Page 55 of A Storybook Wedding

“I hear you on that.”

“Anyway, then I got married to a super famous novelist, and now I can’t date anymore.”

“Unless he takes you out.”

“I suppose that’s true.” She smiles. “Where do you think he would take me?”

I don’t know what comes over me. It could be her angle, how she’s sprawled across our bed, or the look on her face of teasing innocence. She’s so beautiful, I can’t look away. But I’m fixated on her face. So I just stare.

And she stares right back at me.

Her throat bobs up and down as she swallows.

My groin stirs, as if it’s waking up from a long, wintry hibernation.

“I think,” I say, pausing, “that he would take you anywhere your heart desired.”

“Huh,” she mumbles, blinking those brown eyes behind her blue glasses.

The silence between us falls heavy and hard, and I begin to understand that maybe the real reason I didn’t see CJ over the past month was because I was afraid of what I would want to do to her if I saw her. Realizations crash down around me, but neither she nor I move a muscle.

I want this girl.

I want to do unfathomable things to her.

I think, based on the way she’s staring back at me, that she might want me to do unfathomable things to her.

I don’t know what to do with this revelation, so I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I close the door behind me and go to use the toilet, taking a few deep breaths to encourage my sudden erection to calm the fuck down. I flush, wash my hands, splash some cold water on my face, and when I emerge from the bathroom, CJ’s over by her backpack, extracting her laptop from it and plugging it into the socket near the desk.

“I’m going to work on my query letters,” she says. “Since we still have about an hour until lunch.”

“Okay,” I say. “I guess I’ll write.”

“You want the desk?”

“No, it’s fine. You can take it.”

“Thanks,” she says.

When she sits down, she’s facing away from me. I take out my laptop and set it on my lap in the bed, but looking at her sitting there, I am able to write exactly zero words. Instead, I watch her tap the back of her pen against her lips while she’s thinking, crack her knuckles before she types, and flip through that Jeff Herman book studiously.

I don’t know how I’m going to be able to handle this for eight days.

CHAPTER 9

Cecily

That night, after Dillon Norway’s opening reading, Nate and I head back to our room. I want to make sure I get a good night’s sleep before Alice Devereaux’s workshop tomorrow morning, and we got up and out so early today, I can only imagine that he’s exhausted too. So we skip the first-night open mic and tell folks we just need to turn in.

He’s being weird. Or maybe it’s me. But earlier, we had a thing. At least I think we did. It was like a staring contest, only every fiber of my being wished he was naked. But then, just as quickly as it started, it was over, leaving me to wonder if I dreamed up the whole thing.

The rest of the day was okay. Okay, maybe a little bit weird. The three youngish girls from last semester (Ashlyn, Kelsey, and Trix) were definitely whispering about me and Nate during dinner, but this time it felt less like they were making fun of me and more like they might be a little jealous—so that was kind of nice. There were other moments too—raised eyebrows and sideways glances at us that came from teachers and students alike. Gurt said hello to me, and I nearly fell over; she must have finally gotten her single because I’d never seen the woman smile before. Trite Tim and Harry Potter both acknowledged me, and Maleficent even sat at our dinner table with us and asked me how my novel was coming. I’m not sure if everyone was just wondering what Nate was thinking for slumming it with the likes of me or if they were giving me credit for leveling up and hitching my wagon to a literal star.

Truth is I didn’t care either way. I was just happy to have someone to sit next to in the dining hall who didn’t completely ignore me.

It wasn’t like we were with each other all the time, of course. He skipped out on Alice Devereaux’s afternoon seminar about flashbacks (and I’m not going to lie, I felt her throwing shade at me, although I couldn’t tell you why, given that I didn’t say a single word throughout the whole thing). He said he needed the time for writing and to prep some stuff for his workshop the next day. And before dinner, there was another hour of downtime, so I holed myself up in a meeting room downstairs in the main house and worked on my query letters some more.

My plan for querying was simple. I created a spreadsheet to track my submissions, and I decided I would schedule them all to send out at midnight on New Year’s Day. I would label the subject line Your First Query of the New Year! and this clever approach would pique the interest of the twenty-five agents I selected for my first round when they got back to their offices on January 2. Nate told me this was not necessary, that it was too gimmicky and that I should just let the work speak for itself, but we compromised because he wouldn’t let me keep my query letter in its original format, which I thought was charming and he said was cute at best, unprofessional at worst.

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