In Too Hard (Freshman Roommates Trilogy, Book 3) Read online

  She stood up gracefully, careful not to catch any of the paper. Hands on hips, she surveyed her work, turning slowly in a circle until she faced me.

  “Okay,” she said. “First let me say that Down in Flames, as you have it written now, is…” She took a deep breath and let it out. I knew mine was held, but I couldn’t seem to exhale. Not yet. Not until she finished her sentence. “Brilliant.” Exhale. Big exhale. “It’s really…so, so good, Billy.”

  Really big exhale.

  “I mean, your voice is there, for sure, but this is also new and fresh. It’s not you just trying to recreate the beauty of Folly.”

  I put my hands together, lacing my fingers, so they wouldn’t shake in front of Syd.

  “You’re being honest, right? I’ve got lots of people who will blow smoke up my ass, Syd, please don’t be one of them.”

  She looked semi-offended, and then waved a hand at me, as if dismissing what I’d just said.

  “Of course not. I mean, as your…Valentine, I’m gonna gush of course. But as your assistant, it doesn’t help you to not tell you if there are problems.”

  I pointedly looked at the paper flower surrounding her. “And are there? Problems?”

  She didn’t break her gaze and said—quite professionally for a nineteen-year-old—“Not problems. An opportunity.”

  I laughed. “You should go to work for my agent.”

  She smiled and beckoned me to her. I rose, somewhat hesitantly, and carefully made my way to the center of the flower. (Was that the pistil? I’d always sucked at natural science.)

  She carefully stepped out of it on the couch side, as I entered from the credenza side.

  She sat on the couch as I stood at the center. “Okay,” she said, hands up, as if gentling a wild animal. “This is just a thought, an idea. Like I said, I love it already as it is, but something kept striking me as I was reading, and then it clicked for me.”

  I looked at the papers, trying to see, trying to guess, what she meant. “What?”

  “You’re using the secondary character Brandon as your Greek chorus, right?”

  I’d stopped being impressed and surprised by Syd’s knowledge of literary structure and devices. The way she’d broken down all my notes and cut and pasted them together when she’d put them on the flash drives proved time and time again that she was wise way beyond her years when it came to books and the way that a novel worked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Part Greek chorus and part voice of reason,” I added.

  She was already nodding. “Right. Exactly. And I kept thinking, ‘this isn’t a Brandon. This isn’t a new character.’”

  “It isn’t? He isn’t?”

  She took a deep breath as she shook her head. “No. It’s…Aidan Colly.”

  I just stared at her, then looked down at the papers again, too far away to read as I stood over them. My head came back up to see her watching me. “It is?”

  She nodded. “It is. It’s exactly the Aidan at the end of Folly, where you left him, having sort of figured it all out.”

  “Is that bad? I mean, will people just think I recycled one character and threw him in another book with a new name?” I knew I shouldn’t worry about what other people thought about my work, but there would be a lot of scrutiny on this book since it took me so long to write it, and because of how well Folly had done.

  “No, it’s not bad. But…here’s a thought.” A huge, bright smile came across her face and I couldn’t help but smile back at her, even though I was scared to death of what she might say next.

  “What if it’s not Brandon? What if it is Aidan Colly?”

  “Like, find and replace Brandon with Aidan? Bump up his scene count?” It wouldn’t be hard to do, but it felt kind of…false.

  “Sort of,” she said, then rose from the couch and walked the outside perimeter of the flower. “I think the thought of Aidan came so easily to me because I’d recently transcribed your notes for Gangster’s Providence.”

  “Okay….”

  She took another step around the circle. “And then I thought about the notes you’d started for Providence, and things clicked.”

  “Clicked?”

  “Yep. As I was reading, there was something that was being forced. Like you were trying to fit a green triangle into a red hole.”

  “What?”

  She waved a hand. “Like that little kids’ game, with the pegs and holes and squares and stuff.” I nodded, and she went on. “I know that feeling. I’m like the green triangle and Bribury is the red hole.”

  I wanted to ask her about that, to dig deeper, she so seldom talked about herself, but I only waited. Though I did file the thought away for later.

  “Like here,” she said and crouched down in front of one of the petals of paper. “Brandon is doing this while he’s with Esel—cute placeholder amalgamation, by the way—but at one point for Providence, you thought Aidan would say this.” She pointed at two of the sheets of paper and I squatted down in front of her, with just a paper petal, four sheets of paper wide, between us.

  “He would say this to Esel. My thought is Aidan is your Brandon—your secondary character, your voice of reason and Greek chorus—but you use your notes from Providence to do it. To make him really Aidan, even give him a small character arc that you alluded to in your notes, here.” She pointed to the petal in front of us and I read her printout from the Providence transcribed notes. “And here,” she said, pointing again to a different petal. “And also here.” Another point. Another petal.

  My mind was spinning. I wanted to both scream with frustration, and plant myself on the floor and start scouring her notes and breakdowns.

  I told myself to keep it together. We could not have another scene like the time I’d pitched a fit when I saw her reading all my chapter ones. We had come a long way since then. And I hoped that I’d come a long way in the arrogant asshole department.

