Page 112 of Trust Again

A bright flash made me flinch. Turning around, I spied Sawyer a few feet away, holding her heavy SLR camera in front of her face.

I rolled my eyes. “You were invited to be a part of the party, not to photograph it, Sawyer.”

My roommate sauntered over and stood next to Isaac. “Scoot over, nerd.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow.

She fluttered her eyelashes and granted him one of her rare smiles. “Please.”

Red-cheeked, Isaac gave in and slid closer to Allie on the bench.

“Oh, shit,” Kaden said, peering at something over my shoulder and frowning. “He’s finally lost it.”

“Sweetie!”

With a start, I looked toward the source of Spencer’s voice. My boyfriend really had gone crazy. And I loved him for it.

He was invisible. Or rather, he was hidden behind a huge bouquet of helium balloons. Too many to count. There were letters on some of them, which were supposed to spell out my name. And the others spelled out congratulations.

“Fuck, don’t tell me you’re pregnant,” Sawyer groaned.

I rolled my eyes: “For heaven’s sake, no!”

Spencer came over with Monica and Ethan in tow and had to extricate himself from the balloons before he could bend over and kiss me. I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and pulled him closer. The knowledge that he really was mine was still overwhelming, and I took every chance I got to show him how deeply in love I was.

“Are those for me?” I asked breathlessly.

“I figured if we’re celebrating, we might as well do it right. So we needed balloons.” He winked and sat down next to me.

Ethan pulled Monica onto his lap at the end of the table. “So, when are we going to find out what we’re celebrating?”

“Go ahead, Sweetie. Tell them,” Spencer urged.

I cleared my throat and looked at my friends. Isaac took a key and rapped it lightly against Allie’s glass, as if announcing a toast.

“I don’t have a prepared speech or anything,” I said, lifting my hands up. My cheeks were getting warmer by the second. “You all know that I’ve been publishing stories under a pseudonym over the past year.”

Everyone murmured. By now, they all knew about my side job.

“Over the last few months, I’ve been working on my first novel. Sawyer can confirm that I’ve been writing like a banshee, day and night,” I said with a nod to my roommate.

“Banshee is a pretty good description. She sat on her bed, unshowered, with bags under her eyes, looking like a lunatic. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she looked like she was about to come.”

Isaac turned scarlet, picked up Allie’s glass without realizing it, and took a big gulp.

“Thanks, Sawyer, for the unnecessarily accurate description of my state,” I replied. “At any rate I’ve been working pretty intensely with my test reader on this novel,” I said, nodding at Spencer; he took a little bow. “Everly’s and my professor, Nolan, also read it and gave me feedback on the plot.”

“You mean that Thor guy?” Monica asked, looking back and forth between Allie and me.

We nodded, and she sighed, enraptured.

“Nolan thinks I could find a publisher for this novel. So…” I looked beseechingly at Everly.

She leaned forward and rested her arms on the table. “My mom works for a nonfiction publisher. But she used to work for a fiction publisher and still keeps in touch with her old colleagues. So she connected Dawn with one of her contacts there.”

The others looked back at me. I bit my lower lip. Spencer bumped his shoulder gently against mine, a cue for me to spill the beans.

“My debut novel,About Us, is coming out next year, from Triangle Publishing. With my real name,” I announced, and pressed the backs of my hands on my cheeks.