Page 79 of Unromance

She shoved down the vehement refusal that was a knee-jerk reaction at this point. It wasn’t Beau’s fault that Hollywood believed the only way to be happily ever after was for every aspect of your life to magically work out in the end, that the “small tweak” they’d made to the ending of her book was the vulnerable fragment of herself she’d given to her character, and that character now had closure, where Sawyer would always have an open wound. It was bullshit. Wounded characters deserved happily ever afters, too.

Once she was certain she wouldn’t unjustly bite Beau’s head off for his innocent question, she shook her head. But she didn’t look at Beau as she answered, opting instead to study Mason, to riddle out his sudden shift. “No. Not afterAlmost Lovers.”

“You don’t know it would be the same—”

“It’s her choice, Lily,” Beau reminded his wife gently as Sawyer glared down at her potatoes.

She loved Lily, truly, but she was supportive to a fault. The world’s best cheerleader when you needed one, and sometimes even when you didn’t want one. Like now.

“Anyone need another drink?” Beau said brightly, already pushing back from the table.

The conversation moved on, but Sawyer couldn’t stop analyzing the way Mason had clammed up. In all their chats about her film rights, he’d never given his opinion, but of course he had one, given his future job. If his reaction today said anything, they were on very different pages. No matter. It wasn’t an argument worth having, especially not in the middle of brunch. Chancing a glance at him out of the corner of her eye, she was relieved to see the PR Face was gone, he and Lily arguing amicably over the best types of potatoes.

Sawyer took a deep breath, pushing down the well of panic at Lily’s near suffocating joy for her, the inevitable disappointment her friend would feel when Mason moved to LA and this thing between them had to come to an end. She shoved it all down. One thing at a time. First, get through this brunch. Fall apart later. She could feel it coming like a storm, like someone had turned up the speed of the music, forcing her to dance along faster, like she’d been thrown seventeen new balls to juggle, faster, faster, don’t drop them or they’ll shatter, faster, faster.

“French fries,” she blurted out, her voice a little too loud, needing to drown out the flurry inside her head. “French fries are the best form of potato, hands down.”

“Agreed, but which type?” Mason countered.

“Skinny.”

The table erupted with cries of outrage (“Jojo!” “Waffle!” “Curly!”), and the remainder of brunch devolved into a battle for potato supremacy. At some point, Beau produced a piece of paper and made a bracket, and they made a pact to meet up every twoweeks, a style of potato advancing each week until only the Chosen Spud remained.

Sawyer had so much fun brainstorming types of potatoes and which restaurants made them best that she almost forgot the way her legs were beginning to quake under the weight of keeping it all spinning. Almost didn’t notice that the bracket would take six months to finish, long after Mason was gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE L-WORD– Once it’s been said, it can’t be unsaid. Better hope it was said at the right time, and not, say, in the middle of an argument. That would be tragic.

The two weeks after New Year’s passed in a blur. Sawyer’s editor had accepted her book proposal, and Sawyer was glued to her laptop, unable to shake the fear that if she slowed down or took a day off, the creative well would get up and walk out.

Her protagonists had fallen back in love and everything was going well for them, but the journey wasn’t over yet. Sawyer could feel her fingers typing slower by the day, wanting to live in this moment of bliss with them forever. She didn’t want to write the big finale fight. She knew if she could get past it, they’d be happy, but the fight she had planned for them was going to hurt, and right now, Sawyer didn’t want to hurt, because she was happy—mostly.

Ever since brunch at Lily’s, she’d done her best to squash the anxiety that at any moment, the other shoe was going to drop. They’d gone out with Lily and Beau a few times. First, to kick off their potato bracket—Tater Tots had beaten hash browns, much to Beau’s dismay—and again last weekend, putting Lily and Beau’s endless energy to use at the Álvarez family tamale party. Sawyer’s tiny freezer was now positively packed with tamales and menudo.Things were going well, but when things got quiet, Sawyer couldn’t keep the doubt from creeping in.

Mason was gearing up forDiagnosticsto resume shooting, and was spending an exorbitant amount of time at the gym with Luis to “erase the sins of Christmas past.” When he wasn’t doing that, he was in meeting after meeting with Alissa discussing Guiding Light. The announcement that Mason was joining the production company had created a lot of buzz, due in part to the simultaneous announcement that he was leavingDiagnostics. Thankfully, the press seemed to have come around to Team Mason, no doubt in the hopes that they’d be the ones to get the scoop on Guiding Light’s first project.

Mason was even keeping tight-lipped about their first project with Sawyer, only teasing her with the hint that they might be switching the lineup, if Alissa got her way—which, according to Mason, she usually did.

Their schedules had become increasingly difficult to align, but Mason never complained. Not even when she’d paused on her way out the door to go see him to jot down a plot point and ended up skipping their date to write late into the night. She’d made it up to him with phone sex later, both of them too tired to travel half an hour across town to the other’s apartment. At least, she told herself it was just exhaustion in his voice, and not that he was growing to resent her unpredictable writing bouts. Mason wasn’t Sadie, and shewastrying, but it didn’t negate the fact that she needed to finish this book, needed to get paid, needed to get her life back in the black for the first time in years. She was juggling more than she had in years, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was only a matter of time before she dropped something.

She hadn’t seen him in three days—which was nothing, really,and she felt ridiculous griping about it, even inside her own head. It would be nothing—if she had been busy. After that late-night writing sprint, she’d hit a wall. With her deadline fast approaching, she couldn’t afford to be stuck, and she’d been stuck for two days.

She wasted an hour whining about writer’s block to her writer friends, but when she reopened her manuscript, it had the audacity to have not written itself while she was on social media. She spent the next hour alternating between staring at the blinking cursor and writing nothing—or writing something and immediately deleting it. Accepting that today would be another wash, she caved and called Mason. If her creative well was empty, she had to refill it.

“Hello, muse,” she purred.

He laughed. “I don’t think I’ve ever been a muse before. I’m honored.”

“Get me out of my apartment, please. I don’t care where, or what, I just don’t want to decide.”

Mason hummed thoughtfully, the line going quiet as he typed something into his phone. “Okay. I just got back from the gym, so I need to shower first. Meet me at Michigan and Illinois?”

Resisting the urge to ask him what they were doing, she agreed and was on the train in a flash. Mason had the day off today, but he hadn’t pressured her to make plans with him, knowing she would reach out once she hit her word count for the day. Maybe this thing with Mason could work after all.

Her optimism was quickly dampened when she stepped off the train and into a puddle, snow sludge and wet garbage soaking through her left boot and sock. Swearing, she tugged her phone from her pocket as she felt it buzz.

“Tess!” she answered in surprise. What day was it? Did she have a call scheduled with her and forget?

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