  “Listen,” she said, rising and taking a small step back, and then another, leaving the flower altogether. “In case you want to freak out and don’t want to do it in front of me, I’m going to go to the bathroom, and take a long walk around the building to stretch my legs.”

  I wanted to stop her, tell her to stay, but I just nodded. She was so much smarter than I was.

  “When I get back, all you have to say is, ‘thanks for the feedback, I’ll think about it,’ and I’ll never bring it up again. We’ll forget I even said anything about Aidan.”

  I wanted to tell her how great I thought she was in that moment, to give me a graceful out, but I found my throat wouldn’t work.

  She was at the door, opened it and turned her head to say, “The book is really good on its own, Billy. No one will be disappointed in it.”

  She left, shutting the door behind her, and I spent what turned out to be the next hour going through her notes.

  When she stepped back into the room, my arrogant asshole was nowhere to be seen, and instead I didn’t know what to tell Syd first: that I loved her, or that I thought she should seriously consider becoming an editor, her notes being that good.

  But instead of either of those things, I just led her to the couch, sitting first, then pulling her onto my lap so that she straddled my hips and I could look into those gorgeous brown eyes and say, “Thank you,” in a soft whisper.

  When I felt her body relax, when she was certain I wasn’t going to throw a hissy fit, I then added, “Now. Let’s see about those pegs and holes, shall we?”

  I flipped her down on the couch and all thoughts of Aidan Colly left me as I slid my body over hers.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Syd

  We sleepily woke to find that Saturday morning had turned into Saturday evening, the office nearly dark, with just the soft glow of twilight leaking in between the slats of the closed blinds behind us.

  It was mid-March and the days were getting longer, but from the number of times the old heating unit in Billy’s office went on, I guessed it was quite cold out
side.

  I had my back to Billy’s chest, one of his arms under my head and sticking out over the edge of the couch. His other hand drew lazy circles on my hip. The plaid blanket below us had a freshly-washed scent and I realized that he’d taken both of the blankets to his apartment and washed them recently.

  The sweetness of that gesture warmed my heart and I burrowed in deeper to his chest, rubbing my cheek against the rough hair of his forearm.

  “Thanks for doing what you did today,” he whispered.

  “The blow job?” I teased. “It was nothing. Especially considering how long you were down—”

  “The notes, smart-ass,” he said, gently smacking my ass with his hand. Which he then quickly soothed.

  “Ohhhh. That. No problem.”

  “Seriously, thanks.”

  “Thanks for not freaking out,” I said, most of the teasing gone from my voice.

  “You certainly know how to…manage me,” he said. Part of me loved that thought—that I knew him so well now, that I knew when to give him space. When to push, when to pull. It made me feel…safe to know I knew him at that level. And it was not lost on me that I hadn’t exactly let him know me on that level.

  As if he’d read my mind, he said in a lazy voice, “I get that you don’t like talking much about your life before Bribury…”

  I should have felt panic, put up some shields or something. But I was in Billy’s arms and felt like, for once, I could be completely honest. That I didn’t have to pretend to fit in with all the other girls at this school.

  He had chosen me. Not one of them.

  “Yeah?” I said, trying to convey openness.

  “And tell me to shut up if you want…”

  “Okay…”

  “But you know so much about me, and I just want to get—”

  “Billy, what?” I said, giving him a tiny jab with my elbow, which he greeted with an over exaggerated “ooomph.”

  “The night I was an ass—”

  “Which night, specifically?” I teased. I tried to hold on to the levity because I sensed what was coming.

  “Yeah. Ha-ha. I was an ass, but I seemed to hit a particular nerve in you. Was that just putting me in my place about my choice of words—totally justified by the way—or was it…more?”

  I thought about just brushing it off. But Billy had, in a way, bared himself to me by letting me read Down in Flames, and by listening to my ideas. I wanted to do the same for him.

  “I was raped when I was thirteen,” I softly said. It was easier to say it facing away from him. He didn’t say anything, just continued to stroke my hip, but the motion now seemed more comforting rather than seductive.

  The sun had gone down completely now and the room was cast in mostly darkness, just the glimmer of the streetlights on campus coming through the shades. I enveloped myself in the shadows, and went on. “By my stepfather.”

  “Jesus,” he hissed, but said nothing more. Which proved that Billy Montrose knew how to manage me as well—if not better—as I did him.

  “He wasn’t really my stepfather,” I went on, growing braver now, and just wanting it out on the table. I didn’t want any secrets between us. “Still isn’t. He and my mother never got married, but he’s lived with us since I was eight.”

  “Christ,” he said behind me.

  I shook my head, loving the strength of his arm under me, as if he was holding me up. “It didn’t start then. Thank God. It happened when I was thirteen and my mother was pregnant for my little brother Duncan.”

  Nothing from Billy, and I forged on.

  “It happened once. I told my mother of course. She said…she said that Steven had probably been drunk. That she’d talk to him and it wouldn’t happen again. But that I absolutely couldn’t tell anyone, or they would remove Steven from our house and then how would we survive with a new baby. She…” the words caught in my throat, still not wanting to believe her huge betrayal of me. Though, at the time, I wasn’t able to process that—that she had let me down. My thirteen-year-old brain projected all of those feelings back onto myself. That I was the one at fault. That I would be responsible for the new baby starving if I said anything. That I must have done something to make Steven act that way in the first place.

