Page 17

I shook my head. Did I have feedback? Of course I did.

Lips, five stars. Hand placement, five stars.

Freaking everything, five stars. Take my clothes off and ravish me.

Five stars, a hundred stars, an infinity’s worth of stars.

It took every ounce of my self-control not to climb on top of him.

“I don’t have feedback, per se,” I began, specifically choosing to misinterpret his question as him still asking me for my thoughts about his books. “It’s more of a query.”

Huck raised his eyebrows.

I took a breath. “What happens to Clark Casablanca? Does he live, does he end up with Rebecca, or does he die trying to save her family?”

Huck sank a little next to me. I could feel him shift on the mattress as he heaved out a sigh. “Honestly, Stella, I would love to tell you, but I can’t answer that.”

“Oh. Are you planning to revive the series, so you’re not allowed to talk about it or something? I won’t tell anyone.”

He shook his head. “I can’t answer because I don’t know.”

“Wait, what?”

He was quiet for a few moments. I’d been trying to be light, to steer things away from how close we were to each other under the covers, but clearly, I’d led us straight into a totally different kind of trouble.

“Every writer is different. Some have whole stories come to them in dreams. Others write elaborate outlines and use Save the Cat! Writes a Novel . Me? I am a character man. My characters speak to me, they practically write themselves—I’m just along for the ride.

And Clark? He burst into my psyche and took over, for years.

Honestly, his voice was louder than my own.

Then, one day he stopped talking. He was strolling along the canal in Amsterdam and found that note in his pocket, and then, he just went silent.

I tried to work out the ending of the book on my own when he didn’t come through.

Nothing worked. I couldn’t figure out what was next, so I just wrote the first thing that came to mind, the easy ending, the one with no answers, just enough to make it all end.

Then I stopped altogether. Everybody said I gave up, and they weren’t wrong. ”

I squinted at Huck in the dim light of the bedroom, processing what he’d just admitted.

I could only imagine how hard it was for him to tell me.

I’d never heard about this before, and I felt like it must be that he hadn’t told anyone else, because if he had, it would’ve been a story in a gossip column somewhere. I’d have seen it.

I had no idea what to say, or how to comfort him, but I knew I wanted to. I wanted him to feel safe and seen and supported, to understand that I didn’t see him as just his books. That’s what I would have wanted, but words failed me.

“That really sucks,” I blurted. It probably wasn’t the right thing to say. Not thoughtful or gentle or at all insightful, but I’d been quiet too long, and I had to say something—that’s what came out.

A moment of nervousness followed, where I panicked about how he was going to respond to my super eloquent, empathetic comment, but he surprised me. He kept surprising me, actually. He laughed.

“Yeah, it sucks. It really fucking sucks.” It was a whole-body laugh, so hard it shook the bed.

I couldn’t help but join in. I tried to restrain my own laughter because it felt so wildly inappropriate, like laughing at a funeral, that odd kind of laughter that always seemed to precede some sort of breakdown, but it was a struggle.

“It’s funny,” he said. “My agent, Jim, sent me to a shrink who was supposed to help me reconnect with my inner child.” He snorted. I lost the last shred of composure I had been clinging to. I had to mash my face in my pillow so as not to wake Teddy.

“Inner child,” I wailed. “I mean, we probably all need to heal our inner children, but still.”

Huck continued sharing in intervals between his breathless bouts of laughter.

“We tried hypnotism, but apparently I’m what they call ‘hypnosis resistant.’ It was back to the drawing board.

My editor suggested changing my routine, and I started getting up early and going to SoulCycle.

I wore spandex! I’ve never sweat so much in my life.

And the chafing. The chafing was god-awful.

When that didn’t do anything other than change the way my pants fit on my thighs, I took the recommendation of a literary icon who I met at a party and consumed a tea made of magic mushrooms. Nothing—well, not completely nothing, I guess.

I thought I could fly for a few hours and then I was violently ill. ”

I laughed so hard that full fat tears flooded my cheeks and my core muscles ached. Huck’s laughter began winding down and then as quickly as we’d been overcome with the ridiculousness of it all, we both fell silent.

“I sprained both ankles with the flying thing. No Clark, though. The wildest part is that everyone kept giving me these bizarre tasks like that would fix it, fix me . No one ever got it. I didn’t realize until just now how badly I wanted someone to acknowledge how I might be feeling, or that it was hard or even okay to be broken. ”

“You mean, no one ever came to you and was super eloquent and nuanced and moving in conveying the suckiness of your situation?”

“Nope. You’re the first. Thanks for that.

I don’t know how you seem to know what I need, but I needed this, Stella.

I feel so much lighter. I spent eight years with that guy chatting me up, and then he was gone.

It sounds stupid to say it, but I was reeling.

I went from this star everyone loved—well almost everyone—to someone people hated or pitied.

I felt so alone and I didn’t know how to move on and no one really seemed to get it until you, just now.

And then I haven’t written a worthwhile sentence in years, and again I meet you, and suddenly…

I didn’t write what I planned, but maybe it might actually have been good. ”

“You wrote some really incredible erotic fan fiction of us, didn’t you?” I teased. “Is that why you didn’t want me to read it?”

Huck’s hand slid over my hip, and he nestled close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from his skin.

“Truthfully?”

I nodded, stopping the dip of my chin so that my lips were only a fraction of an inch, an instant, away from his. When he spoke, his voice hummed through my entire body. His gaze dipped to my mouth.

“I spent two paragraphs on these lips, and it’s the best fucking thing I’ve ever written.”