Page 20 of Written By a Woman

I was pretty sure that I wanted kids if my future wife happened to want the same.

What did Signe want?

It was too soon to know, or even ask, but I still wanted to find out one way or another. Even if she didn’t seem like a kid person, I didn’t think that mattered to me as much as just having a chance with her. This new perspective of Signe lit a fire under my ass, feeling motivated to try. To not try to distance myself from her as much as possible, but to even return the attention she was willing to give me.

Needless to say, I didn’t sleep as much that night as I had originally planned.

ChapterFour

SIGNE

I wanted to die.

That was a little dramatic, but the thought of walking into work the next day made nerves erupt in my stomach and the urge to vomit consumed me.

Deep breaths, Signe.

I kept reminding myself that I hadn’t received any emails from work. I hadn’t heard anything about this from Jaqueline or Mary or Jamie, which was promising. As far as I knew, no one at work knew about my novel. About my following. This was a good sign, and even though I finally revealed my face in my livestream yesterday, I was still entertaining the idea of scrapping the project entirely.

The bummer was, I had almost thirty thousand followers now.

That was a lot of people that I would disappoint if I scrapped the project. A project that was far enough along to already be under developmental edits at this very moment.

Perhaps I could alter Zayne’s appearance in the newer manuscript? I still wasn’t sure.

“Signe!” I jumped at the sound of my name. I had been standing in front of our building debating even bothering to show my face today when Mary called from behind, “Whoa, are you alright?”

I pasted a smile on my face at the sight of my favorite engineer approaching with her studded laptop bag over her shoulder, “Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Oh, that sucks,” Mary made it up to my side, “Is that why you zoned out on your way in?”

“…Yup.” I followed Mary into the building without another word. I let her scan her badge to access the elevators first, and step onto the fourth floor of our building first, as she chatted about a new anime she had been watching. I nodded and smiled at her ramblings about her favorite scenes and action sequences, and when she finally waved goodbye after seeing me to the front desk, I settled into my chair with stiff limbs.

Feeling numb, I clicked the desktop to life.

Ignoring the stab of anxiety in my stomach, I opened my work email.

Preparing myself for the worst, I held my breath as I tapped on my unread emails and saw…nothing.

Well, not nothing. I already had a to-do list thanks to Brandon, but nothing that would hint at me losing my job.

The more I scanned my work email, as well as my personal, just to be sure, I realized that it hadn’t hit the fan yet.

And then I thought about it some more.

I was part of a very specific, very niche online community. It wasn’t a place that would create headlines, and even when things like my stories went viral within those circles, they never made it out to mainstream social media spaces.

Call me crazy, but I had a feeling that not a lot of people in the office read romance novels. Let alone were subscribers, or friends with the subscribers to my accounts that still had my real name.

Perhaps accidentally revealing Zayne’s inspiration wasn’t as catastrophic as I originally thought. Maybe I panicked too soon, and none of this was really that deep.

I hesitated for a moment, my finger hovering over the email refresh button after clicking it again, wondering what to do with this information.

Did that mean that I just…kept marketing the story?

Maybe if I never acknowledged the resemblance between Zayne and Zaid, the internet would just forget about it. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more likely that everyone had moved on and was sharing a viral cat video or something.

Unfortunately, my anxiety was still there, lingering, the rest of the morning.