  “She didn’t even seem mad about it. She’d pointed to her big pregnant belly and shrugged, with kind of a ‘well, what do you expect, the guy’s got to get it somewhere’ look.”

  “Fuck,” Billy whispered behind me, then brushed my hair over my shoulder and placed the softest of kisses on my bare nape.

  “Yeah, fuck,” I said. “The one thing that she did do was somehow get him to never touch me again. I don’t know what she said to him, or what she threatened him with, but he stayed away from me. Still as mean as a snake to me, but at least—”

  “He’s still in the house? Still with your mom?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, lifting a hand, waving it, and then dropping it, like it was a very breezy decision for my mom to keep her daughter’s rapist in the house all through my high school years. “When she was pregnant with Liam a couple of years later I made myself scarce through the last few months of her pregnancy, and when I did sleep at home, I made Duncan sleep with me.”

  “And when you didn’t sleep at home?”

  Fork in the road time. Tell him everything and taint his vision of me? Or fudge over the truth and let him think of me as just another Bribury Basic who easily overcame a tough break in her early teens?

  “Well, for the first year after the rape, I really acted out. Grades went down in school. I became sexually promiscuous. A self-destructive streak really took over.”

  “I would image that’s common behavior after something like that. Especially if you weren’t able to talk about it,” he said.

  “Textbook, actually. Which I learned later.”

  “I am so sorry that happened to you, Syd. I know I can’t take away any of that pain, but, I…”

  He didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t blame him. I just continued to tell my story. “A year into that kind of shit, when I was fourteen, I was held back because I’d failed all my classes. They had me work with a counselor, Ms. Francis, and she…” How to explain how much Ms. Francis had done for me? And mainly by giving me one book to read. “She pulled me out of it. Really worked with me that year to make me see that it wasn’t my fault. She tried to help legally too, but my mother called me a liar. They would have removed me from the house, but by that time I was so in love with little Duncan that I couldn’t bear the thought of being away from him. I was doing a lot of his care by that point.”

  “Thank God for Ms. Francis,” he said, giving me another kiss, this time on the shoulder. It felt good, warm and comforting.

  “Yeah, she was great. I don’t know where I’d be without her. My grades went back up. Skyrocketed, actually.”

  “Your true genius being unlocked by Ms. Francis.”

  “Well, she was wonderful, but the thing that really turned me around was a book she gave me. I really think reading that book was the turning point for me. I was so in tune with it, it spoke to me so much. It pulled me out of myself, out of my situation and allowed me to see life as it could be, not as it was. It, literally,” I jabbed him at the use of that word, and he chuckled, “saved my life.”

  “Wow. The power of a good book, right?”

  “Yes. It changed everything for me. I read it over and over, still do. And besides the book itself, it instilled in me my love of all books, which of course is a gift in and of itself.”

  “What was it?”

  I took a deep breath. Another damn fork. In for a penny, in for a pound. “Gangster’s Folly.”

  I felt Billy’s entire body stiffen behind me. And not in a good way.

  “Seriously? My book?” he said, and moved to sit up.

  A chill rippled through me, and not just because he’d removed his body heat. He slid to the end of the couch, and I pulled my legs from his lap and sat up myself,
pulling the blanket around me, the end of it long enough to still cover most of Billy.

  I loved his body, but I had a feeling we would need to be covered for where this conversation was headed.

  As if he was thinking the same thing, he rose from the couch and pulled his jeans on in the dark. He tiptoed through the papers still on the floor and turned on his desk lamp, casting the whole room in a soft glow. He then returned and sat down on the arm of the couch, further away from me.

  “Okay, let’s…can we talk about this? My book?”

  “Yes,” I said, not really wanting to. But I’d said all I’d wanted to say on the subject of that bastard Steven, my heartless mother, and my long road to finding myself again. I’d happily talk about how much Billy’s book meant to me, even though I sensed it probably weirded him out a little.

  “I mean, I knew you’d read Folly, we talked about it when we were FaceTiming, but I guess I thought that was fairly recently. Like, because you were taking my class or something.”

  “Well, I did reread it right before fall semester started. Because I was taking your class.” I rose from the couch and dropped the blanket, reveling in the soft moan Billy let out. I didn’t hide myself from him as I dressed.

  “Reread,” he said from behind me. “You said you read it more than once?”

  I fastened my bra and slid my shirt over my head. “Yes. Although not as often as that first year.” I looked over my shoulder at him, trying to let him see the significance of what his words did for me back then. “That year when I was…recovering, I read it over and over. Probably twenty times.”

  I was expecting a softness on his face, a look of…something to tell me he got it. Got what I was trying to do. Thank him.

  But that was not the look he had on his face. His gaze followed me as I, now fully dressed, moved back to the couch and sat on the arm opposite him, bringing my bare feet up to land on the place where our heads had been moments ago.

  I shrugged while he continued to stare at me. “I’ve probably reread it a couple of times a year since then.”