Page 26 of One-Star Romance

Gabby sighed, setting the bottle down on the table a little too hard. “Look, I started reading and it was good. Really good. But it did hit a little close to home, so I put it down. I talked to my therapist about it, actually. We agreed that maybe it’s best for our relationship if I cheer you on but don’t finish reading, at least not for a while. Is that okay?”

Natalie forced a smile, even as her heart cracked at the knowledge that Rob had been right. “Of course. You should do what you need to do.”

If your best friend was a doctor, you didn’t need to watch her perform an open-heart surgery in order to love her. Nat didn’t attend Gabby’s marketing pitches, so why should Gabby have to read her books?

And yet. She couldn’t stop herself from feeling like her writing was more than a career to her. That it was like she’d invited Gabby to her wedding, and Gabby had sent a gift but not bothered to attend the ceremony. But she knew that was childish, so she turned and reflexively checked her email again. Still nothing.

“How many times have you checked that today?” Gabby asked.

“Five hundred and twenty-two. Roughly.”

“Oh, Nat. Things are really hard right now, huh?”

Gabby looked at her with such concern, her face so familiar and comforting that Natalie couldn’t stop herself from leaning forward and grabbing her best friend’s hands, a hope seizing her.

“Maybe we could go away, just the two of us. Nothing fancy. Take the train out to your parents’ house for a couple nights and explore the beaches of Long Island. Or, I don’t know, borrow a tent from someone and camp?” Time together, quality time, could help fix everything: Nat’s current anxiety, this weirdness between them over Apartment 2F. She needed her best friend.

Gabby looked down at their hands, frowning. Nat wasn’t so much grabbing as holding on for dear life. “Work has been nuts, and I already took off for Angus’s weekend away, so I don’t know if…”

“Right. Just a thought.” Natalie let go and stepped back, turning toward the stovetop, unable to stop her shoulders from slumping.

Behind her, Gabby let out a soft sigh, then said in a bright voice, “You should come to the cabin with us this weekend.”

Natalie paused. “For Angus’s special trip? I can’t intrude like that.”

Gabby waved a hand through the air. “You know him. The more the merrier. He wants other people to come. That’s why he rented such a nice place. Well, that, and I think he wanted to celebrate by throwing around some of his signing bonus, which, when I saw the amount, I was like ‘This is obscene,’ but I guess that’s the finance world for you.”

Don’t be jealous, Natalie told herself, biting down on the envy that rose up in her throat. You don’t want to work in finance. The money would not be worth the misery. She’d have to develop some extremely expensive hobby to make her life worth living—tasting thousand-dollar bottles of Scotch, getting into sailing—but now, she worked on her life’s purpose / career in every hour outside of her money jobs, and she had no time for expensive hobbies, so maybe the finances all evened out anyway. And you certainly don’t want to be married to a finance bro, especially not one like Angus.

“Anyways, it’s already all paid for, so you could come for free,” Gabby said. “You just might have to share a bed with my sister.”

“Melinda and I are old pros at room-sharing. I didn’t realize that she and Angus had gotten close.”

“They haven’t, particularly. But she invited herself along as soon as she heard about it.”

“Of course she did.” Natalie laughed. It felt unfamiliar as it came out. Had it really been that long since she’d laughed that the act of it felt foreign to her? All the anxious waiting lately had sucked the joy, the color, out of her life. She was living a sepia-toned existence. Maybe this wouldn’t be the uninterrupted alone time with Gabby that she craved, but it would be far, far better than sitting here in her apartment. “Okay, yes, I’m in. Thank you so much.”

“Yay! This will be fun.” Gabby began to type furiously into her phone. “I’m telling Angus that you’re coming too.” She sent the text and, almost immediately, the phone dinged with a response. “He says, ‘Excellent,’ with five exclamation points.”

“That’s kind of him.”

“Forwarding you the email with all the details now. You can hitch a ride with us.”

As Gabby kept chatting about how much fun they were going to have, Natalie pulled up the email, her mind whirring ahead to visions of herself rejuvenating, revitalizing. Emerging from a swim in the lake dripping with water and newfound peace. Serenely sipping a glass of wine as the sun set. Having a heart-to-heart with Gabby. Making a group dinner on a stove with more than one fucking burner. Not even thinking about the fate of her new book for a brief shining weekend.

Gabby, as per usual, had loaded up the email with details. Nat began to skim them, then stopped, her eyes skipping back up to the email’s recipients. Angus. Melinda. And Rob Kapinsky. She strove to keep her face blank as her mind whirred.

No. Shit. No. Natalie still hadn’t told Gabby that Rob was her sworn enemy, because that would require explaining exactly why. She had a feeling that Rob had never told Angus either (which she supposed was decent of him—he was loyal but not a tattletale). Their best friends were blissfully unaware of the roiling hatred between their former best man and maid of honor, and it was probably best to keep it that way.

So she should tell Gabby that she’d just checked her calendar and had some unmovable conflict. Anything to avoid being stuck in a house with Rob, especially after her most recent contact with him.

Now, a month after that late night at her computer, she couldn’t believe that she had given him the upper hand. How idiotic, how impulsive of her.

She’d finished revising her second book, burnishing and polishing until it shone so bright she thought that anyone who saw it would want it. She’d written with a fire under her ass: the sooner she finished this book, the sooner she could move to the next stage of her life. She’d researched the suffrage movement for untold numbers of hours. She’d turned down a promotion to management at her catering company because it would have interfered. She’d given up offers of vacations with Shay and Becks, passed on parties and events, even at one point fasted for a day to understand the hunger pangs her protagonist experienced in jail. (She was Method Writing.) And yet when her agent had sent it out to the editor with whom she’d worked on Apartment 2F, they’d waited and waited only to get a rejection email—not even the decency of a phone call!—about how they were so sorry, but due to budget cuts and the fact that her first novel had underperformed, they could not take this one on.

She’d gone out with a couple of friends and gotten stupendously drunk. And when she came back and stumbled up the stairs to her apartment, Rob’s name had flashed in her mind. Because Rob was the turning point on her first novel. Everything had been hope and possibility until he’d made her ashamed of her book, hadn’t it? He’d given her that one-star rating, and then others had started to trickle in, reviews delighting in their own cruelty, perhaps feeling like Rob’s one star lit their way, encouraging a race to the bottom, and then the reviews had largely stopped. Rob’s face kept appearing in her mind when she doubted her talents now, all her negative self-talk taking the form of one annoyingly handsome man who smirked in satisfaction that she’d gotten what she deserved.

It struck her then that she should write him an email. So she copied his address from a group message that Angus had sent and started a new one, attaching her latest draft.

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