Page 10 of Rivals to Lovers
A man opened the door and introduced himself as Gary, Estelle’s assistant, and ushered them inside. Taking their bags, he gestured down a long hallway. “I’ll take these up to your rooms. It’s about thirty minutes until dinner, if you’d care to freshen up.”
Gary took their bags upstairs, leaving Wes and Mo together in the entryway. Long, paneled corridors led down either way toward different wings of the house. Amazing to be in a house withwings. It felt almost as likely as being on top of an eagle with them. She stifled an internal image of Gandalf atop an eagle. She didn’t know why her anxiety manifested asLord of the Ringsreferences. Gazing upward, she pictured herself back in time. This was the placeE. J. Morgan had lived when she wroteProud and the Lost. This place might have inspired some of the caged feeling of luxury, but E. J. hadn’t moved out of it from her birth to her death.
Don’t think about the fact that E. J. Morgan died here.
Mo cleared her mind, breathing deeply, and turned to Wes. He was designated to be the receptacle of her non–Lord of the Rings–released anxiety because, hilariously, she had known him the longest of all these strangers. “I can’t believe I’m here in her house.”
“It’s surreal to be in the house of a person whose book you’re adapting,” he agreed, and she suddenly felt how perceptive he was. He might be rich and powerful, but he was insightful too. How lucky for your emotional conduit to have that kind of empathetic sense.
“It is beautiful here.”
Wes shrugged his acknowledgment. “It’s beautiful but not charming, if you see what I mean.”
Mo did, and agreed, but also wondered if that was how Wes saw her too. Or maybe if that’s how she saw him.
When she got up to her room, she texted Yuri.Here safe. Wes Spencer gave me a ride.She would also not mention the LinkedIn embarrassment, how cute he was, or how much she wanted to rub her hands along his finely knit sweater.
Be careful around him!!was Yuri’s instantaneous reply.
Double exclamation marks. She bit her lip, wondering what more dirt another publishing insider could provide on this man. She noticed the three dots and waited for more details. She wandered around her room and marveled at its lovely simplicity. The windows looked out over the large front lawn. She pictured E. J. Morgan crossing that lawn andwalking up the stairs she just had. Even, perhaps, sitting in this room. Writing here? Anything was possible.
The room included an en suite bathroom and a plush yellow bedspread. She ran her hand over it and felt the soft release of the down under her fingers. After rinsing her face and reapplying makeup, she checked her phone again. Yuri had left her a paragraph response, whose first few words wereOkay, so don’t hate me, but here’s what’s going on this weekend—
Mo sat back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She wasn’t here to wow Estelle. She had competition, and that competition was in the room across the hall.
CHAPTER FIVE
Wes
For dinner, Estelle’s chef had made roast pork and pineapple with a side of roasted brussels sprouts and a chewy, fresh baguette. So chewy that Wes had difficulty speaking, which was fine, because Estelle and Maureen seemed to be hitting it off famously without him.
It had to be pork, of all things. They couldn’t have eaten chicken to give this rival less ammo to charm Estelle with. No, it turned out that of course Mo would basically have read the tarot cards of the pig they were ingesting.
“I wasn’t raised on a pig farm,” Mo clarified after the first five minutes of the discussion. Wes couldn’t stop watching her, not even when she unselfconsciously put a bite of the former Babe in her mouth. A tiny little Gordy covered with sauce. A delicious little Wilbur … the more Wes spun out the thought, the less hungry he was and the more curious he was about why kids were so fascinated with pigs.
Maureen had been a little quiet at the beginning of dinner, shooting Wes sideways glances that made him wonder what she had Googled about him upstairs. Something had happened, that was for sure, but when the main course was brought out, pork talk began. And, it seemed, was never going to end.
“My mother was raised on a hog farm, and she and my dad took over the farm after my grandparents passed. So I wasn’t raised around hogs, but I spent summers with them. My parents took over the operation after I left for college.”
Wes did not interject with an anecdote about where he summered, mostly because his May-through-August periods were bougie enough to use the verbsummerfor. He imagined the conjugation on a blackboard in chalk:I summered in Tuscany. You summered in Tuscany. He/She/It did not summer in Tuscany. We summered in Tuscany, but sometimes also in Laos or San Pedro Island. They summered near pig excrement.
Estelle was charmed by the description of a life completely unlike her own. Rural exceptionalism, that’s what it was. Just because Maureen was brought up on or around a farm didn’t make her somehow more moral or worthy, although Wes had to admit he couldn’t think of anyone he knew who grew up on a farm. He represented a diverse range of clients in terms of race, sexuality, genre, and education, but he didn’t send any of their royalty checks to a soybean field.
“When I was growing up, my grandparents kept about a hundred hogs, but that’s more like two hundred today. And my dad is in construction, always has been, so he helped build the new facility for them.” Maureen’s voice was steady, but fifteen minutes into the discussion, even she sounded a littlebored by the topic. She pushed a brussels sprout around her plate.
“Can you smell them from the house?” Wes asked. His appetite for pork was completely gone, but both Estelle and Maureen had eaten their portions without issue. His three rounds of pale flesh stared up from a bed of cranberry dressing. Tiny Peppa covered in red sauce. He might never eat pork again.
“Yes and no. The buildings are better ventilated than they used to be. You can be within a hundred feet of the confinement and not smell anything. And it’s not like we do the processing of the hogs on-site, so there’s not—” Maureen paused. “Anyway, pigs aren’t really a passion for me. That’s why I’m here. Well,here, yes, but also why I’m in New York in general.”
The dinner plates were cleared by one staff member as another put down a small crème brûlée in front of each guest. The tops were perfectly toasted to a coconut tan, and Wes tapped the top with the back of a spoon. The sugar top gave with a crack, and he dug into the rich custard.
“Does all of your family live in Iowa?” Estelle asked, her brain unwilling to move on from the topic that both Maureen and Wes were obviously over. Maureen looked across the table from Wes with a complicated look. In it, he read how apologetic she was about the continuation of the conversation, but also how trapped she was. He smiled at her, chest warming. At least she realized it, and he wasn’t envious of the attention. He knew only too well how much it felt like being consumed to have your family life picked apart.
Maureen put a spoonful of dessert in her mouth before she spoke. She closed her eyes while she tasted, and Wes realized how long her lashes were. When she opened them again,the spoon was still in her mouth, lightly held in her fingertips. She pulled it out smoothly, tongue peeking barely from between her pink lips. She did have a farm girl freshness in her looks. That braid down her back, blonde and sweet, was something he could picture parted. Two Pippi pigtails, braided across her shoulders.
Finally, she spoke, putting the spoon beside the custard. “Yes. We’re sixth generation or something like that. My parents were high school sweethearts. To find the love of your life in a high school with a graduating class of about forty is incredible luck. And my little sister lives about twenty minutes from my parents. She’s getting married this summer.”
“Do you get to see them often?” Gary asked.
