Page 37 of Rivals to Lovers
“How’s Tahoe?” Wes asked by way of an answer.
“Oh, fine, fine. I drove the ’vette out here. Long ride for the little bugger, but I think it enjoyed stretching its legs. Everything else is coming in a pod later. Have you seen those pods? They put them in the yard, and you pack everything in.”
“Youpacked everything in?”
“Well, I had some people pack things in. Then the truck came, and it met me here. The person that invented that must be rich.”
“You’re rich,” Wes said. The clock on the microwave said 7:55. “Listen, Dad, I have a friend coming over soon. Did you need something?”
A smile came into his dad’s voice. “A friend? A boyfriend or a girlfriend?”
“A girl friend, with a space betweengirlandfriend,” Wes said. “Friend that is a girl.”
“Always so literal. I wanted to make sure you’re all right. I know that it’s a change, but we both love you very much. I’m still here for you. Just—”
“Just in Tahoe.”
“Right, just in Tahoe. But a phone call away.”
“Or I can pack you up in one of those pods and send you back here, huh?”
His dad laughed again, but then turned serious. “Listen, I remember when my parents divorced—”
Wes interrupted him. “Ulla said it was a separation?”
A pause. A throat clearing. “Well, she has her own ways of phrasing things. Marketing them, as she does.”
“Oh,” Wes said. His knees felt weak suddenly. “I didn’t know it was final.”
“I won’t interrupt your time with your friend.” Wes’s father put a slight emphasis on the word but softened it in the next sentence. “But we’re still a family, and I love you, son. I don’t get to tell you enough.”
Wes hung up, disconcerted. He wasn’t thrown by his dad’s affectionate tone—his father had always been a hugger, a feelings sharer, whereas his mother had the buttoned-up manner of someone too used to being burned by people’s uncareful words. His dad was worried that Wes might be worried, which in turn made Wes feel even worse. He leaned into Ulla’s worldview in most things, uncertain how to emote in the same open way his father did, but now Wes wanted to call him back and askWhose idea was it?
The doorbell rang, shaking Wes out of his mental spiral. He threw a last look around the living room, lit a candle on the fireplace, and walked down the stairs to the entryway.
Mo had a bottle of wine in one hand and her manuscript in the other. Wes didn’t bother telling her he had both wine and her book here. He’d managed to hold off reading it so far, waiting for her. His own personal audiobook narrator.
Who Wes had kissed and done much more to. Whose taste he knew. Whose breasts looked really good under her yellow linen jumpsuit.
She handed Wes her pink coat, and he hung it on one of the hooks leading from the stairs up to the main floor. Wes saw her glancing around and tried to take in the place froman outsider’s perspective. Hardwood floors and high ceilings. Mismatched art on the wall he’d collected from flea markets and friends’ art shows. In his main room, a mural of Winnie the Pooh smoking a hookah with Piglet dominated the wall. She gestured at it. “And I’m the one who got in trouble for edibles last weekend?”
“Hookah is only flavored tobacco,” Wes said, hands up in defense. “My friend Ajay made it. They have a show quarterly. This was one of the less risquépieces in their collection.”
“Oh no—hopefully not sexy?”
“No, no. But children’s book characters and drug use was the theme of the show, and some of them got dark. Something about the toll of criminalizing drug abuse? It got a write-up in theTimes.”
She sat on the couch, nestling an orange throw pillow under her elbow to prop herself up. “I don’t have much reason to be in this area often.”
“Well, I don’t have much reason to invite people over, so thanks for coming.”
“Are you sure you’re not midwestern?” she laughed. “That definitely felt like a deferential neighbor about to bring out a casserole.”
“I have absolutely never made a casserole.”
“As a person of Iowan origin, I’m not sure this will work,” she said, then blushed. “Like, bythisI mean being critique partners. My MFA cohort has mostly fallen out of touch, and most of my writing friends in the city are poets.”
“Well, I can’t promise to critique your book,” Wes said. He didn’t want to critique her book. It was one of the things that had made him consider leaving Yuri’s agency before circumstances forced him to. He found that he had been unableto find much to criticize in Maureen’s first novel. Yuri told Wes then that he didn’t have the editorial eye needed to work in this business, and though he’d proved her wrong time and again, he couldn’t help wondering whether, if he had allowed himself more emotional distance from Mo’s first book, found some sort of flaw that no one else could see, she could have whipped it into the kind of shape to be sold. Wes didn’t tell her this, though. He couldn’t tell her that this wasn’t his first time falling in love with one of her projects. Revealing that detail would reveal too much about who he’d been while Yuri’s intern. And what he’d done.
