Page 48 of The Seven Year Slip

Then she stood, and Iwan—James, I had to remind myself—followed suit.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” he told Drew, and shook her hand. “I look forward to perhaps working with you in the future.”

“I hope so. I could do so much with you—respectfully,” she replied.

He grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I have no doubt.”

Drew followed the agent out the door, guiding her to the lobby, and suddenly I found myself alone with the talent. I quickly pulled all my papers together and shoved them into my notebook, wanting to leave as quickly as possible, but it would be rude to leave before him, and he wascertainlytaking his time.

A knot formed in my throat.

“James?” his literary agent called.

“Coming,” he replied, and started for the door, but as he passed, he bent toward me, and I caught a bit of his expensive cologne, woodsy and sharp, and he whispered in a deep and delicious rumble, “It was good to see you again, Lemon,” before he slipped out of the conference room, and I was left, mouth open, staring after him.

20

Berried Alive

Wednesday nights were usuallyreserved for three things: cheap wine and cheese plates at Berried Alive, a small bar down by the Flatiron Building decorated in death motifs that skewed more cute than morbid, and bitching about our week. Fiona called it our “Wine and Whine,” though she’d been missing out on the first part of it for the last eight months. Now she picked her way through the cheese plate and lamented about how she missed the taste of a house red. Usually it was just Fiona, Drew, and me, but Juliette had had a particularly terrible week, so we’d invited her along, too.

The wine bar was dead tonight—no pun intended—so we actually managed to get our favorite table in the back in the shape of a skull, and that justtickledFiona. She sat at the top of the skull and cried, “Look, babe, I got a head!” with a cackle, and—not for the first time—Drew looked like she might just walk herself into the sea. We ordered what we always did, cheese plates and cheap house wine, and we started our Wine and Whine session, because it wasnothing if not therapeutic, and none of us couldactuallyafford therapy.

I, personally, just wanted to burrow into the center of the earth and never come out again. Ever since yesterday, I don’t think my heart had—once—calmed down.

“It was good to see you again, Lemon,” Iwan—James, damn it, he was a potential author—had said. Which meant herememberedme.

I knew how to handle a whole host of situations. I knew what numbers to call when my authors were stranded in airports, I knew which journalists to go to first for exclusive scoops, I knew how to make a good first impression, the best words to say to start off on the right foot, butnoneof that was going to help me here.

I kept replaying the meeting in my head, over and over again, trying to pick out the Iwan I knew from the James Ashton seated at the table. The way he just controlled the room the moment the meeting started—it was like I couldn’t look at anyone else—was infuriatingly sexy, and at the same time unattainable.

At the table, Juliette was beginning to spiral about the social media campaign that Rhonda had put her on—something involving a TikTok dance that was, above everything else, just a complete waste of time.

“I can’t even dance!” she cried, burrowing her face in her hands. “Oh,whydid she choose me?”

Fiona said, “You could’ve said no.”

“ToRhonda?” she asked, aghast. “Clementine can, but I certainly can’t, and I like my job.”

Which, to be fair, was true, though Juliette was definitely the stronger of the two of us when it came to genius and unexpected campaigns. A year ago—when I was on vacation—Strauss &Adder had to promote a book titledI Chart the Stars, but the marketing designer had left a typo in an ad that ran in theNew York Timesand, regrettably, on the big jumbotron in Times Square that made it readI Shart the Stars.It immediately blew up on the internet, and everyone started making fun of it, but instead of apologizing and pulling the ads we spentwaytoo much money for, Juliette decided to lean into it with the hashtag#ISHARTTOO.It was only a coincidence that the main character also suffered from IBS, and the author, empowered, came out as a person with IBS as well. It became a whole thing.

And yes, that was the marketing designer Rhonda later fired.

Juliette thought on her feet in a way I absolutely did not, even though I’d worked as a publicist a little longer.

“Well, maybe you can get that new intern to do it?” Drew asked, and Fiona agreed.

“Or the new social media manager? Why don’t you make this her problem?”

“I tried,” she sighed. “She made it my problem again.”

“Well, that’s silly—Clementine, what would you do?” Fiona asked. “Clementine?”

I had my head down, scrolling through Instagram on my phone. Okay, technically asingle profileon Instagram. James Ashton’s. My phone glowed, full of colors from all of the places he’d been, the bright yellow of the Sahara, the deep green of Thailand, the sakura pink of Japan... so many different places, soaking them all in.

Like my aunt.

There were other people on his timeline, too. His agent, Lauren, but also people I assumed he worked with at the Olive Branch. Further back, there were photos of women, too, grinning as he kissed them on the cheek, or as they sat on his lap in intimateposes. Pictures of vacations in the Hamptons and intercontinental trips with exhausted-but-happy girlfriends. None of those women stayed in his feed for long. A few months at most, and then they would disappear, and soon enough another woman would sneak into his life, and another.

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