady brown eyes, starlight shot through them, and there’s that smirk again.
“Don’t you dare smirk at me,” I challenge.
“I think you were in the middle of complimenting me. Or better yet, thanking me. Profusely.”
“It’s black magic,” I say. I feel drunk on the fact that I just got a thousand words on paper and it didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel breathless and stupid and incapable. “How did you… how did you get that to happen?”
Ben crosses his arms over his chest and arranges his face into something resembling a serious adult expression. “I cooked chicken. You seem to respond very well to rewards involving chicken.” He cocks his head to the side. “Or maybe you were responding to the threat of punishment.”
I swallow hard.
“But you’re the one who made it happen, Eva. You could do it again and again until your book is done.”
; My fists shoot out from my body as if they’re not under my own control, and then I’ve got the tightest grip of my life on the front of his T-shirt. “I don’t care about the secrets.” My heart beats a rabbit-fast rhythm in my chest.
Ben hasn’t moved. “What?”
“I don’t care if you tell me any secrets. But you cannot bail on me. Do you understand?” Maybe it’s pathetic of me. Maybe it’s weak. But I don’t care. We’re in this magical getaway cabin, and I’m going to say it out loud, even if I’m out of practice. Even if I’d normally cover this up and forget about it. “I need your rewards.” My breath catches. “Or your punishments.”
Ben’s eyes are hot coals burning into mine. “All of it’s yours.”
“Yeah?”
“If you can wait fifteen more minutes to eat.”
“I can wait a year. Try me.”
16
Bennett
Eva tips her head back, exposing the long line of her throat, and I take advantage of her little moans to roll her peaked nipples between my fingers. She bites her lip, her eyebrows drawing together.
We’re outside in the larger of the two lawn chairs. I am a cruel taskmaster, so I’m fully clothed, but Eva is down to a neon pink pair of panties.
She rocks her hips forward but can’t get anywhere. Not in my grip. I’m holding her too tight to let her rub on the front of my shorts, and it only takes one hand. She knows the game we’re playing.
I dip my other hand between her legs and drag my fingers along the damp fabric.
The moan turns into a groan. “Come on, Ben. Come on....”
I lean forward so my mouth is next to her ear. “It’s another thousand words if you want these panties off.”
Eva snaps her head up, green eyes blazing, and fixes me with a stare that could melt steel. “You’re mean.”
“You love it.”
There’s a moment of shyness, a little bit of that wall coming back up, and Eva pouts. “I need it.”
“Nothing wrong with needing a little incentive to get your work done.” I trace the curve of her chin with my finger and tilt her face back to mine.
“But what am I going to do when—”
“Shh.” I press that same finger against her lips. “No questions about the future on our magical sex writer’s retreat.”
Eva laughs and the movement makes me even harder. I’m not only teasing her. My own cock wants to know what made me such an asshole. “Even if it’s about the immediate future?”
“What immediate future?”
“It’s Wednesday.” Eva hooks a finger in the neckline of my T-shirt and tugs lightly at it, enough so that I feel the fabric drawing closer on my back. “The meet-up is this Saturday.”
“You’re still thinking about that? Why is that still on your mind?”
Eva looks out over the lake. We woke up early this morning, and as soon as we’d finished having our way with each other, I kicked her out of bed and made her write for her breakfast.
I love how she blushes when I set the terms.
“I feel bad about bailing on Whit’s party like that. I could make up for it at the trivia night.”
I take a fistful of Eva’s hair in my hand and twist it gently in my palm. “Do you think you’ll be done with your book by then?”
She gapes at me. “By Saturday?”
“By at least Saturday at noon. If you don’t want to rush getting out of here.”
“I don’t want to rush it, but…”
There it is. That look in her eyes that plants cold doubt in my gut. I’d let myself feel it if Eva wasn’t so warm and sitting in my lap.
“I probably won’t be done by then,” she admits. “And at some point, I have to go back to the city.”
“For what?”
Her eyes graze over mine and then she looks back out at the water. “This isn’t real life.”
“Mmmm.” I reach down between her spread legs and press one knuckle against her clit. Eva gasps as if I’ve touched a livewire. It doesn’t seem to matter that she still has her panties on. “Did that feel real, or fake?”
Her back arches and she puts her palms flat on the arms of the lawn chair. “I don’t…. You know, it seemed pretty fake to me.” She presses toward my hand, a shift of an inch. “Maybe if you—”
I stand up, lifting us both from the chair, and set her on her feet. “A thousand more words, and I’ll show you if it’s real or not.”
