Page 5 of A Novel Summer
He smiled. “Apologies. Can I buy you a drink?”
“No,” she said.
She waved at the bartender, who slid another tequila shot across the bar. The guy moved down two stools to sit beside her.
“So, are you Shelby’s publicist or something?” she said.
He shook his head, and a lock of his dark hair fell across his forehead.
“No. I work with her literary agent,” he said.
“In New York,” Hunter said. He nodded.
Hunter hadn’t taken the logical next step in her career, which would be looking for a job in Manhattan, where nearly every major publishing company had an office. The thought of New York City intimidated her. She was a tenth-generation Bostonian, and her hometown gave her a sense of security and confidence she just didn’t feel anywhere else.
So, she’d spend the summer at her parents’ beach house while they opted for two months on the Amalfi Coast. She just needed time to regroup. In the meantime, her own professional setback made Shelby’s success even more infuriating.
The flip in the power dynamic of their friendship was a twist Hunter hadn’t seen coming. When they met freshman year, Hunter had been the golden girl. She was the Bryn Mawr legacy, her great-great-grandmother’s name on more than one building. Shelby had been a wide-eyed farm girl from Virginia—or wherever her family was living at the time; Shelby wasn’t from any one place. Hunter had believed, at first, that it sounded exciting to have moved every few years growing up. Then Shelby told her how lonely it had been. Hunter had taken her under her wing, introducing her to all the right people for the rest of the year. Every summer, she brought Shelby to live at her parents’ Provincetown beach house. And how did Shelby repay her?
“So, do you know Shelby?” he said. “That question...”
She narrowed her eyes. “Did you read the book?”
“Sure,” he said. “I read all the books by Claudia’s authors. It’s my job.”
“As a feminist, I find her characters offensive.”
“I think the characters are all interesting women,” Ezra said. “They have their issues, but that’s what makes the book compelling. It’s the way they workthroughthe issues.”
Hunter found his cavalier take infuriating. “Don’t you think the first few chapters of the book are essentially slut-shaming Ashley?”
His brow furrowed. “I didn’t read it that way, no.”
“Okay, let me put it this way: If the character of Ashley was based on your sister, and you knew it was based on your sister, and you read the book...”
“I don’t have a sister,” he said, tilting his head back to finish his beer. He had an elegant neck, and artistic hands. Like a pianist.
Hunter put down her beer bottle. “Do you want to come back to my place?”
He looked at her, assessing if she was serious or playing around. After a minute, he said, “Only if you let me take you for dinner first. I’m starving.”
She shrugged. “Fine. Just as long as we’re clear—this isn’t a date.”
He laughed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means,” she said, leaving a bunch of twenties on the bar. “I don’t do relationships.”
He stood up and held out his hand. “I’m only in town for tonight.”
“Thatis one of my favorite sentences.” Hunter slid off the bar stool and pressed against him, Shelby’s stupid book forgotten. She wouldn’t think about it for the rest of the summer.
She was finished with Shelby Archer.
Five
Colleen made dinner reservations for the two of them. But after the blowup with Hunter, Shelby just wanted to check in to the B and B and hide.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Colleen. “You’re welcome to come over. I just don’t want to be out.” She felt raw. Wounded. And also well aware that she had absolutely no right to feel that way. She wasn’t the victim. She was the one who’d hurt someone.
