Page 75 of Total Creative Control

Aaron sucked in a shocked breath. “I would never—”

“Just go,” Lewis said coldly. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Fine.” Tears pricking, tears of rage and hurt and humiliation, Aaron snatched up his laptop. “You’re the fucking boss.”

He had a brief impression of Lewis flinching, of Toni’s distress and Charlie’s crowing delight before he swept out of the room.

The door slamming behind him echoed the final cracking of his heart.

Chapter Nineteen

Lewis

The rest of the meeting was a blur.

As they resumed their seats, Toni met Lewis’s gaze and frowned slightly, signalling concern—perhaps asking if he was okay to go on.

He just looked away, out of the window at the steadily falling rain.

After that, he was aware of Toni and Charlie talking, animatedly at one point, but not what they were saying. He knew he should pay attention. Charlie was probably making the most of Lewis’s distraction to bring all his firepower to bear on Toni. But still, he couldn’t pull himself together. His mind couldn’t let go of those last minutes before Aaron had left.

“I’ve written tens of thousands of words…”

How could he not have known? The fanfic thing was bad enough, but to not know that Aaron dabbled in writing at all? How could he not have known something sofundamentalabout him?

Years Aaron had worked for him. Every day, the two of them spent hours together. Aaron knew Lewis better than anyone else, and Lewis had, perhaps foolishly, imagined it went the other way too. No lover had ever come close to that level of intimacy with Lewis. The only other person was his brother Owen, and even Owen didn’t really understand Lewis’s writing, which was hands down the most important thing in his life.

But Aaron knew everything. His knowledge ofLeecheswas better than anyone else’s, maybe even Lewis’s, and his instincts about the characters and storylines were pitch perfect. Somehow, over the years they had worked together, Lewis had come to think of Aaron as… well, that was the question, wasn’t it? Howwasit Lewis thought of him?

It was always Aaron who Lewis turned to when he wanted to know how the show’s fans would react to something. During their script discussions, Aaron always spoke passionately about what different groups of fans wanted and expected and loved. That wasn’t all Aaron did, though—he was also the most intuitive person on the show’s editorial team. His eye for detail was incredible, and his memory was astonishing. It was always Aaron who reminded the team about those tiny connections between characters and past episodes that they could layer in for those sneaky inside jokes that the fans loved so much. His input was so valuable that, at some point, it had got that Lewis didn’t really consider a potential storyline good to go until Aaron had given it the nod in his quiet, unassuming way.

When it came toLeeches, Lewis’s own precious baby, he’d shared everything with Aaron.

And all this time, he hadn’t evenknownthat Aaron wrote fanfic.

Lewis stared at the large puddle that was forming on the surface of the helipad outside while Charlie droned on about speeding up story delivery to maximise audience engagement.

Fanfic.

He was still boggling over it. Aaronknewhow he felt about fanfic. They talked about it regularly during their script discussions—Lewis had reluctantly agreed that it was a decent barometer for how the fans felt about all sorts of stuff, but he’d never imagined that Aaron was so intimately acquainted with it because he was part of the fanfic community himself. He’d assumed Aaron skimmed that stuff because of his job. Because he was details-orientated and curious and thought the information would be useful.

Lewis was pretty sure there wasn’t one single time they’d had a conversation about fanfic when Lewis had failed to express disbelief that anyone would want to read or write that sort of hyper-sexed, romanticised drivel. He grimaced a bit at the thought of those many past cutting comments, but his simmering anger soon rallied. After all, wasn’t that observation justified? He might not have read any fanfic, but he knew the vast majority of it was sexual fantasies about characters who would never actually end up together in the official versions of whatever work was being bastardised.

Where was the artistic merit in taking someone else’s fully fledged characters and shoving them into a series of gratuitous sex scenes? That wasn’t just unimaginative, it was fuckingtragic.Everyone with a laptop thought they were a fucking writer these days.

And yet, he found himself wondering whether he’d recognise Aaron’s writing if he searched for it online. The thought of reading it was...uncomfortable. Sex scenes written by Aaron about Skye and Faolán? Way too personal. Yet he couldn’t help wondering whether he’d recognise how Aaron’s versions of Skye and Faolán interacted. How they flirted and kissed and fucked and did all the things that Aaron so wanted them to do in the real show.

“You know how empowering that kind of representation is for people like me.”

Aaron’s gaze when he said those words to Lewis had been bright with hope. And why did that make Lewis feel so fuckingangry? Like Aaron was putting something on him, something he didn’t want and hadn’t asked for?

Abruptly, without thinking, Lewis stood up. His chair rocked back on its rear legs but didn’t topple. Toni startled, and Charlie broke off what he’d been saying to glare at him.

Charlie opened his mouth—probably to rebuke him—but before he could get out a word, Lewis said shortly, “Let’s reconvene another time.”

He turned away from the conference table and headed for the door without waiting for a response.

“You want to stopnow?” Charlie squawked behind him. “Ten more minutes and we can put this whole thing to bed.”