Page 20 of Seven Days in June

Perfect jeans; rugged boots; expensive watch; sinewy, lanky build; two-day stubble; simple white tee. Could’ve been Hanes or Helmut Lang. Fuck him—it was exactly what she wished she were wearing.

How am I gonna survive this?

A blond journalist Eva recognized fromPublishers Weeklyraised her hand. Cece nodded in her direction.

“Speaking of Eight,” started the blonde, “you’ve gotten some flak for writing exclusively from a female point of view. Is that fair? As a man, do you feel qualified to speak from a feminine place?”

At this point, Eva, Belinda, and Khalil were effectively back-burnered.

Shane chewed his bottom lip and stared into his mic, like it held the answers to every mystery. “I guess…I don’t think a lot about whether or not I’m qualified to do things. I just do them.”

“But it’s a ballsy move, as a man, to explore young female angst in such an intimate way.”

“I don’t think I’m exploring female angst. I’m just…writing a character? Who has angst.” He rubbed his hands on his jeans, looking deeply uncomfortable. “Novelists should stretch beyond their experience, right? If I can’t adequately manage a female voice, then I’m probably in the wrong profession and should revise my LinkedIn.”

“Oh! Do you have LinkedIn?”

“No,” he said, his eyes playful. To Cece, he whispered, “Told you I was bad at this.”

And in that moment, whatever was holding Eva together snapped. Suddenly she was volcanically offended by his existence. She’d worked herself into a frenzy prepping for this event, running lines with Audre, and squeezing into this dress, but Shane was allowed to be exactly himself. His whole career, he’d done whatever the hell he’d wanted—evading interviewers, dropping off the face of the planet, sleepwalking through events Eva would kill to be invited to—and generally been awarded for bad behavior in a way that, in the history of creative pursuits, no female artist had ever been indulged. Women didn’t get to be bad boys.

“I don’t think; I just do.”

Shane made it all look so easy. Everything Eva did was so effortful. And the worst part? This was supposed to be her moment to prove that she was a legitimate author, a force to be reckoned with. And it was shot to hell the second the One Who Mattered showed up. Was this even her real life, or a Mona Scott-Young production?

For all these reasons—as well as the older, darker ones—she had to say something.

“I hear what the reporter’s saying,” started Eva, slowly, to quell the tremble in her voice. “You’re co-opting an experience you know nothing about. Eight’s troubled. She self-harms. She’s suicidal. And you idealize it, making her this adorable, sad chick. Depression isn’t a ‘catastrophe of a girl’ weeping a single, pretty tear while gazing out of rain-streaked windows and dropping one-liners. Depression is tragic. Eight is tragic. And a male writer romanticizing female mental illness is inappropriate.”

“You’re right,” Shane said. He scratched his jaw slowly, thinking, and then dragged his eyes over to Eva. For the first time, she met his gaze. Which was a mistake.

The air had gotten thick. They both blinked. Once, twice, and then continued to stare at one another. Not stare. Gawk. With such single-minded focus that the crowd was forgotten. The event was forgotten.

Belinda and Khalil sat between them, looking back and forth like they were in the stands at Wimbledon. Cece’s eyes grew to anime proportions. What were they witnessing?

“It’s true. I’m not a woman,” started Shane.

“Exactly.”

“And you’re not a vampire. Or a man.”

“Bloop,” muttered Belinda.

“And yet Sebastian? He’s one of the most vivid, true portrayals of masculinity I’ve ever read. Especially in the third and fifth books. Sebastian literally and figuratively sucks the life out of everything around him. And he’ll drain Gia one day, too—heknowshe will—but he can’t stop himself from loving her. Maybe it’s ’cause he knows that in the end, she’ll survive him. He knows Gia’s tougher than him. By virtue of being a woman, she’s stronger. Girls are given the weight of the world, but nowhere to put it down. The power and magic born in that struggle? It’s so terrifying to men that we invented reasons to burn y’all at the stake, just to keep our dicks hard.” He paused. “You made Gia’s magic broom ten times stronger than Sebastian’s fangs. Witch trumps monster. Tells me everything I need to know about why men are scared of women.”

Eva was too stunned to breathe. Against her better judgment, her eyes locked with Shane’s again. Whatever he saw there made him hesitate for a moment. But then he kept going.

“You’re not a man,” he continued, “but you write the fuck out of ambivalent masculinity. You’re not a man and it doesn’t matter, because you write with sharpened senses and notice the unnoticed, and your creative intuition’s so powerful you can rock any narrative to sleep. Yousee. And youwrite. With Eight, I do the same thing.” He eyed her with an unmistakable familiarity. “I’m just not as good as you.”

Belinda leaned over to Khalil and whispered, “You wanna reopen thefluffconversation, or you good?”

Eva’s jaw went a little slack. Light-headed, she nodded in slow motion. She would not let him see how thunderstruck she was. And she refused to let him have the last word.

“Well,” she managed. “That was quite the interpretation.”

“It was quite the read,” he said, his voice low.

“Yours…too.”

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