Page 56 of Rivals to Lovers
Mackenzie smiled and patted Mo’s legs. “We keep missing each other this week. No ratport or anything. You doing well?”
“It’s busy. I’m busy. You’re busy.”
Mackenzie nodded emphatically. The head librarian at her branch had delegated some of the programming planning to her, and the planning and running of events had eaten into her supposed off-hours. “I love it, though. Do you love”—she smiled through pressed-together lips—“what you’re doing in the evenings?”
Mo squinted at her. “I’m working.”
“Oh, when you’ve been at Wesley Spencer’s place, that’s workingsomething, I bet.”
Maureen hoped the light wasn’t bright enough in here to see her telltale blush. She could feel it, though, starting at her chest and moving up to her cheeks. “I haven’t even seen him this week. And I don’t know what’s going on.”
Mackenzie laughed at that and patted Mo’s legs again. “Oh, sure, okay. I believe that. I noticed what his name was on your phone, by the way.”
Mo hadn’t changed it, true. She handed the phone to Mackenzie. “My sister did that. You can change it back to show you I don’t care.”
Mackenzie picked up Mo’s phone, looking victorious. When her finger was obviously swiping up, Mo reached for the phone again. “Hey, hey, hey,” she said. “No reading the texts!”
“I am not reading the texts; I am taking in the number of them. This is quantitative, not qualitative analysis.”
“Stop with your master’s-in-library-and-information-science-speak,” Mo said.
“Fine.” Mackenzie relinquished the phone again after a few more taps. “Here.”
Mo glanced at her contact for Wes, which had a picture of him that had auto-populated when she’d added him—something he had saved on his phone that shared with her phone. She liked the picture, him smiling behind aviator sunglasses, his tangled mess of curls standing up. It made her want to reach through the phone and brush it with her hands. Then she glanced at the name Mackenzie had typed in.
“King Sex God?” Mo asked, laughing. She waved the fork at Mackenzie. “If you hadn’t made me a delicious breakfast, this would not stand.”
“I don’t think you do much standing around him. Ouch!”
Mo had hit her with the backside of the fork this time. “Keep it up, and you’ll get the tines.”
Mackenzie scooted off and ran to the doorway. “I’m glad you’re getting anything!”
Mo laughed, shoving the rest of the pancake in her mouth. She was tired after a night of dreams about getting all ofitthat she wanted, and the pancakes weren’t filling the need she felt the most right now, but they were something. And something made with love, that was for sure.
On her walk from the subway to work, Mo checked her email. On a Sunday, she wasn’t expecting anything too serious, but she was surprised to see a notification from her writing email account. That email was a sacred space—she didn’t even give out that email to her mom. It was the place she got news from Yuri, and the place where so many years ago she’d gotten the ask for a phone call with her. Her writing email had received multipleNew Yorkerrejections, including one saying,Keep submitting—this is promising, but not for us at this time.It was the place where she had gotten acceptances and notifications of all the major moments of her writing life, and looking through the archived emails, you could almost sense her career’s dips and rises.
So what would this new notification bring: a dip or a rise?
Mo opened it, surprised to see an email from Gary, Estelle’s assistant. Maureen had looked for news about Estelle’s condition, but she hadn’t found anything. She was grateful to hear from him. She skimmed the message while walking, staying to the side of the walkway to avoid bumping intoanyone. By the time she arrived at work, she felt like she’d left her stomach on the concrete behind her. Estelle was doing worse and had been checked into the hospital again. She’d had a chance to finish the book and loved it, but—Gary put it as kindly as he could—Flor and Talia had also “tried to read it” too.
Tried to? Mo wondered what had caught them off guard. Couldn’t they see how their grandmother’s original book needed a sharper critique on wealth distribution? How it begged to take on traditional narratives of the home, of the hierarchy of women’s labor versus what men traditionally did? Mo could see them scrunching their noses, saying, “Oh, this is toopoliticalfor the classics,” as ifA Tale of Two Citiesweren’t political. As if Shakespeare weren’t political. As if Thoreau, for all his “mom is secretly doing his laundry while he’s chilling at Walden Pond,” weren’t political. Their grandmother’s work was political too, even to the act of it having to be published under her initials. A few years ago, there had been talk of rereleasing it under her full name, but critics put a stop to it. No, E. J. hadn’t identified herself as Emma Jean while writing it, and modern readers should take it with that context in mind.
Mo couldn’t respond to the email, mostly because her hands were shaking too badly. She knew Gary was writing this while stressed about Estelle’s health, plus juggling Estelle’s daughters. She felt deeply for him, this man who managed so many other people’s lives. Mo hadn’t gotten to know him well, but from what she could see from their limited interactions, he seemed like a lake of a man—placid on its surface, but teeming with life and activity underneath that she might not understand or be able to see. She would reply tomorrowmorning after she’d gotten a full night of sleep, but for now she needed to focus not on the dreams that had brought her to New York but on the job that would keep her here.
As she began prep for the first wedding of the day, her phone chimed. “Sorry,” she said to Amy. “I forgot to silence it.”
Amy looked up from the saltshakers she was filling—the bride had bought them special for the occasion, not trusting the standard glass saltshakers to apply salt in a fancy enough manner. “It’s fine. We still have half an hour before the rest of the staff arrives. Bridal party and guests aren’t due for an hour.”
Mo dug out her phone. A text from Wes, still listed as King Sex God. She bit her lip at the name, trying not to think about the oral sex he’d given after breakfast at his place, her in the kitchen chair and him on the floor below her. She couldn’t getthatoff track. His text scrubbed dirty thoughts from her head.Hey, I heard from Gary and wanted to let you know Estelle isn’t doing so well.
Mo knew this, but now she wondered not how the messages they’d gotten from Gary had been the same but how they differed. What words of praise or adoration had Flor and Talia asked Gary to communicate to Wes, or had he heard those from the women directly?
Of course, Mo had already finished reading his manuscript on the plane ride. She hadn’t been back over to tell him that. She’d somehow refrained from texting him her favorite lines, but she had underlined three dozen of them. She didn’t want him to know yet how much his book had moved her, and it didn’t seem like the full weight of her love of the book could be sent through text. She thought of words that blurbs someday might use to describe the book—sad, but lyrical and thought-provoking—and yet those words alone didn’tdemonstrate how it moved her. His interpretation made Mo see the original text in a new way, even though it was set in the same time period and even though Eliza’s character was, well, very normal. So normal that her flaws showed through in Clive’s eyes, so normal that Mo realized how adept Wes was at noticing people’s flaws. She didn’t want to think about how many he might have noticed in her.
Mo considered a text back, starting and erasing one several times. She settled on the shortest message she could, one that kept her cards close to her chest.Sorry to hear that. Thanks for letting me know.She sent it, then read back how impersonal it looked. How office-speak, how default-response. She waited for a few seconds to see if he would respond with something else, but he didn’t.
Maureen was too afraid of how he would take an honest statement from her now, a serious question. She was afraid he’d misread her tone or read too deeply—or too correctly—into how scared she was that this was her last chance to make a project work with Yuri, maybe even to be able to rationalize staying in the city. After all, she could fail much more cheaply from Iowa.
