Page 5 of Absolute Certainty
Willa came up and hugged her from behind. “I got really sentimental last night and cried to Ethan about how much I love you.”
“Aww, babe. Are you on your period?”
“He asked me that, too, and no. The picture you posted made me really emotional.”
Ah, the picture.Last night, Sahar had been feeling reflective, so she’d edited one of her favorite photos from her birthday last year. Conveniently, even though Martin was there, he hadn’t been in any of the photographs. Because why would he be when he was being a pissy dick all night.
The one Sahar had posted was one of her, Willa, Ethan, Sam, Priya, Declan, Carmen, Miles, Naomi, Jeanie, and Christian. She had a thing about editing the photos she took with various filters, adding a Polaroid frame, and posting them with a white background on her feed.
See, romanticism. She’d even done it with photographs.
Sahar squeezed Willa’s arms. “I love you the most.”
“And I loveyou,” Willa returned before plopping herself down on her chair. “Oh, and Sam’s been going on about how weneed to get pizza today and eat together during break because our team building is lacking. Whatever that means.”
“As in the whole cast?”
“Yeah,” Willa confirmed.
Sahar let out a laugh. “We thought our separation anxiety was bad. Sam starts malfunctioning when we go a week without bonding.”
“And this is why when the show ends, we have to come as a package deal.”
When the show ends.
Willa couldn’t have known that Sahar was mulling over that very same idea. Her heart threatened to crack in half at the thought of an uncertain future.
Not now.
There was time, still.
She had the summer and the fall and the winter, too.
But she was determined more than anything to ensure that, unlike last summer, she wouldn’t spend this one chained inside the storyboard of a worthless man’s happiness.
2
JAY
It was barely noon, and he’d already kicked out one person for harassing Dahlia and another for walking into the shop buck naked. Jay was almost always irritable at work, but especially on the days when he spent the night prior tossing and turning and then getting shitty news during his break.
With a pounding headache, he stared at the digital clock located at the corner of the screen as he made a quick adjustment for tomorrow’s schedule.
Less than two hours to go.
The spreadsheet blurred in front of him as his mind trailed back to the conversation he’d just had with Sahar. Leaning back against the cheap fabric-swivel chair in the coffee shop’s breakroom, Jay took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
He appreciated the fact that Sahar wanted to read his work, but what would she think of him after? There was something extremely daunting about sharing your screenplay—anything—with people you admired, so his brain was now doing an excellent job of convincing him that his ability to write was mediocre at best, and she’d run the moment she read anything from him.At this point, he was also sure that at the age of eight, his daughter Eloise was more talented.
Jay was no stranger to the metaphorical snares of insecurity, but because he wanted to impress Sahar, it was twice as agonizing now.
The two of them had only ever talked about other people’s crafts, never their own, and it felt wrong to even think about or want her good opinion. She had a boyfriend. He knew as much because even though Jay wasn’t on social media, she’d once mentioned that her boyfriend wasn’t a gamer.
An exasperated sigh tumbled out of him. He put his glasses back on and stood up. He needed to get back to the front of the shop and stop thinking about her. Butfuck, every time he saw her and every time they spoke, it grew harder for Jay to deny that he was enraptured by her. And there was still much to learn about her outside of what he already knew, like she was a Man City football fan, a gamer, a Broadway actress, and always, without fail, a ray of light.
He also couldn’t deny that he loved the way his name sounded falling from her lips. He couldn’t ignore the fact that she awakened something in him every time she walked into the shop and saidhi.Jay hated his name, tarnished and foul, because he knew his deadbeat father chose it. But when Sahar said it… It was different somehow.
It was soft and honeyed in her husky voice.
