Page 22 of Rivals to Lovers
She stopped then and turned around. “How did you know my nickname?”
A couple that had been walking behind them veered around her stopped position. Wes steered Mo to the edge of the sidewalk, in front of Diane’s Books. He realized it was the first time he had said “Mo” aloud and not Maureen. He didn’t want her to suspect he knew anything about her. God, especially not about him having a Google alert on her name.
“Lucky guess. I had a friend named Maureen that I called Mo.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, looking more closely at him. She bit her lip, a lip she had obviously already been gnawing on because it looked pink and plump.Don’t look at her lips, Wes. Rule one.“You’ve read my stuff.” Her tone was certain.
“What?”
“You laughed at me for following you on LinkedIn, but you’ve read my short stories! I sometimes publish under the name Mo Denton. You’ve read my work.”
He absolutely had. He had, in fact, read through all the ones he could find last night in bed when he couldn’t sleep. She had a short story inAlaska Quarterlylast year, and one inPloughshares. She had an achingly perfect flash fiction inSplit Lip’s print edition, and she had posted on Threads about a close call withThe New Yorker. With her talent, and a little luck, she would be in it someday, he was sure. “I liked what you read this morning. Where have you been published?”
She raised an eyebrow and kept walking. “Fine. Never mind. But realize that I won’t be bulldozed over about my ice cream opinions.”
“Why do I feel like challenging someone from the Midwest on their dairy choices is a battle I can’t win,” he mused aloud.
“Get used to losing, Wesley Spencer. I intend to pay your mother back for that dress.”
With that jab, their route circled back to the car, and having wasted all the time they could that morning, they headed back to the Hill. Lunch loomed, then dinner with more of the family, and he would have to pretend he hadn’t seen Mo in the dress she carried over her arm. He had to pretend because if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to scrounge up the competitive spirit to fight for his book articulately.Get used to losing,she had said. Seeing her in the dress, seeing her expression soften this morning as they shared a joke, made him want to roll over on his back and expose his soft parts to her like any beta male in a wolf pack. She could go for his throat if he thought about those lips too hard. God, he wanted her to go for his throat.
He needed to get back on his game.
CHAPTER NINE
Mo
Maureen thought about texting her friends an honest play-by-play of the weekend, including the private performance of her book, getting too high to function in front of her rival, meeting a media bigwig with her own brand of dish soap, then trash-talking that bigwig’s son constantly, mostly to his too-attractive face. Her body had stopped making cortisone hours ago, maxed out. Maybe that was why the reading over lunch had gone so well. Instead of mentioning any of this, she texted them a simpleHi, I love you both. Please send Perkins pixas she lay on her bed, digesting both her lunch and the weekend so far.
Mo had thought she would nap, but instead she stared at the ceiling. Wes’s second reading had been good. Really good. They hadn’t coordinated their readings from the middle of the book, but both had selected their interpretations of the dinner party scene from near the center point of the novel. Wes finally hit on that latent sexual tension between Clive and Perkins that he’d talked about in the car, and Mo couldsee what he meant about the undertones in the book. The way he wrote about Clive looking at his longtime friend and knowing he wanted him was electrifying. The whole setup, this artifice of adulthood when the main characters were only in their early twenties. And still—they were adults. They had been through war and parenthood, but the longing, awkward and almost adolescent, remained. It was a potent scene, and Mo wanted to flip ahead to the next chapter after he finished. She could picture him reading that selection on a stage in three years, accepting some major literary prize.
She knew he looked good in a tux.
During the reading, she’d focused on his fingers, watching them curl around his paper, and wanted to ask what instrument he played growing up. She was certain, after meeting Ulla for only an hour, that he had been forced to play something. To distract herself from his body, she had made mental guesses—maybe violin from a young age, Suzuki method. Mo bet he’d been sat down with a bow at age two and performed for guests at the mansion. He came from such a different universe. Mo had played the kazoo from the cereal box, the recorder in fourth grade, and a miserable rental clarinet through middle school. Mo could tell her parents really loved her because they recorded those god-awful concerts and would probably show them off as proudly as Ulla had shown her a picture of Wes in his boarding school uniform (he had a plaid tie!).
Mo’s reading was the same party but spun forward eighty years. An upscale patio barbecue—polo shirts for the men and wrap dresses for the women. There was wine, and the characters were just old enough to have the right kind of matching glassware. Mo’s Eliza—Liza—was restless, herdress itchy and her period late. In the scene, Liza sipped her wine and thought about ultrasounds, the way they revealed things you only suspected.
Mo couldn’t look at Wes after finishing her chapter. She hated that her first impulse was to check his face or ask him what he thought. She thought about the way he described gelato and ice cream, how ice cream was served so cold it numbed the flavor out, and she wondered if prose could do that too—be too cold and emotionally distant to let the flavor and feeling come through. She wanted to ask him,Could you taste it? Could you taste my scene?Instead, she complained of a headache, thanked Estelle for lunch, and retreated to lie down. Soon, though, the rest of the family would arrive, and Mo would have to be on her best behavior again.
She draped an arm over her eyes, wishing she could nap. She rolled to her side, then heard the tap on the door. “Who is it?” she called.
“It’s Wes.”
She sat up and smoothed down her hair. He didn’t deserve to see her ruffled. She refused to give him the satisfaction of flyaways. “Come in. It’s unlocked.”
He opened the door and stood in the hallway. Instead of entering, he lingered near the door and stared at her. The look wasn’t full of antipathy or calculation but instead, unless she misread it, confusion. Confusion, as if he hadn’t been the one to knock on her door. After a few seconds of silence, the air between them was thick enough to slather with jam and take a bite of.
“Hi,” he said. “How’s your head?”
“Better when someone isn’t asking me how it is,” she said honestly. “But it’s okay. Thanks.”
“I was taking a self-tour of the house and thought you might want to come too. You said you hadn’t been here before.”
The offer was nice, too nice to turn down. She had considered wandering around by herself. She stuffed her phone in her back pocket and nodded.
The started on the ground floor and wound through the empty rooms from one wing to the other. Drawing room, morning room, guest room—the spaces blurred together as they walked from one to another. As they walked, Maureen couldn’t help but show off her knowledge of the Hill, and of Morgan, finding comfort in his rebuttals with his own tidbits. “These bas-reliefs were originally Morgan’s sketches, some of them self-portraits,” Wes said, to which Maureen could reply, “And the materials came from local quarries.”
As they passed a tapestry in an alcove, Wes paused and pointed to the intricate threadwork. “That’s E. J.,” he said, gesturing up at the woman stitched there. Her eyes were light brown, the same color as her hair, and her hands were folded in her lap on top of a notebook.
