“So why are you acting like I got in? Maybe this is a rejection letter.”
“Oh, Tess,” Kait sighs, reaching across and rubbing my shoulder supportively. “I read the story you submitted. They’d be crazy to reject you. Come on. Open it.”
I glance at her again, biting my bottom lip, my gaze moving to the three hearts she has tattooed across her chest, going up toward her neck. Despite everything Kaitlyn has been through in her life – abusive father, alcoholic mother, running away from home – she’s managed to fill herself with optimistic light, always.
I constantly vow to myself that I’ll be more like her.
But somehow my paranoid writer’s mind is always searching for the trick, nightmaring up the worst-case scenario.
Kaitlyn knows how much this opportunity means to me.
When I was a kid I fell in love with Tanner Telford’s books, especially his first novel. Published when he was only fifteen years old – so twenty-four years ago now, before I was born – Promenade in the Rain is a semi-autobiographical novel about Tanner witnessing his parents’ murders at the hands of a home invader and working to overcome his grief.
Tanner then went on to write over a dozen novels, thrillers, and literary works, all of them bestsellers. On top of that, he’s traveled the world, hunting with tribes and sailing like a Viking, a modern-day Ernest Hemingway, a silver fox at six foot seven with wide shoulders and a muscular physique and piercing blue eyes that gaze penetratingly from the cover of Time magazine.
And now he’s doing a creative writing boot camp.
Here, in his home city, in our home city.
He’s an orphan just like me.
To be accepted by Tanner Telford …
A dream, it’d be a freaking dream, and now my hands are shaking and silly, nonsensical tears fill my eyes.
“Oh, Tess,” Kait says, sliding up the couch and wrapping her arm around me. Gizmo paws at my barista shirt, clambering up, trying to leap up so he can lick my tears away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“No, it’s fine,” I murmur. “I’m just being silly. It’s like a Band-Aid, right? I just need to get it over with.”
I tear open the letter and stare down at it, blinking away my tears, trying to still the stampeding of my heartbeat. Even Gizmo must sense how important this moment is because he stops his pawing and just stares up at me, and then turns and glances at the letter and beyond it, trying to figure out what I’m gazing so fixedly at.
“Well?” Kait breathes, her excitement bubbling up behind her voice. “Hello? Earth to Tess? Jiminy Cricket on a biscuit, Tess, what does it say?”
I laugh and shake my head, meeting her eyes.
“Did you just say Jiminy Cricket?”
“Yep, I did. And I’ll say a whole lot more cheesy farm-girl stuff if you don’t tell me what that damn letter says.”
I hand it to her, unable to stop my lips from tugging into a smile when hers do the same. She throws herself forward and hugs me like the sister I never had, both of us laughing now, both of us knowing how important this is.
Tanner Telford, the man I’ve looked up to since I could read, the man whose writing has kept me warm on too many cold nights to count.
The man whose Google images result you sometimes stare too longingly at.
The silver fox, the writerly alpha, the man with the muscles to match his brains and who is single, even though he could have any number of glamorous, beautiful, intellectual women.
I stamp down on that wayward train of thought.
It doesn’t matter if he’s single.
He’d never want me.
“I knew you’d get in,” Kaitlyn beams. “Didn’t you, Gizzy? Didn’t you know your amazing Mommy would get in?”
Gizmo beams just as brightly, soaking up her attention, and I try to ignore the jagged nerves that start twisting in my head.
I’m in now, which means I have to face the question I’ve spent the last month of waiting purposefully ignoring.
What if I’m not good enough?Chapter TwoTanner“Two years is a damn long time for a writer as prolific as you, Tanner,” my agent says, as though I’m not aware of that fact, as though I don’t think about it every second of every day. “What is it, my man? Whatever it is, I can help you. Excitement, women, cars, a drug problem, hell … an existential crisis? I’ll have you on a mindfulness retreat so fast you won’t even be able to say ommmm.”
I laugh grimly, knowing that Kenny is joking … mostly.
“The words just haven’t been coming like they used to,” I say, sitting behind the desk of the lecture hall, looking around the large, empty room and wondering just what the hell I’m doing here.
These moments come to me, in brief flashes, these what-the-fuck-I-am-doing imperatives. It made sense when I formulated the plan—teach writing, and by teaching it unlock the steps necessary for putting the words on the page again.