Spoiler Alert (Spoiler Alert #1)(44)

Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: As I wrote earlier, I don’t want to hurt your feelings or alienate any of you, because you’re my friends and my community. But I thought this was important, so I said it, and hopefully by discussing the issue, we can become an even better, more inclusive community than we already are.

Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: Thank you, and I’m sorry this ran so long.

Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: TL;DR: Please don’t make fat people automatically awful or ugly or lazy in your fics. It makes me, an actual fat person, sad.

Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: P.S. When I say I’m fat, I’m not insulting myself. I don’t use fat as a pejorative, as some do. For me, it’s merely an adjective, like blond, or tall, or (TopMeAeneas’s favorite) TUMESCENT. Whether it’s offensive depends entirely on context, as with many descriptors.

Marcus sat back in the too-hard hotel chair and let out a slow breath.

Among all the fics he’d recommended to her over the years, at least a few included fat secondary or tertiary characters. He suspected the descriptions of those characters would now make him cringe.

Shit.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by far.

They do it by urging me to work out, she’d written, or by pushing me toward what they consider more nutritionally sound food choices.

With his goddamn life at stake, he would swear—swear—that his invitation to the gym, to the buffet, hadn’t been a paternalistic nudge toward more exercise or so-called better nutrition. But with her background, he could see how she might interpret his words that way. He could see why she’d gone chilly, and why she’d pulled away from him, and why she hadn’t wanted to look him in the eye for the rest of that endless cab ride.

Given her personal history, given the infamous, all-consuming concern for appearances he’d playacted in front of cameras for years, of course she’d believe the worst of him. She didn’t yet know him well enough to do otherwise. Even with Book!AeneasWouldNever—

He pinched his forehead between his thumb and forefinger, pressing so hard, he half expected to leave fingerprints.

How had he overlooked it? How had he forgotten? She’d asked even Book!AeneasWouldNever, her longtime, faithful friend, whether her appearance had spurred him to cut off contact with her. Because she’d thought those photos of their dinner together were his first real glimpse of her, and she didn’t know he’d already seen her by that point. Already admired her. Already found her unbearably sexy.

Not because of her size. Not despite her size. Because she was . . . April. Ulsie. Her.

And no, she hadn’t seemed especially bothered by the cruel opinions of Twitter randos. But she’d been clear about that distinction in her Twitter DMs, hadn’t she?

I don’t give a shit what strangers think. Just the people I care about.

Either he was still a stranger to her as Marcus Caster-Rupp, and she didn’t give a shit about him or his clumsy, ill-considered invitation—or she’d begun to care about him, if only a little, and he’d hurt her. Like Book!AeneasWouldNever had only last night.

Fuck.

This time, it was only a little after Alex’s usual bedtime in Spain. And since his friend wasn’t precisely an exemplar of impulse control himself, Marcus figured he’d be forgiven. Eventually. Once Alex got a good night’s sleep.

“Holy shit, I’ve fucked up so badly,” Marcus said as soon as his friend answered. “I didn’t mean to, but God, did I fuck things up.”

With admirable patience, Alex forbore calling him an asshole again. “What, specifically, did you fuck up?”

“Everything.” He scrubbed his free hand over his face. “Everything.”

“Such a freaking drama queen,” Alex muttered. “Maybe you could be a bit more specific?”

If Marcus was a drama queen, then Alex was a drama . . . whatever was more powerful and dramatic than a queen. Drama dictator? Drama deity? Still, kettle-pot-blackness issues aside, Alex was listening, and Marcus planned to take advantage.

The whole story didn’t take as long to relate as he’d expected. After it was done, Alex remained silent for a long, long time.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” he eventually said.

The phone should have splintered under the force of Marcus’s glare. “What?”

Even across a continent and an ocean, Alex’s sigh was audible.

Marcus stabbed an accusing finger at his best friend’s name on the screen. “Over the course of a single weekend, I’ve lost a dear friend and the only woman I’ve truly wanted in years”—or possibly forever, but that could just be the drama queen in him swanning forth yet again—“and she’s convinced I’m a fat-shaming dick as Marcus and a lying abandoner as Book!AeneasWouldNever. In what universe could that possibly be for the best?”

“Dude.” His friend smothered a yawn. “Think about what you just said. You answered your own question.”

Marcus scowled. “I did not.”

“Moments ago, you just referred to yourself in the third person. Twice. As two different identities.” The patience in Alex’s voice sounded a bit strained. “Doesn’t that seem a bit . . . overly complicated to you?”

Hmph.

“I’m a diamond of many facets.” Hadn’t April told him so earlier that day?