A thousand words for breakfast. A thousand words for an orgasm. A thousand words to go out and write on the beach. Another thousand for me to fuck her underneath one of the oversized beach towels from the house. I charge two thousand to fuck her with no beach towel. That, Eva admits, is real. It’s a miracle we don’t get arrested. We would have been, if this cabin were on the fancy side of the lake.
At some point in the afternoon, I lose her.
Eva stops counting the words.
She digs a notebook out of her bag and perches at the kitchen counter, scribbling things into it. Every so often, she stops and types furiously.
I wait long enough to be sure she won’t need me right away and then, finally, I let my mind go back to my own work.
I’m in the early phases of a fact-checking project for my job, but this phase is the lightest, with the team sending me snippets of draft material to check. All of it will be double and triple-checked. The nature of the work leaves a gap in my schedule.
I need the gap. I have a new lead.
The genealogy websites online can tell you a lot about your family tree, which is pertinent information for me. I need to know as much about my father as possible, and secondary sources are a way to do that.
But those websites only work when people enter their information. My father didn’t do this, so all my searching came to nothing. Until I hired a woman out of New York, Robin, to tell me something I didn’t already know.
Her email this morning was a bombshell.
Your father was adopted out of the foster system, she wrote. He was a rare late adoptee at fourteen years old.
The new knowledge is so strange it hurts to hold it inside my skin. My dad’s adopted parents—it seems terrible to think of them that way—were busy people. They were affectionate when they could be, but they both worked at the Ford plant in Flat Rock and we lived up north in a nowhere town by a lake sort of like this one. It was a long drive for a day off, so we mostly saw them on holidays.
And nobody ever mentioned this.
Not one time.
I can’t distract Eva with this. She’s doing too well with her book to make that kind of rookie mistake.
But I can do something else.
His original last name was Siverling.
It seems odd to me, that name. It probably seems doubly odd, because if things had gone very differently in my father’s life, it would have been my last name too.
No. I wouldn’t have existed. If everything hadn’t gone exactly the way it went, I wouldn’t be sitting here in this lawn chair right now, tapping my father’s secret into a search engine.
The results are slim. Too slim. One page of results on a Google search. I straighten my back. If Robin was wrong, then she was wrong. I can keep looking elsewhere. But it’s possible this family didn’t interface with the Internet very often.
I click on the third link down, which looks most promising. It’s the genealogical profile of a man named Robert Siverling.
This could be my dad’s dad.
The birthdays make sense for that.
I take out my phone and copy some of the information into a note. It looks like one of the Siverling daughters got interested in genealogy a few years ago and added in as much as she could. By the dates, the two girls in the family were much younger than my father. Old enough to have existed by the time he left—and how did he leave? Why? What the hell? But….
It’s such an afterthought that I almost miss it. It’s not even in the family tree section of the page; it’s down below, in miscella
neous notes.
All it says is H? 1961?
I don’t usually get emotional about this kind of thing. I saw enough in Afghanistan to know that getting yourself worked up over what’s already said and done is a fool’s errand. But it makes my throat tight to see this little note, never updated.
My father was part of another family.
And these people don’t know that he’s dead.
“Did you check all the facts?”
Eva’s voice comes from behind me, from the front door of the cabin, and then the door closes and I hear her soft footsteps on the grass.
She comes into view next to me, wearing an oversized hoodie with holes in the sleeves where her thumbs can go. I take the hem of it in my fingers and tug her closer. “Who said you could put this on?”
“I got cold,” she says haughtily. “I can’t write when I’m too cold.”
I pull her into my lap and we look out at the water together. The sun is beginning to set, orange and pink streaks across the surface. For a moment, it’s enough to sit here with her, taking it in.
Then Eva turns to look at me. “You’re not keeping up your end of the deal.”
I exaggerate my shock. “What could you possibly be talking about? I have tended to you for days. I have motivated you, and—”
“I’m very motivated.” She runs a hand over the side of my face, tracing the line of my jaw. “But you were supposed to start telling me secrets.”
“We were both supposed to tell each other secrets.”
Eva’s eyes flick to the left then back to my face. “I don’t have any secrets.”
“Here’s one: you’re a terrible liar.”
“Here’s another: you’re keeping secrets too. I want to know what your real job is.”
“My real job?” I brush an auburn curl away from her face.
“There’s no way a fact-checker can afford to take a sudden weeklong vacation and barely work.”
“I work from home.” I’m not sure where she’s going with this. “I’ve always worked from home. Or, in this case, cabin.”