Page 27 of One-Star Romance

What’s your opinion of this one, oh arbiter of great literature and all that is morally right in the world? I dare you to tell me that it’s not a step forward!

(To be completely honest, the actual email included many more typos.) Before she could think better of it, she clicked send.

Then she went and fell asleep on the living room floor. Forty-five minutes later she jolted awake, filled with a sense of nameless unease, like a heroine in a horror movie investigating a strange sound in her basement.

Cursing under her breath, she sprinted to her computer, ignoring her pounding head, and read her email again. Oh, it was bad. So bad that she wished she could go investigate a murder basement, because being chainsawed to death seemed more appealing than the idea of Rob opening her message.

Okay, how could she undo this? Was there any world in which Angus might know Rob’s Gmail password, and Nat could use it to log in and delete her message before he saw it? Maybe Angus and Rob shared a Netflix account, and Rob was one of those people who used the same password for everything.

No, no way Rob was one of those people. He probably had a unique and hacker-proof password for every website he’d ever visited.

Shit. She gaped at the email, her face burning and her brain exploding, then quickly typed, Whoops, meant to send this to someone else, please delete!

Only after sending that did she realize that her excuse didn’t make any sense, and perhaps made the entire thing even more embarrassing. (Who else would she have been sending that email to? How would she accidentally send it to Rob when she had never before emailed him in her life?)

Mercifully, he had never responded. But the act of pretending that her emails had never happened would be much more difficult if they went on vacation together.

Speaking of emails, she clicked back to her inbox and refreshed it. Still nothing from her agent, Iman. Of course not. It was eight p.m. and Iman had a life. Nat and Iman had put together a list of other editors at other companies. Maybe this rejection was a blessing in disguise, Iman had said, an opportunity for Nat to find a new home that would cherish and support her more. And yet, slowly but steadily, the rejections from all those potential new homes had rolled in. Not the right fit or My list is too full, and I can only take on the rare projects that I absolutely love.

But still, Natalie was waiting on three. Three editors who were potentially interested and just needed some time to think it over or bring it to their higher-ups for approval. Three editors who had promised to get back to Nat and Iman very soon.

Natalie refreshed her inbox again. Fuck. She needed this weekend. How often did she get offered an all-expenses-paid trip to the Poconos with her best friend? Never. Nat hadn’t really had a vacation in years.

“So, we’ll pick you up at four?” Gabby asked.

Screw it. She could stay out of Rob’s way, right? Awkwardness be damned, she was going to dip herself in a lake.

“Can’t wait,” Natalie said.

12

Rob was sitting in his parents’ living room when he learned that Natalie would be attending the cabin weekend, thus destroying all his plans for a calm escape.

He’d looked forward to this East Coast retreat for a month now. Every day as he trudged from his apartment to his office under the blazing Arizona sun, he called up the lake in his mind. Its smooth, untroubled surface. Its fringe of firs and other trees that wouldn’t grow where he currently resided. Rob longed to hold a pine cone in his hand.

He’d spent the past year of his life doing a postdoc at the University of Arizona. And while there was much to be said for the school—interesting coworkers, a fine institution—and the state—wildlife, canyons, burritos—the arid climate was not for him. The constant heat prickled the back of his neck, caused him to burn in the sun like a lobster. Rob was made for changing seasons, for temperatures that dipped below freezing. Maybe he could get some relief from the pressure-cooker environment, from the nagging feeling that something was off, if he could occasionally go outside and take a deep breath of chilly air. But the academic job market was not what it had been when his father was starting out (a fact his father could not seem to grasp). Rob went where the openings were. Now he was waiting to hear if Arizona wanted to offer him a more permanent position. A tenure-track job had unexpectedly opened up for January—a professor leaving for a career opportunity in New Zealand—and of course Rob would accept if he were lucky enough to get it. He was good at what he did, but he was in no position to look a gift horse in the mouth.

His mother had gone into the kitchen to refresh their mugs of tea. His father was sitting in an armchair across from Rob on the phone with a colleague asking him for advice. Giving advice, Professor Kapinsky was in his element. At least, when he was giving advice to someone who posed no threat to him. He stretched his left leg over his right knee and sat back, genially ribbing his young colleague. Rob took his phone out of his pocket and checked his email. He was limiting himself to five checks a day during this waiting period. Still nothing from the university. But Angus had sent him a message about the inflatable kayak he’d bought for the cabin.

PS did I tell you Natalie is coming too? Sounds like she’s going through a bit of a rough patch and Gabs wants to cheer her up, which means we’ve been ordered to have even more of a good time than we’d planned to previously. I BELIEVE WE CAN DELIVER!

Rob inhaled sharply. Perhaps it would be better for him to stay here with his parents for the long weekend. It had been a while since they’d partaken in some quality family time. Natalie would inject all sorts of chaos into the lake getaway. Not like here, where Rob knew what to expect: his father bloviating, his mother taking care of them all. A hum of competitive unease, sure, but predictable competitive unease.

Right on cue, his mother handed him a steaming mug. “Here, sweets.” She smiled at him from behind her tortoiseshell glasses, not a hair out of place on her head. He hadn’t seen a hair out of place since he was seven years old, when she’d decreed that she wanted to be her “own person” for reasons he didn’t quite understand. She’d taken Rob off with her to a shabby one-bedroom apartment in NYC, where they’d remained for a full summer, an apartment so infested with cockroaches that Rob had ended up killing a few with his bare hand out of desperation. His mother had worked the lunch shift at a diner while she waited to hear from the jobs she actually wanted. And yet somehow those jobs never came through, and she picked up dinner shifts too while Rob sat in an empty booth and read his way through the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The day they’d had to put back half the groceries in their cart because her card was declined, he truly understood what it was to feel ashamed, of both their circumstances and the fact that he couldn’t stop crying in front of the cashier. That night, his mother had called his father. Professor Kapinsky showed up the next morning, magnanimous, to help them pack, then drove them all back to New Jersey, and they’d never talked about it again. Failure was not their family way.

“Thanks, Mom,” Rob said. Briefly, she touched his cheek.

“Right,” his father said into the phone. “Well, you just remember that you can dance rhetorical circles around them. You can. I don’t take just anyone under my wing! All right, now go enjoy the weekend. You’re welcome, of course. Bye, now.” He hung up and looked at Rob, indicating the phone. “I should introduce you to Keith. He’s a real killer. When he was on the job market, you know how many places were competing for him?”

“How many?” Rob asked, voice dull.

“Six! But he knew that Princeton was the place to be.” He shook his head. “I still don’t understand why you couldn’t choose a department in which Princeton had more of a concentration. I could have been more helpful to you that way. But ah well. Any word from Arizona?”

“Not yet.” Rob gritted his teeth, then offered up, “They said by the end of the weekend, hopefully. But I did hear that they’ve been passing my dissertation around more broadly within the department, which seems like a good sign.”

Professor Kapinsky nodded sagely. “Ah. And when are you going to let us read, then?”

Rob’s mother shot his father a glance. Because Rob had sent it over to them months ago, a bound copy with the title Understanding How Neologisms Spread: The S-Curve Model and Morphological Innovation (he could fully admit that it sounded boring and pretentious), and his parents had called him up to compliment him on it a week later.

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