The Decoy Girlfriend(58)

Freya tries not to frown. True enough, but since meeting him, being distraction-free wasn’t her first choice. It was what she settled for being okay with when he made it clear nothing could happen between them. Maybe his rigidity shouldn’t have surprised her. After all, Taft is a man with a scripted, synchronized love life, carefully choreographed for max career benefit.

“I heard you talking to your friend the other day,” he continues. “?‘Books over boys’?”

It’s Freya’s writer dream to have a lover repeat her own words back to her, but this isn’t quite the way she thought it would go. They both have entirely too many clothes on, for a start.

“Is eavesdropping your new thing now?” she asks wryly, straining to stretch her legs out as far as they can go without touching him.

Taft chuckles, but a frown of concern quickly takes over his face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, just stiff. I’ve been working all day.”

Freya’s gotten more used to Hen, but she’s still nowhere near comfortable shoving him away when he claims his spot on the couch as her personal furry furnace, paw adorably draped over her typing hand like he wants a cowriting credit—and now her muscles are paying the price.

Taft starts to reach his hand out toward her calves as though he’s going to give her a massage but lets it drop. “You shouldn’t sit in the same position for long stretches of time.”

As she watches his fingers flex against his thigh like he’s restraining himself, a sense of loss fills her, but she breezes past it just like she’s been doing ever since he friend-zoned her. It’s gratifying that there’s some part of him that craves connection, even if he tries to resist. Taft is thawing, but he’s not all the way there yet. Baby steps.

She takes an extra-long sip, hiding her face behind the mug. “Tell that to the world’s worst writing assistant ever. Or the best. I don’t know how much I’m going to keep, but thanks to Hen, I did manage to get all this out.”

“That’s good.” Taft stares at the laptop as if he can read the words within. “So you don’t have writer’s block anymore?”

She takes a moment to consider. “More like writer’s snarl.”

“What’s that?” His fingers drum against his chino shorts.

“I made it up. It’s when you have things to say, but they’re tangled like yarn, so you can’t say them to your satisfaction, and everything you write sucks, anyway, so what’s even the point?”

“Let me read it, and I’ll be sure to tell you why it doesn’t suck,” he says confidently.

This time she does snort. “As my ‘friend,’ you’re going to be brutally honest?”

“Deeply honest, yes. Brutally honest? Never. Who told you that honesty had to be brutal? And can I kick their ass?”

She stifles a smile but has no control over the rush of affectionate warmth that his words bring. “This feels like something you have big feelings about.”

Taft shrugs, like he’s trying to downplay it. She’s noticed he does that a lot, pretends like what he wants and feels doesn’t matter.

“The rest of the world is more than happy to tell you everything that they think is wrong with you,” he says. “Why would you expect it from friends who love you?”

“I . . . guess I never thought about it like that.” Freya blinks at him, drawn to explain. “For authors, no matter how talented you think you are or maybe you actually are, a first draft is never perfect. You learn how to take critique and kill your darlings, and it stings, but eventually it fades and you’re a better writer for all that work and heartache. It sounds harsh, but it’s a good lesson: don’t get attached to things that aren’t permanent, that can get deleted in a keystroke.”

“That sounds . . .” He seems to struggle for a tactful way to put it. “Like the kind of thing that can really fuck with your self-worth.”

“Isn’t it the same in your industry? Actors lose out on roles all the time, get every flaw thrown back at them, live their whole lives under the public’s unforgiving eye. The list goes on.”

“Yeah, of course. But it’s not exactly the same, is it? We bring characters to life, but they aren’t us. They don’t come from us. Somewhere, a writer like you spun them up out of nothing, like magic.”

If that was true, Freya could wave her wand, say an incantation, and her book would be done. Ugh. If she was a better writer, she wouldn’t even need a magical solution to a nonmagical problem. She would persevere on her own merit and sheer force of will.

“I get what you’re saying,” says Taft. “And I don’t know a whole lot about writing books or publishing them, but maybe thinking about everything potentially wrong with your work in progress is preventing you from seeing everything that’s right with it.”

Freya’s words are automatic. “It’s a first draft. There’s nothing right with it.”

A frown creases Taft’s forehead. It’s sweet how much he cares, but his voice of support can’t silence the flagellating fear that she can’t write anything real anymore. That she achieved her dream of being an author and that’s it, it’s all over for her. She’s peaked, like a once-superstar actor whose breakout role defined the whole trajectory of their career and now that’s the only thing they’re remembered for.