Page 6 of Going Viral for Christmas
The next wide-eyed person in line steps up immediately, radiating with a mix of desire and hero worship that once fed my ego. Not anymore. Not for a long time.
Please don’t mistake me. I love my readers. Christ, I do. They’ve changed my life in ways I’ll never be able to repay. They’ve funded my ridiculously overpriced sword collection, my downtown loft in Seattle with floor-to-ceiling windows, and so much more.
But this version of me—the carefully crafted book boyfriend persona that ShelfSpace devours? Well, he’s slowly suffocating the man underneath.
I’m caged by my own charisma, forced to perform the same seductive dance until my soul feels scraped bare.
The Blade.
Fuck, I hate that name. It tastes like copper and lies every time anyone says it.
I finish another signature, the pen sliding smoothly across the paper, and force out another laugh that grates against my throat.
As if drawn by some cosmic pull, my focus veers left—straight to where Ava Bell is standing. Little does she know, she’s my lighthouse in this bookish storm, surging inside this ballroom.
Somewhere between the cheers, the selfies, and the hundredth book shoved under my nose, my mind drifts toward the woman who’s labeled as the thorn in my side.
Ava’s polite smiles never quite touch her eyes. The little waves she gives look genuine enough, but there’s tension simmering beneaththem. She plays her part, posing when readers ask, but it’s her hands that betray her—nails chewed down to the quick. She’s holding herself together, bite by bite.
Every so often, she glances at me. Quick. Curious. Checking to see if I’m still here. Each time she does, hope burrows under my ribs and yanks. I feel it everywhere. Gravity. Hunger. Want. Desire.
Dread.
Ava’s fan line has dwindled to almost nothing. Not because she isn’t magnetic—she is. That woman is whip-smart, sharp-tongued, and funny as hell.Shedeserves a line out the damn door.
The second I walked in, the energy changed. Heads turned. Lines shifted. Phones came up. My name trended. I didn’t plan it, didn’t want it—but, I stole the room just by existing in it.
That reality nags at me. Gnaws, if I’m being honest. The worst part is, every smile aimed at me feels like I’m robbing her blind. I hate that because I like her. A lot. Even though I don’t even know her. Even though she hates me.
I’m not wired for empathy; it was never standard issue. Charm, sure. Graciousness on cue. Genuine concern, however? Rare.
Yet watching Ava fight to stay composed stirs something unfamiliar inside me. It reminds me that beneath the sharp edges and the sparring, a real magnetic pull has always been there, dragging us closer.
We started as a feud.
Ava showed up on myGot Youpage in a video that disemboweled my entire genre with pinpoint accuracy, triggering a fan war that crashed the app’s servers for two days.
I retaliated with candlelight melodrama and a poetry-slam wig. She countered with a stitch that said my heroes had the emotional depth of a puddle.
In the span of one week, that tiny, five-foot-nothing female managed to pick apart three years of carefully crafted brand identity.
I decided to go full scorched earth.
Reading the steamiest scenes from her book,The Lumberjack’s Love Letters,I wore a flannel button-down, no shirt underneath, boots, and sawdust in my hair—because if I was going down, I was taking her libido with me.
At the time, it felt deserving.
Ava didn’t even wait a full day. She posted a video captioned,Two can play the forestry fantasy game.
The clip opened with her in a cute, checkered dress, featuring delicate straps and a daring neckline that tested my self-control.
In the video, Ava’s voice dropped into a mock-serious narrator cadence as she started reading one of my most tortured passages.
“I want to touch her,” Ava read, tone perfectly flat, expression bored. “But I shouldn’t.” She glanced up at the camera. “Touch her, you jackass. She wants you to. Wealldo.”
She flipped a page. With the same disinterested, almost teacherly delivery, Ava read one of the steamiest scenes I’ve ever written—every filthy, fevered word—like she was dictating a grocery list.
The effect was devastatingly funny. My passionate prose had never sounded more virginal. Ava wasn’t just roasting me; she was dismantling my ego with a witty scalpel. I watched it on loop, hand in my hair, half mortified, half turned on.
