Page 19 of Breakout Year
Akiva’s heart rate, already up from caffeine, elevated a little more—until Eitan’s next message arrived a second later.
Eitan: To get caught up.
“What’s got you so jumpy today?” Sue asked when they were back in her car and making slow progress through the drive-through line. PT made her want coffee, and Akiva wasn’t above bribery to get her to actually go, even if she always insisted that he use her card to pay.
Akiva startled. “I am not jumpy.”
“Sure,” she said innocently. Too innocently. He’d known Sue long enough—for the five years since she’d found him on a freelancer website and hired him to be her assistant—to know when her mystery-writer hackles were raised.
He distracted himself shouting their orders into the speaker—black cold brew for him, an iced double-shot and double-whip confection for her—and got the static of a response. Chances were that he’d have to go in and clarify what he’d asked for but at least that would spare him this conversation.
The drive-through line crawled steadily forward until they were by the takeout window. He paid and retrieved the cardboard holder with their cups. He held Sue’s cup out to her, waited until she had it secured in both hands before he let go. Her hands weren’t shaking, now, but soreness from PT could take a while to set in, accompanied by sudden weakness. He’d stocked her glove compartment with a stack of napkins, just in case.
“How are my slides coming along?” she asked after she’d taken a gurgling sip of coffee. That had been clear from the beginning: she liked to know what he was working on in an exacting amount of detail. If I’m paying for your time, I wanna know how it’s spent. To which he’d said, Sure, just so long as you pay me.
So he ran through his to-dos, estimated dates for when he’d send files, when he’d have research ready, when he’d answer her emails and look over various proofs and and and…
The work of writing was never really done. Especially when so little of it had to do with actually writing the books themselves. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll be ready for next week’s event.”
Sue tsked. “I never worry that you aren’t working hard enough.”
“I, uh, might need to take a night off next week.” He wasn’t sure why he was telling her this: he got to set his own hours, even if the expectation was that he was relatively available. But something about this whole situation with Eitan felt like it was sitting too close under the surface of his skin. “After the bookstore event, I mean. I have a friend in town.”
Sue’s eyebrows—also dyed jet black—rose. “A friend?”
“Yes, I have those.”
“What’s different about them that they warrant such an introduction?”
“Mystery writers, always so suspicious.”
Sue laughed. “I know a deflection when I hear one. Fine, whoever this friend is, do I get to meet them?”
“He—”
“Oh, he?—”
“Yes, he just moved to town.” Akiva had no intention of getting into Eitan’s trade, or the press conference he’d watched twice already when he should have been answering email: Eitan, smiling his way through a New York media interrogation, not defenseless so much as sincere. Which was probably worse. “Just, I haven’t told him a lot about our business.”
Another Sue tsk. “I should hope not.” Because his arrangement with Eitan wasn’t the only thing covered by an NDA. “You must really like this one,” she said. “And it’ll be good for you to get out of that house. You spend too much time in front of a screen.”
“I’m mostly working to make sure I can stay in that house,” Akiva said.
“If you need a loan…”
Another long-simmering argument. What Akiva didn’t need was another color-coded square. “Thank you but no,” he said. “And if you need me to cancel on my, uh, friend, just say so.”
“You sound like you’re looking for an excuse not to see him.” Sue took another long pull of coffee. “Is he awful?” Asked with professional interest, because Sue kept a list of awful men for when she needed the occasional villain.
“No, he’s not awful. He’s—” Akiva cut himself off. And if he focused on completing a precise left-hand turn rather than finishing that sentence, it was mostly so he didn’t have to see the look Sue was throwing him across the center console.
7
Akiva
Rain came the next week, a gush of it, a summer storm that arrived on Sunday night and didn’t leave, pouring like water from an overturned cup. Monday morning, Eitan texted Happy weekday shabbat, along with a selfie, Eitan on his couch in sweatpants and a thin T-shirt, halfway asleep. Too much for just being back in touch, and Akiva paused for all of twenty seconds before he saved it as Eitan’s contact picture.
That was all the romanticism Akiva got about rain. His roof didn’t leak, at least, but humidity swelled the walls of his house. His power flickered with every gust of wind.
