Page 24 of One-Star Romance

“Please,” she said, “continue telling me about my lack of decency. I’d love to hear it.”

“You want to know why I didn’t like the book?” he asked. “Because you used your talents to be petty and mean.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“The character of Dennis? It’s the most uncharitable reading of Angus that I can imagine.”

She stared at him for a long moment, her big eyes blinking rapidly, chest heaving up and down, her full lips slightly parted. Then she let out a scornful laugh. “Dennis isn’t Angus.”

“Sure. He’s a man with no basis in reality who happens to be intent on carrying the protagonist’s vibrant best friend off to the land of suffocating matrimony. A totally random vehicle for your biting commentary on…what was it you wrote? ‘Boys who fail upward, who approach the world as if entitled to everything on offer. Boys who would, unlike the rest of us, receive all that they’d been promised, though not because of any talent beyond sheer unearned confidence’?”

“For someone who hates the book so much, you sure can quote a lot of it from memory,” she said with a smirk, folding her arms across her chest. It had the unsettling effect of drawing his attention to said chest, which was especially distracting in this dress.

“Anger has a way of burning things into my brain,” he retorted.

She took a deep breath and said, in a calm, patronizing voice, “The book is a work of fiction.”

“In the loosest sense of the word.”

“I like Angus!” Her tone was unconvincing. “You want me to list all the differences?” She held up a hand and began ticking them off on her fingers. “Dennis is tall, Dennis is Southern, Dennis is—”

“A bumbling fop modeled after my best friend.”

“Okay, the vast majority of fiction pulls some inspiration from real life. Did I use some of Angus’s qualities as a jumping-off point? Maybe. But then I spun them out into something different. Are you saying that an author can never use anything they encounter in the world as inspiration?”

“No, but—”

“Because if so, say goodbye to almost every book you’ve ever read. Tear up The Bell Jar, burn The Great Gatsby—”

“There’s a way to be inspired by the things around you without being so blatantly obvious and uncharitable! And the hypocrisy of you giving that wedding toast just now, when in your epilogue, you imply that Dennis and Victoria’s marriage is unsatisfying, that she’s trapped, but our heroine holds out hope that, maybe someday, her friend will find the strength to initiate a divorce—”

Natalie moved even closer to him now, her finger poking into his chest, her head thrust up so she could look him in the eyes. He could feel the heat coming off her, smell the scent of her lotion, or maybe her deodorant, or maybe just her sweat: a faint, enticing blend of cucumbers and jasmine. Her fury made her buzz, as if her outline were electric. She was the angriest and most alive person for miles. He leaned forward, or maybe she pressed against his chest harder, with all her fingers now, as she went on, “Calling Dennis a simple stand-in is a willful misreading, showing both a lack of imagination on your end and an assumption that I share that lack of imagination. You’re as good as saying that I can’t do anything but plagiarize what I see in front of me. And honestly, it’s a bit insulting to Angus from your end to say that you don’t see him as anything more than the character in the book.”

“Oh please.” She was the one who didn’t see Angus, or had chosen to see him only in the most unflattering light in order to give herself something to write about. And someone who was so lazy and cruel, that wasn’t somebody he wanted in his life. “You know he’s my closest friend in the world—”

“Well, nobody else has expressed this concern to me, so maybe this is more of a you issue. And I think you know that, or else you would have said something to my face instead of posting it anonymously like some basement-dwelling internet troll.”

The pressure built up inside him, from her hand on his chest, from the inescapable fullness of her around him, the way her body in that dress curved toward him, the slit in the fabric up her thigh, from her words and words and more words, pretty and biting and infuriatingly superior, the kinds of words you could get swept away in if you weren’t careful. He wanted to stop her mouth, and for a wild, out-of-nowhere moment, the best way to do that seemed to be by pressing his own mouth against it. But he swatted that impulse away.

She would not win this battle too. He’d read all the other reviews on her page and had noticed a conspicuous absence. So he dealt the fatal blow. “If it’s not a problem, then why can’t Gabby bring herself to finish it?”

Immediately, the fury drained from her face, replaced by a deep pain. In seeking to reflect her cruelty to her, he’d become cruel himself, touched a deeper nerve than he’d meant to. Her eyes reddened, and she stepped back.

“Natalie.” He reached out a hand toward her, but she pulled her arm away.

“Screw you,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. She turned toward the stairway that led up to the bedrooms. “If Gabby asks, tell her I got drunk and went to bed.”

At the top of the staircase, right before she disappeared from view, she whirled back around. He stood there, unable to move. In a cold, clear tone, she said, “I hope we never see each other again.”

But of course, they did.

Part Three

SEPTEMBER 2016

A Year and a Half Later

FROM: [email protected]

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