Total pages in book: 151
Estimated words: 145746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 729(@200wpm)___ 583(@250wpm)___ 486(@300wpm)
“Okay, well, um,” she says, licking her lips nervously and standing. “Wanna go gang up on him now?”
“Sure.” I stand, too, which brings our bodies closer together. Delivers her heat and her fresh scent tinged with apples straight to me.
“By the way, how are your aunts?” I ask, when neither of us have moved to go find Canon.
This is small talk 101, but being close to her without the rage feels good. I don’t know when it faded. A simple truce I wasn’t even sure I could keep wouldn’t lower my guard this quickly, but in this moment, resenting Verity is the last thing I’m thinking about.
And fucking her is the first.
“The aunties are good,” she answers. “Still running their store. Actually drowning in online orders now. They discovered TikTok Shop and the rest is history.”
I chuckle and rotate the apple in my hand. I can’t come up with anything to say except shit I probably shouldn’t, so I don’t say anything and wonder if she’ll find in the silence the same thing I did. That once the years-long enmity clears, what’s left feels dangerously close to what started all of this between us at Finley years ago.
There’s a question in her eyes that she would never ask. I know that about her, so I guess I’ll have to be the one to stir old embers. But not tonight. Tonight it’s enough to know something here still burns.
“Ready?” I ask, tossing the apple and catching it. “I think we hit Canon up with it now.”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice coming out a shade huskier than it was a moment ago. “I’m ready.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Verity
“Please don’t make me,” I moan through the hands covering my face.
“Verity,” my agent, Sheila, says, her tone patient, with a clear hint of Get your ass up, even over speakerphone. “We’ve talked about this. Your career isn’t just what you put on the page. It’s also keeping your name in front of the right people. This screening is a great networking opportunity.”
“I hate networking.” I sit up in bed and rest my shoulders against the headboard, glaring at the phone on the duvet beside me. “I don’t feel like peopling.”
Truth be told, I haven’t had to be on set much this week, and what started with one day skipping morning yoga, because it was so hard to get out of bed, turned into three days without exercise, balanced meals, and—as I give myself an investigative sniff—showers. If Sheila knew I’ve barely left the bed this week, she’d probably be here banging down my door.
Very few in the industry know I have bipolar, but it’s not something I could keep from my agent, not when more than once she’s had to make excuses for me when the pendulum of my moods swung too sharply in one direction or the other. Her job is to help my career, and a lie would hinder that. So she had to know the truth: that at any given moment I’m capable of a euphoria so fragile it could crumble under the slightest pressure. It could be dragged with a whimper into depression. It might, in a flash, render me as likely to laugh as I am to wail.
“You hate networking, yes, my sweet girl,” Sheila says in that reasonable voice she uses to coax me out of caves. “But you do like Desiree. Attend the screening for her, if not for the potential opportunities it presents for you.”
I sigh and struggle to keep focused on the conversation. I’ve been asleep most of the day, but try telling my heavy eyelids that. She’s right, though. Desiree and I met at USC, two of only a few Black women in our program. After years of slogging away in mid-level writers’ rooms, she finally sold a script for her first big feature.
“I’ll go,” I say, sliding down until my back sinks into the mattress and I can pull the pillow over my head.
“Now that we have that settled,” Sheila says, satisfaction clear in her voice, “how’s the pitch for the studio coming along?”
I moan like she’s stretching me out on a torture rack.
“That well, huh?” Sheila deadpans. “How can I help?”
“None of their mandates really fit what I’m best at,” I whine from under my pillow. “They want something propulsive and suspenseful and dramatic and woman-focused. And I’m only good at two of those. Being a woman and being dramatic, in case you needed me to clarify.”
“You’ll figure it out. Writers dream of an overall deal like this one. Play your cards right, and this could be a huge leap forward in your career. You might end up the showrunner on this.”
“I know,” I whisper. “And I’m not ungrateful.”
I’m numb and sad and barely existing in a doldrum.
I can’t say those things aloud to Sheila, but that is the truth. I’m not sure how to explain it to someone who has never had to drag herself from under a boulder merely to accomplish basic hygiene, much less create a dynamic fictional world that people would pay to watch when you feel like roadkill every day.