Page 18 of Here for a Good Time
With a snort, I burst out laughing. Which makes Zwe laugh, and we’re both shaking our heads at the absurdity of this situation. “Damn right we won’t. At least, not until after you buy me dinner,” I say.
“You know what I mean,” he groans, covering his face with one hand, and it’s so cute I want to go over and give him a hug. “Why are we being like this?”
“It’s the air.” I wrinkle my nose. “I’m telling you, all this nature isn’t good for the human body. Makes our brains do weird things like… turn sharing a bed with your best friend into this awkward situation.”
“Even though it’s not,” Zwe says. “Awkward, I mean. You take your side of the bed—” He gestures at the left side, and I don’t linger too long on why the knowledge that he still knows which side of the bed I prefer pricks at a tender spot in my heart. “And I’ll take the right side.”
“There we go!” I say. And as though to prove it, I jump off of the couch, march over to the left side of the bed, sit down on top of the duvet, and pat the spot beside me for him to join. Here we are, just two friends sitting on the same bed, looking out of a set of glass doors at the Indian Ocean in the distance. “It’s so beautiful here,” I murmur, my body relaxing as I focus on the roar of the waves hitting the cliffs, which is audible even with the doors closed. Ariel had always been my favorite Disney princess, and when I was a kid, I’d beg my parents to move to the beach so I could try to befriend a mermaid.
“It is,” Zwe says. I swear I feel his gaze on me, and it takes everything in me to not turn in his direction and check.
After prepping for bed, we get under the covers with our books,settling in as we angle the pages under our individual overhead reading lights. At one point, I stretch out my legs and my left foot presses into Zwe’s calf.
“Sorry,” I mutter, retracting my foot across our invisible dividing line.
“It’s fine,” he says with a low chuckle. Without warning, his foot glides over and grazes mine, the sudden, intimate contact tripping up my neurons.
It lasts for only a second, so short that I can’t decide if it’s weirder to comment on it or to not. When I chance a glance at Zwe, he’s still fully focused on his book, nothing new on his face. He must’ve just been stretching, too.
Zwe turns in first. An unintentional smile comes to my lips when he starts lightly snoring. Even with the space between us, I can feel his body heat emanating from him under the sheets and tempering the cool of the air conditioner outside them; then again, that’s Zwe for you—radiating warmth even when he doesn’t mean to. For all of my talk about us becoming adults who do adult things, in this moment, I’m a kid again, buzzing at getting to have a sleepover with my best friend and already looking forward to the morning.
I read a couple more chapters, and, not feeling drowsy in the slightest, I carefully slip out of bed. There are few things I love more than writing late at night; it feels like I don’t have to worry if I write the worst one thousand words anyone has ever written since the dawn of time, because every single person in the world is asleep and so who will read any of it anyway?
Taking my laptop out onto the deck, I open a new blank document, trying to embrace rather than be scared off by the extreme whiteness of the page.
I tell myself that we’re starting over, that the dozen or so failed firstdrafts sitting in the virtual trash bin don’t exist. Here, we’re writing a new story. Agoodstory. A new, good story with abigidea, like… time travel. Okay, I can work with that. Time travel. That’s a big idea.
Beside my laptop, my phone lights up with a text from Soraya.
How’s the trip so far? Have you had hot hammock sex yet?
It makes me laugh out loud, and I promise myself to reply to her once I’m done writing for the night, or at least definitely in the morning.
I write for half an hour—a completely new story, one about a young woman who accidentally trips into a time-traveling manhole that takes her into the future for twenty-four hours. Unhappy with how her life turns out, she becomes obsessed with making changes in the present day followed by a trip to the manhole to see how it’s affected her own future.
It’s a story with potential. I can already foresee some plot holes off the bat, but that’s what editing is for. On the whole, though, it’s the kind of book that, if someone pitched me the premise, I’d add to my To Be Read pile.
But it’s not… fun. Writing it isn’t fun. Frankly, writing it feels like work. But then again, that’s what this is now. Guilt spirals through me as I realize that, lo and behold, I’m again complaining about having the exact job that I’ve wanted my whole life, that I’m complaining about having towrite.This is normal, though. Every professional writer has had days where stringing together three coherent sentences has felt like pulling teeth; I just have to remember that it won’t be this way forever.
Like the boogeyman jumping out from around the corner,Vik’s face pops up in my head. It wasn’t that he was ever mean about me wanting to be a writer, or even that he didn’t believe I could do it. I’d been used to people doubting that I’d become a published author, but that wasn’t the case with Vik. He always thought I was a good writer, but that was also what made it a new, particular kind of heartbreak, a pointed cruelty: he thought I was good, just not goodenough. Of course I’d sell a couple of books and they would do okay—but that’s all they would be. Okay. I would make an “okay” amount of money, but not enough for me to do this and just this alone. I would have an “okay” readership size, but not actual fans who would be actively wanting my next book. Okay, good even, but notgreat. And with every day that passes where I can’t write this second book, the notion that maybe he was right becomes just that little more plausible.
I’ll revisit this tomorrow,I think, shutting my laptop.
I lean back in the chair and stare out once more at the waves beating toward and away from the shore. Two weeks here. If this doesn’t inspire me to write another bestselling book, nothing will.
FIVE
“What the fuck is that?” I moan.
“It’s the alarm that I’d be able to turn off if I wasn’t in your death grip,” replies Zwe’s voice from somewhere above me.
My ramble comes out muffled, but I’m too sleepy to lift my head. “What death grip? What are you talking about?” The high-pitched ringing sound vibrates through every fold of my brain. I push my face deeper into the soft pillow in an attempt to drown it out, and kick my feet under the covers like a petulant toddler being woken up for school. “Make it stop! Why must you torture me so? Just use Siri to turn it off!”
“Oh, right,” Zwe mumbles. As he shouts over at his phone to turn off the alarm, I blink awake through the slight sheen of sleep and eye crust. The right corner of my mouth is dry, which means I must’ve been drooling in my sleep. Instead of the view of the sofa that I’d fallen asleep to, however, I come face-to-face with soft white fabric that feels warm and smells so… familiar. I inch back, tilt my gaze up—and see Zwe’s chin.
“Oh my god!” I yell when I’m finally able to take stock of the whole scene. I’d moved around in my sleep into a position where I have my face pressed into Zwe’s chest, one bent leg thrown over both of his (which, given the length of my legs, has resulted in my foot just dangling in the air) and the other foot resting onhisother foot so that he’s essentially sandwiched from the waist down. From the neck up, I have him in a half headlock, one of my hands having somehow slipped under his neck and the other linked around both of his forearms. When I scramble to sit up and scoot several feet away, there is a giant mortifying drool spot on the front of his shirt where my mouth had been resting.
Zwe laughs at my horrified expression. “You’ve thrown up on my shoes before. I can handle a bit of drool. By the way—” His face shifts to teasing, and I brace myself for the situation to get even more horrifying. “Were you having…intimatedreams, by any chance?”
