Page 6 of Trip Me Up

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NIALL

I couldn’t denyit as I walked into my hotel suite and tossed the key card onto the counter in the kitchenette.

My fingers tingled.

Still, I didn’t dare hope. It might’ve been the champagne I’d drunk or the choking formalwear.

As I tugged at the tie Gabi hadn’t let me take off, even in the car, she tossed her purse next to the key card and tapped at her phone. “Still sulking?”

“Of course not.” I fiddled with the buttons on my dress shirt and tried to smile at her, but she didn’t look up from her device. She’d done so much for me: the book deal, the TV show. Sticking with me on this long promotional slog. I shouldn’t have been mad at her. Until I remembered the way Samantha’s big, beautiful eyes had turned to slate when that photographer started snapping pictures.

Big? Beautiful? I was a writer; I could do better than that. Or maybe I wasn’t a writer anymore. Were you still a writer if you hadn’t written a word in over a month? Was it a qualification you had to renew, like an organic farm certification? Or was it something that stuck for life, like Grandpa’s veteran status? It felt like a muscle I’d allowed to atrophy from disuse, too weak to work the way it used to.

Except…my fingers tingled.

“Well, well, well.” Gabi ran her gaze over me, finally distracted from her phone. “It’s not like I haven’t seen it before, but most of my clients prefer to keep their clothes on in front of their agent.”

Without even thinking about it, I’d stripped out of my jacket, shirt, and shoes, and I stood in the middle of the hotel room wearing only my suit pants.

“Shit. Sorry.” I scooped up the discarded clothes and strode into the suite’s smaller bedroom. When I was dressed in jeans, a soft T-shirt, and a flannel shirt unbuttoned over it like a jacket, I walked out into the living room.

Gabi sat on the couch, still wearing her cayenne-red dress. She tapped on her phone. “We got some good pictures today. Qiana will be ecstatic. You and Audrey and Natalie Jones, you with that sci-fi writer—” She snapped her fingers.

“Tamarah Starr.”

“That’s the one. Though I wish you could’ve gotten one with that Samantha woman. I think she’s a Jones, too. She had that look.”

“A Jones?”

She rolled her eyes. “The family in charge of the literacy foundation? The dad, Jasper, died young before his company really took off, but now they’re rolling in cash. They say the dad was into books, and that’s why they created the foundation. Or maybe it’s just a tax write-off. Who knows? Anyway, the mom, Audrey, runs the foundation. The daughters are socialites, and the sons are in tech like their dad.”

Samantha hadn’t looked like a socialite. She’d looked as uncomfortable as I’d felt. That minuscule dog of hers trotting up to me and scrabbling at my ankles had been the highlight of my afternoon—until Samantha herself skidded up.

She hadn’t talked like a socialite, either. She’d been unguarded, open. Unlike every one of those plastic, wind-up-doll people there. Including me.

Until Gabi and her photographer had walked up, and she’d frozen stiff like a startled deer. What would’ve happened if Gabi hadn’t interrupted us? Would we have dug a little deeper, exposed a sliver of ourselves, made a real connection that wasn’t about what I could do for her and what she could do for me?Synergy.That was the word they tossed around here like my friends and I used to chuck pinecones out in the woods.

Speaking of plastic people… “No email from—from him?”

Gabi stopped tapping her phone and looked up, pity softening her brown eyes. “No, sorry, honey. But I got the shipping notice that the copy of your book was delivered to his office.”

I shook my head like Sally, our goat, shook off flies. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sure he’s busy.”

“I’m sure he is.” She pressed her lips together for a second and then burst out, “But he’s your dad. He could have texted.”

Ironic, that. My dad was the CEO of one of the most successful phone technology companies in the world, and he couldn’t be bothered to text his son. Rather, he hadn’t texted my agent, since the remnants of the last phone he’d given me were at the bottom of our farm’s pond.

Next to Gabi, on the end table under a copy ofPublisher’s Weeklyand the mystery novel she was reading, the too-new, too-stiff red cover of my writing notebook poked out. My fingers tingled.

I walked to the table, tentatively, like I’d have approached a frightened calf or a wounded dog. Something that might lash out at me and injure me if I wasn’t careful. I put a hand on the book and the magazine and slowly slid out the notebook.

Gabi watched me do it. Maybe she held her breath, too.

“You going to write tonight?”

“I dunno.” Better not jinx it, tingling fingers be damned. They’d tricked me before.

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