“I told you, Wilder. I knew it the minute you let me read your story. I knew you would be a hit.” Anders knocked his knuckles on the table. “Are you listening to me?”
“Don’t make this about you,” I said, sipping the last dredges of my latte as I closed my laptop.
“I’m not. I’m simply saying—”
“That you’re the one who got me the deal. Therefore, you deserve some credit. Yeah, I think I know you pretty well by now, Andi.”
He cringed, setting his Americano down on the table. “Ugh, don’t call me that in public.”
A content grin settled across my lips. “Only in bed, then?”
“We should celebrate. It’s not every day a debut author makes it to number three on The New York Times best seller list.”
I leaned across the table. “Are we still playing games, then?”
“Only if you want to.” Anders’ smug smile faded as a flash of vulnerability crossed his pale blue eyes. “It’s been awhile.”
“It’s unprofessional to sleep with your client,” I reminded him.
Anders and I had an on-again, off-again relationship. I’d met him while working as a copy editor at Bartley Press a few years ago. He was smart, cocky, and sexy as hell in a suit. One thing led to another, and by another, I meant dinner, movie, and blow jobs. We’ve been friends with benefits ever since. Lately, our relationship had become more for him, he’d become too invested in me and in my writing career. But I couldn’t give him what he wanted. Trust was something I struggled with, something I didn’t give to men who I was involved with sexually. Sex was a release. A need to fill. Anders Lowe was a top literary agent, and I was a means to an end for him. An author who needed representation. Not that I’d slept my way into a contract. It wasn’t until after I’d published a few pieces in The New Yorker that I’d signed with him. He’d said I had a big future in publishing. I hadn’t believed a word of it. Turns out I was wrong.
He lowered his voice, serious he said, “You mean more to me than that.”
My reply stuck in my throat. Anders ran his fingers through his blond hair, the light catching the golden strands in a way that reminded me of him. Of Jax. The only guy I’d ever loved. The only guy I’d ever hated. Jax was the perpetual ghost that haunted me.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Wilder… get another agent.” He reached across the table and rested his hand on mine. “I’m serious about you. About us.”
“You only say that because I’m a New York Times bestselling author now,” I joked and pulled my hand out from under his. “I’m money in your pocket.”
He didn’t laugh. The vein in his forehead pulsed. I’d pissed him off. “You always push me away.”
“I’m…”
“Fucked up, I know. I read your story. Remember? I pitched the damn thing. He’s dead, Wilder. It’s been nine years. When are you going to let him go?” He didn’t know the truth. When I didn’t answer, he sighed and reached into his bag. Anders handed me a book. My book. “Open it.”
Looking at my name on the dust jacket of a book was surreal. The cover was deep red, the font slightly raised. This was my book. My story. My words painted across paper, my heart splattered out for the whole damn world to see. To judge, to own in their personal interpretation. The title, always a knife to the chest, taunted me.
Love Always, Wild.
This was my true story with a fictionalized twist. That’s how I’d sold it. A world inspired by true events. Where I was wanted and loved but left behind by death. I’d changed Jax’s name, and instead of it being an autobiography, I’d turned a huge chunk of my life into fiction. The lie worked for me. I’d told myself he’d died because it was better than the alternative. The truth? In our junior year at Eastchester University, he’d left for winter break after we’d gotten into a fight about him coming out to his parents without me. I’d wanted to be there as a support, but he’d said his father would probably kill us both, that he didn’t want me to get hurt.
Hurt.
In the end, Jax’s dad hadn’t been the one to wound me, it’d been Jax himself. He’d left and never came back to campus. Never answered one of my calls or texts. I’d worried myself sick. So sick I’d almost failed out of school. What had happened? Where had he gone? Jax Stettler had disappeared. None of his shithead friends had known anything, and it’d made it worse that Jax had deleted the two social media accounts he’d barely used anyway. The only information I’d gotten was from the registration office. He’d withdrawn. He’d never told me the address to his parents’ house in Florida, and the school wouldn’t give it to me either. The darkest days of my life were locked inside my dorm room walls back in North Carolina. I’d tried to write the truth, that I hadn’t mattered to him, that I almost lost myself once, but this part of me, morbid and cold, wondered if he might’ve died. Or maybe I wished for it. I had no closure. Nine years later, and I still couldn’t stomach the taste of chocolate.
“Don’t just stare at it, open it, for Christ’s sake.” Anders opened the book for me, and I smiled when I saw all the signatures. “Everyone at Bartley signed it.”
I ran my thumb over one of the signatures. The letter B curled brazen and big on the page. I looked up at Anders in surprise.
He chuckled, and I let the sound of it erase the memories of Jax, at least for now. “Even Mr. Bartley himself.”
“I thought he was in the Hamptons until August?” I asked.
“I have my ways.”
I shut the book, and Anders’s smile warmed the lingering cold of my past. “This is amazing.”
“Very true. I am pretty amazing.” He stood and grabbed his bag. “I have to meet with a client.” He hesitated and squared his shoulders. “Look, I’m asking you as your agent… Have dinner with me tonight?”
“To celebrate our success.”
“Your success. To celebrate you, Wilder.”
“Want to try that new place we’ve been eyeing near Piedmont? I’ll bring June.”
He lowered his eyes, focusing on anything but me. He was disappointed.
“She’s my best friend.”
He raised his arm and looked at his watch. “I better get going. Eight o’clock work for you?”
“I’ll have to text June, but I think that should work.” I stood, picking up my laptop and shoved it into its case. “I’ll walk you to your car. I don’t think I’ll be able to get any writing done today anyway.”
The summer air hit us like a brick as we left the coffee shop. It was ninety degrees today. The clouds hovered like large castles above the city, their gray linings threatening rain and filling the air with a wet heaviness that I despised and irrationally adored. I reached for Anders’s hand and he let me hold it with a small shake of his head.
“You are the most confusing guy I’ve ever known. You know that?”
I tugged on his arm and he pulled me into his side. He was taller than me only by a few inches, and I liked how easy this was, how easy I fit alongside him. I never really seemed to fit anywhere else, not in a long time.