agent, dedicated to my clients needs, I would. But only this once.”
Aaron sawed at his chicken with excessive force. “Tell him the usual.”
“It always makes me happy to spew vulgar obscenities and watch his eyes narrow to toothpicks. Martin is waiting for the manuscript,” she added, daintily picking at her salad, turning from one unpleasant topic to another.
“I’m not ready to write again.”
“Yes. I know. You are too emotionally frozen, devoid of all feeling and heart, and even worse, unable to plot your way out of a paper bag. Blah, blah, blah. You are becoming tedious.”
He stared at her silently, as any self-respecting heartless, emotionally frozen man would do.
Unamused, she shot him a withering look.
“I need more time,” he lied. Actually there were ten completed manuscripts under his bed. In fiction, Aaron believed in total honesty. In life, not so much.
“I’ve been telling him that for eight years. Eventually he will grow old and possibly die, and you will have squandered your opportunity. Not that I care.”
Aaron shrugged, feeling the pecking bites of guilt, and he hated guilt. Guilt was usually directly followed by stupidity. “I’ll have something when I have something.” It was an empty promise, Didi knew it, and she moved aside the bud vase, the better to scowl at him.
“Show me what you have, Aaron. Give him a morsel, something to dangle in front of his greedy little eyes, and let them remember the vibrant talent that you are.”
Aaron fought the urge to put the vase back in place and hide the disappointment in her eyes. “When I’m ready. The perfect book takes time. It’s nearly impossible to do it twice in a lifetime.”
“You will never be ready if you spend all your time in this dreary little ghost town. You should be in the city.”
She spoke with all the arrogance of Aaron’s father, some acquired from her two short years as Cecil Barksdale’s mistress, but there was one important difference between the two—Didi actually looked at Aaron with affection. Aaron’s father only looked in the mirror with affection. In the end, it was the same reason that both Didi and Aaron had left him.
“Since hell has now frozen and your will has fossilized into something large and beastly usually found in museums, I have no choice. For the next week, I will be slumming here for a short respite.” She coughed, not so delicately. “If you feel a warm, relentless wind breathing down your neck, it will be me doing my job as I should be paid to do, if you were actually writing.”
As he considered the horrific idea of someone sitting there, waiting for him, expecting to actual read his words, Aaron’s fingers began to tap once again. His father had always said true genius could never be forced. There were few things that Aaron and Cecil agreed on. That was pretty much it.
He considered the lethal determination in Didi’s face and knew that soon he would have to come clean. But not yet.
“Oh, you are the sly one,” she murmured, her mouth curved in a Cheshire grin. “I know you’ve been writing. It’s there in your face, your restless fingers.” Delighted at his obvious misery, she rubbed her hands together. “There. I’ve decided. Every day we will have lunch, and you will report your progress.”
“You can lunch wherever you choose. You’ll lunch alone.”
“You would treat me so shabbily, Aaron?” she asked, watching him with those piercing black eyes that knew him better than anyone.
“No,” he said with a resigned sigh. With a single-minded efficiency, Aaron had chased away everyone in his life. Nine years later, it was only Didi who stuck beside him. He wasn’t sure if it was his commission check that kept her in his life, or some stubborn desire to needle him to life. He suspected the later. Money had never been Didi’s raison d’être.
“It would break my heart if you chose to brush me away now.”
“You don’t have a heart,” he reminded her.
“True. But if I had a heart, it would break.”
Aaron pushed at the chicken on his plate, seeing too much resemblance in himself and not proud of it. “As long as we don’t eat here again,” he told her, then swallowed a bite, doubts lodging in his throat like a bone. This was going to be a disaster and Didi’s victorious smile didn’t help.
Airily she waved her knife with as much skill as flair. “Of course, darling. Whatever you want.”
2
“A QUIET TUESDAY NIGHT in Harmony Springs. Day One in this reporter’s quest to find something interesting in this picturesque town where absolutely nothing ever happens. Did Quinn need to send me on this assignment? Do I have sucker stamped on my head? Do I need to keep asking these stupid rhetorical questions?”
Jenn clicked off the phone’s voice recorder, and leaned back on the hard surface of the giant boulder. Above her was the night-dark sky. And stars. She’d heard the rumors of their existence. She’d seen pictures in books, but as a lifelong resident of New York, she’d never observed them in their natural habitat.
Out here in the solitary woods, there were other creatures in their natural habitat. She could hear them scuttling and slithering, and she told herself not to panic. Cute, furry things scuttled. Mouselike things. Mickey. Minnie. Mighty.
And then of course, there were the not-so-nice ones with devil-red eyes that glowed like the fires of hell. With large teeth that could chew on human flesh … and she could almost feel something crawling on her.
Instantly she brushed at her jeans and came away with nothing but embarrassment. Sometimes an overactive imagination was a plus, and sometimes, like now, it was a definite problem. Taking a deep, focusing breath, she stood up, and held her phone to the moon like Excalibur.
Two bars. Almost enough to make a connection.
Standing on tiptoe, she reached for the stars.
At the sight of three magical bars, she squealed with delight, nearly dislodging her feet from terra firma.
Still, the near-death experience was worth it.
Her phone’s display finally lit up, showing a map of the constellations above her head. Virgo and Centaurus. These were the twinkling constellations that were normally obliterated by the bright lights of the city. They seemed so low, so deceptively close, as if you could throw out your arms and touch them. It seemed that stars, much like New York politicians, were born to deceive.
She repeated the line in her head, liked it, and recorded it, a mental reminder of her literary prowess. And they thought journalists couldn’t write.
Below her notes, the day’s headlines crawled across the screen. All the things that happened in New York without her. A humbling experience, which proved that yes, the world did not revolve around Jenn.
But, her reporter’s brain argued, wasn’t that the whole point of being out here, at one with nature? It was a giant screw you to the concept of being at the center of everything. To say that you don’t
