He pulls the cue from my hands and circles the table, eyeing several options for his first shot before choosing the green-striped ball and getting into position. “And I guess I should’ve mentioned”—he taps the cue ball, which sends the green-striped ball into a pocket, the purple-striped ball sinking right behind it—“I’m left-handed.”
I jam my mouth closed when he looks at me on his way to line up his next shot. This time, he pockets the orange-striped ball, then the burgundy one, before finally missing on his next turn.
He sticks his lip out like I did when I teased him about bad memories. “Would it help the sting if I bought you another beer?”
I yank the stick from his hand. “Make it a martini, and get yourself one too. You’re going to need it.”
* * *
Charlie wins the first game, so one game becomes two. I win that one, and he’s unwilling to tie, so we play a third. When he wins, he pulls the cue out of my reach before I can demand a fourth match.
“Nora,” he says, “we had a deal.”
“I never agreed to it.”
“You played,” he says.
I tip my head back, groaning.
“If it helps,” he says with his signature dryness, “I’m willing to sign an NDA before you tell me about whatever deep, dark, twisted fantasy brought you here.”
I slit my eyes.
He moves my glass off the cocktail napkin and feels around in his pockets until he finds a Pilot G2, admittedly my own pen of choice, though I always use black ink and he’s got the traditional editor red. He leans over and scribbles:
I, Charles Lastra, of sound mind, do swear I will keep Nora Stephens’s dark, dirty, twisted secret under penalty of law or five million dollars, whichever comes first.
“Okay, you’ve absolutely never seen a contract,” I say. “Maybe never been in the same room as one.”
He finishes signing and drops the pen. “That’s a fine fucking contract.”
“Poor uninformed book editors, with their whimsical notions of how agreements are made.” I pat his head.
He swats my arm away. “What could possibly be so bad, Nora? Are you on the run? Did you rob a bank?” In the dark, the gold of his eyes looks strangely light against his oversized pupils. “Did you fire your pregnant assistant?” he teases, voice low. The allusion is a shock to my system, a jolt of electricity from head to toe.
Miraculously, I’d forgotten about Dusty’s pages. Now here Nadine is again, taunting me.
“What’s so wrong with being in control anyway?” I demand, of the universe at large.
“Beats me.”
“And what, just because I don’t want kids, I would supposedly punish a pregnant woman for making a different decision than me? My favorite person’s a pregnant woman! And I’m obsessed with my nieces. Not every decision a woman makes is some grand indictment on other women’s lives.”
“Nora,” Charlie says. “It’s a novel. Fiction.”
“You don’t get it, because you’re . . . you.” I wave a hand at him.
“Me?” he says.
“You can afford to be all surly and sharp and people will admire you for it. The rules are different for women. You have to strike this perfect balance to be taken seriously but not seen as bitchy. It’s a constant effort. People don’t want to work with sharky women—”
“I do,” he says.
“And even men exactly like us don’t want to be with us. I mean, sure, some of them think they do, but next thing you know, they’re dumping you in a four-minute phone call because they’ve never seen you cry and moving across the country to marry a Christmas tree heiress!”
Charlie’s full lips press into a knot, his eyes squinting. “. . . What?”
“Nothing,” I grumble.
“A very specific ‘nothing.’ ”
“Forget it.”
“Not likely,” he says. “I’m going to be up all night making diagrams and charts, trying to figure out what you just said.”
“I’m cursed,” I say. “That’s all.”
“Oh,” he says. “Sure. Got it.”
“I am,” I insist.
“I’m an editor, Stephens,” he says. “I’m going to need more details to buy into this narrative.”
“It’s my literary stock character,” I say. “I’m the cold-blooded, overly ambitious city slicker who exists as a foil to the Good Woman. I’m the one who gets dumped for the girl who’s prettier without makeup and loves barbecue and somehow makes destroying a karaoke standard seem adorable!”
And for some reason (my low alcohol tolerance), it doesn’t stop there. It comes spilling out. Like I’m just puking up embarrassing history onto the peanut-shell-littered floor for everyone to see.
Aaron dumping me for Prince Edward Island (and, confirmed via light social media stalking, a redhead named Adeline). Grant breaking up with me for Chastity and her parents’ little inn. Luca and his wife and their cherry farm in Michigan.
When I reach patient zero, Jakob the novelist-turned-rancher, I cut myself off. What happened between him and me doesn’t belong at the end of a list; it belongs where I left it, in the smoking crater that changed my life forever. “You get the idea.”
His eyes slit, an amused tilt to his lips. “. . . Do I though?”
“Tropes and clichés have to come from somewhere, right?” I say. “Women like me have clearly always existed. So it’s either a very specific kind of self-sabotage or an ancient curse. Come to think of it, maybe it started with Lilith. Too weird to be coincidence.”
“You know,” Charlie says, “I’d say Dusty writing a whole-ass book about my hometown and then me running into her agent in said town is too weird to be a coincidence, but as we’ve already established, you’re ‘not stalking me,’ so coincidences do occasionally happen, Nora.”
“But this? Four relationships ending because my boyfriends decided to walk off into the wilderness and never come back?”
He’s fighting a smirk but losing the battle.
“I’m not ridiculous!” I say, laughing despite myself. Okay, because of myself.
“Exactly what a not-ridiculous person would say,” Charlie allows with a nod. “Look, I’m still trying to figure out how your shitty Jack London–wannabe ex-boyfriends factor in to why you’re here.”