He considered that. They gave up any pretense of looking at art and sat on wooden chairs stationed near the front of the gallery. “Not writing?”
“No,” she said simply. “I had some friends who worked writing gigs—copywriting for companies, editing for textbooks,freelancing listicles and essays. It all seemed like so many words, draining the well before you even got to the writing you wanted to do. I’m not knocking it—money is money. Personally, I wouldn’t have the creative stamina for that lifestyle, and sadly, I don’t have the family money to just write.”
She didn’t mean it as a jab, but he obviously took it that way from the way his spine straightened. “I work. I work hard.”
“I’m sure you do.”
He ran a hand through his hair and stood. “I didn’t get into agenting with my parents’ help. I applied with a fake name for my first internship, actually. When I got it, when I started working, I had to come clean, but I wanted to start on my own terms. The literary world is its own beast, luckily or unluckily. One that my mother hasn’t tamed. I always wanted to be the person to help books be discovered, to scream about the ones I loved into the universe. It takes a lot of my time. It’s a lot of laptop time. Writing and agenting is—”
“A lot?”
“A lot, yeah. Sometimes all I get are my morning pages. Usually a morning page, singular.”
“I do that too. They’re mostly shit, but it’s good to get it out of my head.”
“I can’t imagine anything you—” He stopped himself. “It’s useful. The lack of filter.”
“It’s nice to be unfiltered sometimes,” she said. “And thank you for complimenting my lips.”
He laughed. “Honesty is hardly a compliment.”
“You have nice lips too,” she said. She didn’t add that she liked talking to him, and that her prose made her breathless. “I ruined the mood.”
His mouth quirked. “Moods have a way of reappearing, at least in Victorian lit.”
“So you’re saying this was foreshadowing?”
“As long as there are no exes in the attic, ready to set fires.”
“At least none that we’ve seen on the tour so far.” She refused to smile at him again. If she did, she was worried she wouldn’t stop. “I need to get my head on straight for tonight. It’s obviously not right now.”
“Fair enough.” He rose and brushed the nonexistent wrinkles out of his shirt. “But while I walk you back to your room, I have to ask: Did you talk about madness in your class? I hated when I saw it in literature as a symptom connected to feminine childbearing or lack of children.”
And of course he had been thinking about that class all along. She laughed, and as they walked, she recited as much of the syllabus as she could remember from almost ten years ago as if she weren’t picturing him naked.
Which was just as well, since Gary stepped into their path just before they got to her room. He seemed surprised to see them walking together, and she was suddenly extremely grateful they were not caught doing anything else. “Estelle’s daughters have arrived,” he said. “Cocktails in fifteen.”
Mo glanced at her phone and saw that it was almost four—later than she had expected. No delaying the inevitable. She was going to meet the people who would control the trust if for some reason Estelle … well, she didn’t want to think about that, especially since she liked Estelle. She also thought Estelle really liked her and her book. She was ready to make a second and third first impression on Estelle’s kids, but she hoped she could still rouse some fighting instinct when her mouth felt bruised from Wes’s kiss. Her kiss too, sheguessed, though she’d never thought about how a kiss really belongs to two people at once. It always felt like she was kissing someone, or she was being kissed, never that two magnetic forces were meeting.
She needed to get her head out of Wes’s mouth and back into her work. Wes gave a wave over his shoulder as he left. “Door open or closed?” he asked.
“Closed.” She had fifteen minutes, and she needed to either climax or cool down, and honestly, it could go either way. Plus reapply her mascara. She needed all the time she could get.
CHAPTER TEN
Wes
Wes came downstairs first, despite needing a few minutes to lie on his bed and stare at the ceiling. He imagined lifting Maureen’s shirt over her head and rumpling her hair. He pictured the softness of her skin under his fingertips and what her low, sweet voice would sound like moaning into his ear. The curse of being a creative. He had more than enough imagination to play the whole scene out to its frustratingly satisfying conclusion.
He needed to stop thinking about her, though, or he wouldn’t make it down the stairs without getting another erection. Attraction or not, this was still a competition. His best skill was charm, and he hoped to introduce himself to Estelle’s daughters before Mo. He hadn’t gone on a tour with Maureen to seduce her, but if that had somehow thrown her off the game, then all the better. Boxing had taught him to get in a jab when the opportunity allowed—but that wasn’t why he’d wanted to see Maureen. In all honesty, he was lonelyand unsettled after the news about his parents. Seeing Mo, walking and talking to her—and eventually kissing her—had been such a shock to the system that it almost made him feel balanced again.
Gary greeted him at the bottom of the steps. His mustache bloomed around his mouth, fuzzy and gray. Wes wondered if Estelle liked it. He had never been much for facial hair, but then again, everyone’s tastes were different. Gary was a good-looking older man, especially in his knit green vest. Gary glanced behind Wes as if waiting for Maureen. “She’s on her way,” Wes said. “Probably soon.”
“You’re attached at the hip, from what it looks like to me,” Gary said, smiling.
At least she’s not my boss,Wes wanted to say, but he refrained. “Lucky for me that the competition turned out to be so interesting.”
He could see Gary wanted to ask something, but Wes didn’t want to answer anything. Instead, Wes asked, “What do you think of our chapters so far?”