Page 3 of Rivals to Lovers
“Wesley. Hi.”
He didn’t know if it was him conjuring her, but the voice rang familiar from those intern days at Eikura, Schier & Gurnett. He shivered. “Yuri?”
“Yes, hi, new number. Glad you picked up.” She said it in a rush—busy woman, things to do—but had she feared he wouldn’t pick up? Because really, if he’d known it was Yuri Eikura, he wouldn’t have. He would have let it go to voicemail, and if the first words out of her mouth weren’tI’m sorry for how things ended, he would have deleted that voicemail. But here he was, on a phone call with the woman who had fired him and generally made his life harder by doing so.
“I’m going to hang up now,” he said, though he didn’t know if he had the nerve. Even though she couldn’t—shouldn’t—be able to overturn his career at this point after signing the NDA. Still, it was nerve-racking to know she remembered he was out there.
Yuri seemed to be waiting to see if Wes followed through on his threat, and when he didn’t, she said, “Okay, so I know you represent the Morgan estate.”
“I do.” It had been pure luck that he got the position, but he was grateful for it now more than ever.
“I have a client who wants to adapt P&L.”
“Profit and loss?” he asked. His heart skipped a beat, then two.
“Ha ha,” she said, not actually laughing at his not actual joke. “She’s finished this incredible adaptation ofThe Proud and the Lost, and we’d like to pitch it to the estate. Truly, Wes, it’s one of the best manuscripts I’ve read in years. I think it would make us all a lot of money.”
He could not be hearing what he was hearing, because he also had been writing an adaptation ofThe Proud and the Lost. It was almost finished. It was almost perfect, in fact. “You actually read it?”
“Of course I actually read it. Mo Denton is my client, after all.”
Mo Denton. Mo— “Oh, Maureen Denton?” Wesley coughed, the name ringing a bell. It was worse than that—Wes had put a Google alert on that name. Looked like he needed to change, or add to, that Google alert to includeMoalongsideMaureen. It wasn’t a stalking kind of thing; he did this for all his clients, and even though Maureenwasn’this client, he had a certain stake in her career. When he worked at Yuri’s agency,he’d been assigned to read slush. If he ever thought he got too many queries a week now, that was dwarfed by Yuri’s daily intake. She typically had two interns at any given time reading queries and skimming the first few pages. If anything caught their attention, the interns would forward it to Yuri. It had been a grueling job, and at the beginning, Wes had passed along the first thing that really caught his eye, only to have Yuri leave her desk, walk to the pod he shared with the other intern, and read a sliver of the paragraph in an ironic voice. “This is a total,totalrip-off of Franzen. Do you read?” she had asked.
“I readthat.”
“Read more. Read better. And don’t send me this.” And she’d turned and left.
It had been a full week before Wes found anything else promising, and then he only forwarded it to her with a demure “Good premise.” He hadn’t gotten scolded for that one. He sent a few more—but nothing stopped Wes’s heart like Maureen Denton’s query and first pages had. Vulnerable—that was the only word for it. The yolk of the words was smeared all over the manuscript, raw and sweet and bright. When Yuri ended up signing her as a client, Wes felt victorious, and not only because he had found a client in the slush pile before his fellow intern. Mainly, he felt Maureen’s book was something beautiful that would touch people someday.
And then Wes left—was fired—before he found out how that story ended. And so, the Google alert, one that hadn’t ever pinged his inbox with a deal announcement from Publishers Marketplace or a prepublication interview withThe New Yorker.Nothing. He had honestly forgotten about that alert, but like a seventeen-year cicada, it wouldn’t be forgotten now. Here was the fruit of that interest.
Wes’s stomach twisted. He remembered howgoodMaureen’s—Mo’s—first project had been. Quiet, maybe, but the prose was lush. He tried not to be curious what she could do with the themes and characters ofThe Proud and the Lost, especially since he had written his own book reworking those characters and themes. Maybe hers would be horrible. Maybe he didn’t have anything to worry about. There is nothing vainer than hope. There is nothing more hopeful than vanity.
Wes had been silent for at least thirty seconds, practically ten years in phone time. Maybe Yuri thought he’d grown the balls to hang up on her. More likely she thought he couldn’t string a sentence together.
Accurate.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Wes finally said. “The Morgan estate has been extremely litigious in pursuing cases which even suggest a connection toP&L.”
“I’ll be honest, Wes. If this manuscript wasn’t good, I wouldn’t have made the phone call. I know the right way to do this, and I’d like to go through you rather than finding work-arounds.”
“Is that a threat?”
Yuri gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Oh, Wes,” she said.
“Oh, Yuri,” Wes said, as if he hadn’t called her Ms. Eikura every single day of his internship. The familiarity that came with using her first name should make him feel like they were equals, but it did not. He could see Yuri going to his boss, or writing to Estelle directly, and he did not like that idea. Estelle read her mail, every piece of it. Every piece of fan mail that came in through the years passed through her careful fingers. She even wrote back.
Maureen had written a new novel. Maureen’s novel was an adaptation ofP&L. And he didn’t want to talk to Estelle about it. “I’ll try to bring it up with her, but no promises.”
“You’d get a cut, you know. Just keep that in mind.”
He wouldn’t get a cut, though. He didn’t want a cut from someone else’s book. The first step of showing his book to Estelle was resigning from his place representing the trust, but he’d been putting that off until his book was absolutely perfect. Mostly perfect might have to do. Wes hung up and stared at his half-written letter, knowing that instead of introducing the one book, the book of his heart, he might have to introduce two.
He could pour a glass of whiskey,àla Hemingway, and write a missive full of braggadocio, but if he was already thinking in ten-cent words, alcohol wouldn’t help. Estelle Morgan-Perry was a plainspoken woman in every interaction Wes had with her. He’d also changed his mind, knowing that a letter was the surest way to reach her. Email was faster but less likely to be opened. For this, Wes would break out the seventh-grade calligraphy-camp skills. It was time to tell her about his adaptation.
Two weeks later, he was in Greenwich with an iPad full of cookbooks.
On Wes’s manuscript wish list, he called for “Literary and upmarket fiction, fantasy with a twist, nonfiction books about lesser-known events, and cookbooks,” which made for a wonderful collection of persistently excellent prose, dragons, long-form-podcast-worthy histories he knew nothing about, and cookbooks. Wes did cook, but it was lonely cooking for one.Often, he took the best bets to his mother’s house to try out some of the most appealing recipes.
