Page 17 of Written By a Woman

I huffed a laugh at the video, something my sisters gave me curious looks over as I realized that the scene looked familiar.

I was on my way to the break room when I heard Signe’s voice echoing in the empty building. I had paused before I entered the break room because I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t interrupting a private conversation before I refilled my coffee mug for the last time that day. After a few seconds of eavesdropping, I realized that Signe wasn’t on a call with anyone, but instead, she was doing what must have been a livestream on the internet.

I didn’t spend a lot of time on social media. I scrolled threads occasionally when I was curious about the topics that piqued my interest, but my own accounts were private and didn’t have more than family members following me.

Filming or taking pictures of personal content at Sun Steer went against company policy, and while Signe didn’t sound like she was posting anything problematic about the company, I still took the opportunity to mess with her by walking into the break room in the middle of her video.

I wondered if she would tell me what she was up to, but it looked like she ended the stream immediately after I had walked in. After playing a one-sided game of chicken with her, I decided to do my job and remind her of the company policy regarding social media.

I hadn’t ever seen Signe stammer or struggle with words before, and I relished the feeling of seeing her tongue-tied in front of me, while also wanting to ease her concerns so she was back to her friendly, bubbly self.

It was immature of me to mess with her like that, but I’d had a long day, and it was entertaining. So no, I wasn’t too surprised to see screenshots of myself waltzing through her video looking clueless. Technically, that was by design.

What I was surprised to see, however, were the comments that were left on the video and screenshots of the stream. The fact that this many people took screenshots and screen recordings of the stream wouldn’t cross my mind until later. At the moment, I was just struggling to put pieces of a puzzle together.

WHO THE FUCK IS THAT?????!!!

Is that THE ZAYNE I SAW?!

Omg he’s so hot.

Doth my eyes deceive me, or did Zayne just casually walk through her stream?

SIGNE IS THAT ZAYNE!!!!!

Zayne is real?!

I’d let that man step on me and thank him for it.

“I…” I blinked a couple of times before adjusting my glasses and focusing back on the screen, “What is happening?”

“Signe wrote a novel about you,” Raina explained, keeping her voice low so our family inside the house wouldn’t hear, “Aromancenovel.”

A blush immediately burned my face, my skin suddenly felt too tight and too hot. I lifted my free hand to cover my mouth in an attempt to look like I was mindlessly rubbing my jaw, but mostly because I didn’t want my sisters to see the heat darkening the color of my cheeks and ears.

“Oh…” I couldn’t gather any other words than that.

“Oh,is right,” Raina kept showing me more pictures, comments, and tags, but everything was starting to blur while my mind spun.

“I was following this story so religiously,” Salma whined, “When I heard that she got picked up by an agent, I screamed. You can ask Ben.”

“Agent?” I asked. I don’t know why that word stuck out to me the most, but it did.

“Yeah, for her books,” Raina explained, “Sig-yuh is a romance author. She just recently got picked up by an agent and she’s going to try to publish her story.”

“And she will,” Salma nodded, “I do not doubt it. The fact that she has this many followers from this one storyline of hers is telling.”

I felt the pinch in my brows deepen as I tapped on what looked to be Signe’s account, @ReadHeadedWriter, and saw that she had almost twenty thousand followers. Twentythousand. Her account was public, and when I scrolled through her feed, I realized that this account must have been relatively new.

And she already hadthatmany followers.

“So…she writes romance…” I was struggling to form words still. Raina nodded her head encouragingly at me, reaching her hand over to tap on a cartoon illustration that Signe had been tagged in.

It was me.

I mean, it wasn’t. It was a cartoon.

But it was me.