Page 19 of Again with Feeling

But it was totally fine for Bobby to hook up with somebody. Anybody. Whoever he wanted. However many he wanted. Whenever he wanted. Even if the, um, booty call came when he was hanging out with friends. And trying to solve a murder. And I mean, it was totally fine for Bobby to do whatever he wanted,but was he even being safe? Not, like, that way. But if these were total strangers, shouldn’t he be telling someone where he was going? What if they were axe murderers? What if they wanted to turn Bobby into a sock puppet? And if this guywasn’ta total stranger, then couldn’t Bobby say something like,Hey, tonight I’m hanging out with Dash and the gang because I haven’t been spending enough time with them and they’re my best friends?

If you asked me, I’d say that’s a sign of a toxic relationship, when your new boyfriend won’t let you spend any time with your old friends.

Oh my God.

Did Bobby have a boyfriend?

Believe it or not, all of this went through my brain in about half a second. Which was perfect timing because a moment later, Bobby, another man, and a woman stepped out of one of the ground-floor apartments, and I almost drove off the road. I only caught a glimpse of them: the man looked young, blond, and ridiculously cute in a tee and jean shorts. The woman was older, with darker hair—maybe honey blond, I wanted to say, although it was hard to tell as she stepped away from the porch light. They were laughing about something, and as I watched, Bobby put his arm around the blond man’s shoulders. The woman said something, and the blond beamed. The woman said something again, and this time, Bobby shook her hand. She said something that made them all laugh again as she pulled him into a hug.

And then I was past them, and then a moment later, I was past the apartment building, and I couldn’t even see them in my rearview mirror. All I could see was myself, and the dark, and the empty road behind me, red with my taillights.

Chapter 6

The next morning, I stayed in the den (which, to judge by the number of crumpled-up sheets of paper, the abandoned pens, and the half-finished cups of coffee, was now starting to look more like a villain’s lair than a writer’s workspace). I stared at the screen of my laptop. The cursor blinked back at me.

Somehow, for some reason, I had let Hugo talk me into a co-writing project. When I put it like that, I make it sound like he was twisting my arm (which, kind of, he was). But the rational part of me also knew that it was a tremendous opportunity—Hugo was a published author, his star was rising, and he was doing me a favor (scratch that; he was handing me a winning lottery ticket) by letting me write with him.

And it didn’t hurt that Hugo’s arguments had been so persuasive. I mean, Hugo had been right: I’d been grappling with Will Gower, the imaginary detective who lived inside my head, for decades now. And so far, after about a million permutations, the idea hadn’t gone anywhere. Why not try something new? Why not give Will Gower a break? I mean, authors did that all the time—they might start off with an idea that lived and grew with them for years and years, but at some point, practicality set in, and they moved on to an idea that they could, you know, actually sell. (Or, for that matter, actually write.)

And Hugo’s idea was going to sell; I already knew that.The Next Nightwas an update on the noir genre, which was already well within my wheelhouse. Private investigator Dexter Drake was caught in a loop created by systemic oppression, the realities of being a gay man in 1940s Los Angeles, and, of course, his ownbad choices (a trademark of the hard-boiled and noir was the detective who was hampered by his inability to be anything but what he was).

It was…fun. I mean, it wasn’t exactly my thing. But Hugo was basically a genius, and as he had told me—convincingly, many times—this was going to be a great way to stretch myself as a writer.

The only problem was that—speaking of the inability to be anything but what we are—writing Dexter Drake wasn’t all that much easier than writing Will Gower.

Never mind, I texted Hugo, still staring at the blinking cursor on our shared doc.I give up.

His reply came a moment later—a GIF of a cat typing manically on a keyboard.

Nope, I wrote back.I’m done. I’m finished. It’s over. It never even began.

Have you been talking to Fox?

No. But that did remind me of some of Fox’s more memorable fits of despair, so I riffed on some of those.I’m a sham. I’m a huckster. My only success was a fluke, and everyone is going to see me for the fraud I am.

This time, the composition bubbles appeared, disappeared, appeared, disappeared. And then, finally, Hugo’s reply came through:It’s a description paragraph for a sleazy office. You don’t have to writeWar and Peace.

Which was a helpful reminder, sure. But I decided to stick with my guns.This is what I’m talking about. I can’t even come up with a simple description for a sleazy office.

The next pause was even longer. But when Hugo replied, the composition bubbles appeared only briefly. There was no pausing. No erasing. Just a short, quick message. And then it came through:Write what you see.

I almost replied,Easy for you to say. But I held myself back. In the first place, because I knew—by this point—that I was feeling sorry for myself. But also because he was right. It was a description. That was all. And yes, it was easy for my brain to spin out of control even with something as simple as that—because in the best writing, a description was never just a description. A description was also a window into a character’s mind, into how they perceived the world, their idiolect, their past, everything that shaped the process of perception and interpretation. What you saw in a simple passage of description, in the hands of a good writer, was the character, and the mood, and the theme, even the foreshadowed action—everything, in other words.

Write what you see.

The office was small and cramped and smelled like boiled cabbage. The desk was battered steel, painted the battleship gray Bobby remembered from the Army; every desk he’d ever seen, on every post and base where Uncle Sam had sent him, he’d seen that same desk.The papers covering the desk might be interesting, but what held his attention now was the blood—spattered across the desktop, and at one corner, thick and black in the weak light from the hall. Bobby stepped back, reached into the pocket of his windbreaker, and wrapped his hand around the little gun. Fear made his heart start to pound. On the wall opposite him, a cheesecake girl stared down at the scene from her poster, looking like all she wanted was to take a break and put her feet up.

With an explosion of breath like someone surfacing from a deep dive, I leaned back from the laptop. My brain was already circling around each sentence, jumping over words, scanning the text, probing for weaknesses. Were they called cheesecake girls? Pinup girls? A quick search told me that the term was cheesecake, not cheesecake girls, but I liked the sound of thephrase, so I decided to leave it—if someone wanted to buy the story and told me to change it, then I’d worry about it. I wasn’t crazy aboutboiled cabbage. That was a good detail, but the blood smell seemed like it would be stronger, so I changed it torust.And there was too much stage direction at the end; I took out the part about himstepping back. It was enough for him to put his hand in his pocket. Same with the heart-pounding fear (hello, cliché!). I deleted that whole sentence—if someone couldn’t tell he was worried/concerned/afraid from the blood and the gun, I wasn’t doing my job.

After those changes, it actually wasn’tterrible. I mean, it did the job. But wasrustreally the right word? Maybe it should have beenrusting metal? Or more vivid—maybesmelled like his grandparents’ garage, where they’d kept a rust-eaten Plymouth that had been full of moths. Okay, I actually liked the image of the moths billowing out of the old Plymouth, so maybe just one more change—

But I stopped myself. This wasn’t the right moment in the story—the focus needed to be here and now, not on the past. In the next chapter, maybe, when he was remembering the blood, he could associate it with the old Plymouth, with his first, startled discovery when a cloud of moths came pouring out of the old car.

Finally, I made myself text Hugo:?

His text came back a moment later:There’s my guy.

I couldn’t help but grin; there were a lot of things that hadn’t worked in my relationship with Hugo, but he was a great writer, and there was something so…reassuring about having his approval. It was one of the reasons I’d agreed to write this story with him—Hugo knew how to handle me when I got tangled in my own thoughts, and he knew how to cut through the nonsense and get me back on track. (At least, most of the time.)

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