Book Lovers(28)

“Loosen your grip.” His low voice vibrates through me, his breath warm on my jaw as he pries my fingers from the cue and readjusts them. “The front hand’s for aiming. You’re not going to move it. The momentum”—his palm scrapes down my elbow until he catches my wrist and drags it back along the cue toward my hip—“will come from here. You just want to keep the stick straight when you’re starting out. And aim as if you’re lining up perfectly with the ball you want to sink.”

“Got it,” I say.

His hands slide clear of me, and I will the goose bumps on my skin to settle as I line up my shot. “One thing I forgot to mention”—I snap the stick into the cue ball, sending the solid blue one across the table into the pocket—“is that I did used to play.”

I walk past Charlie to line up my next shot.

“And here I thought I was just a really good teacher,” he says flatly.

I pocket the green ball next, and then miss the burgundy one. When I chance a glance at him, he looks not only unsurprised but downright smug. Like I’ve proven a point.

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.”