Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE WRITER TM – Montage scene of the creative character producing their craft. It will only take them, like, a few wistful gazes into the sunset to produce an entire book that requires zero edits before becoming an instant bestseller.

S awyer kicked off her shoes in the entryway, too exhausted to put them in the hall closet or carry them to her bedroom. She hadn’t met that many new people in so long, and while there hadn’t been the explosion she’d expected following the LA announcement, the tension of not talking about it was almost worse. She threw her ruined tights in the trash with a barely suppressed smirk. She’d meant to make a point that it was a one-time thing, but then she’d gotten caught up in the feel of him, all the tension from the evening finally getting some release.

Trudging to the bathroom on leaden feet, Sawyer went through her face-hair-teeth routine on autopilot. She was drained, the tension at the dinner table a little too close to home, so at odds with the jelly feeling in her bones after an orgasm. By the time she crawled into bed, groaning like her body was much older than twenty-six, her mind was no longer on the Wests or the Greenes. Her characters swirled through her mind, and she wondered what their family gatherings would be like. She jotted a few ideas into her Notes app before plugging her phone in to charge. Burrowing deeper under the covers, she willed her brain to shut off.

She lasted all of five minutes. Rolling over to write down another idea, she typed until her arms began to ache with the effort of holding her phone aloft without dropping it on her face. With a sigh, she resigned herself to getting out of bed. It wasn’t just her partners that her wily imagination and unpredictable bouts of inspiration drove crazy. It wasn’t always fun for her either. Well, that was untrue. She loved writing with a fierceness even she couldn’t put into words. But that didn’t make staying up until two in the morning after an already long day any less draining.

When she’d finally managed to empty her brain, she had two new chapters drafted and a hodgepodge of scattered dialogue for upcoming scenes. She’d started writing at the kitchen table, but her body demanded cushions, so she’d wound up on the couch. It was worse for her, hunching over her laptop like that, but the blankets and throw pillows had been too tempting to resist. She saved and triple saved her progress before shoving her laptop onto the coffee table and falling sideways onto the couch, allowing it to fully consume her. She would rest her eyes for a few minutes, then move to the bed.

Sawyer woke up with the sun, a crick in her neck and more ideas demanding to be written. She forced herself to get up, brew a pot of tea, and eat something before allowing herself to be re-consumed by the words and the couch cushions.

She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, typing, staring, typing, deleting, retyping, until her phone buzzed. She had no idea where it even was. Upending pillows and blankets, she found it wedged between two cushions, but the call had already gone to voicemail. Mason.

“Shit,” she swore. She’d been writing for hours. Her back popped as she stretched, wincing at the ache in her muscles from her shit posture. She dragged her laptop and a blanket back to her kitchen table before unlocking her phone.

She couldn’t call him back right now, not when the words were flowing so easily, flowing for the first time in years. But after what they’d done last night, she should say something .

Opening their text thread, she saw two texts from him that she hadn’t seen, phone eaten by couch and all. Shit. The first, a tentative Hey and the second, Sawyer? Shit, shit, shit. She’d been too lost in the new world beginning to come into focus in front of her to check her phone.

sorry, writing. text you later?

Was that too brusque? Her fingers hovered over the keys, and she shook her head in frustration. She could write thousands of words in a day, but one simple text was nearly debilitating.

She should say more after what they’d done in his car last night, but to Sawyer, it felt like a million years ago, another person. She wasn’t Sawyer right now. She was a conduit for this story that she needed to get out of her. She hadn’t felt this kind of urgency to write in a long time, and she wasn’t going to let it slip through her fingers, wasn’t going to dwell on what Last Night Sawyer had initiated in Mason’s car, how to explain to Mason it was a one-time thing because Horny Sawyer’s leash had slipped. That was a problem for Tomorrow Sawyer. Or maybe Never Sawyer. She hoped her lame five-word text would suffice for now, that Mason would understand that in this moment, her words were reserved for the page.

Before she could hit the button to turn off her screen, three little dots appeared. She held her breath, a smile breaking across her face at his response: a GIF of Patrick from SpongeBob waving flags with the caption “Rooting for you.”

She exhaled a laugh before putting her phone face down on the table, sinking back into the chair that was now permanently molded to the shape of her ass. It was a long time before the smile faded from her face, a warmth spreading through her, fueling her as her fingers flew across the keys. It had been so long since she had someone in her corner, rooting for her. A void in her she hadn’t known she’d had, slowly filling up to the brim.

She lost track of time again, letting the words flow. The scenes were messy and imperfect, but she needed to finish this draft. It was quickly becoming her lifeline. She needed to prove to herself that she could still do this. That she could still tell stories, that she hadn’t gotten her dream job and ruined it. That in all her rookie juggling, she hadn’t dropped her gift. She had to believe that this skill she’d honed since she was a child—first telling herself stories during her father’s sermons that she could never seem to pay attention to, then to distract herself from the muffled sounds of her parents’ fighting in the next room over—that she could still use it to create joy rather than hide pain. Creating safe spaces to disappear into when the real world became too much.

She couldn’t think about that right now either. Thinking about her family required many hours of therapy and staring at walls. So she shoved those thoughts down, down much deeper than her thoughts about Mason. She would think about him later. Her family—she tried to think about them never.

So she dove deeper into her world of make believe. Every time she finished a scene, she snagged more snippets from her outline, keeping them at the bottom of the page like fairy lights leading her deeper into the forest. She wasn’t scared of the forest, of getting stuck, so long as she had those little guideposts to show her the way.

Until the next afternoon, on day two of her writing frenzy, when following the fairy lights led her straight into a plot hole. She stared at the wall of text for what felt like hours, trying to figure out how to dig herself back out, how to put a Band-Aid on it—or if she could ignore it and keep going, figure it out later…

She couldn’t. Once she’d seen it, it was all she could see.

Normally, she’d hash it out with Tess or Emily, but she hadn’t even gotten this pitch approved yet. So she pivoted. She cleaned up her outline, churned out a synopsis and pitch, and gave her opening chapters a perfunctory edit before sending it off to Tess. She chewed on a hangnail as she watched the message land in her outbox, and with a whoosh, move to her sent folder. She’d sent lots of pitches in the past year, only to hate the idea once she started writing it. This felt different. There were still so many nebulous details she had yet to figure out, but she knew how it ended. She would finish this one. She had to.

Apparently, she was feeling extra brave tonight, and opened her muted writer friends chat and turned the notifications back on. She sent GIFs of the Kool-Aid Man bursting through the wall and Steve Buscemi’s “How do you do, fellow kids?” before pasting the pitch for her book into the chat and hitting send. She closed her laptop before anyone could reply, because, baby steps.

Her stomach growled, and she stretched, jumping when her gaze landed on the oven clock. It was nearly dinnertime. She’d promised herself to stop for lunch hours ago, her kitchen table an absolute travesty of drafting snacks. Her morning yogurt had been banished to a far corner. Granola, banana peels, and an empty family-sized bag of cheesy puffs littered her makeshift desk.

Her neck cracked loudly when she rolled it, and she sighed, staring around her apartment, really seeing it for the first time in two days. Her heels were still by the door from where she’d kicked them off after Christmas dinner with the Wests. Her sink was full of dishes—mostly because her sink was so tiny it was full after putting three whole things in it. She was wearing the same pajamas she’d put on after her shower two days ago, barely having moved from her kitchen table save to pee and catch a few hours of sleep. Drafting Sawyer was not the best at keeping a routine or being a human. It wasn’t really a surprise no one wanted to be with her when she was like this.

She was too exhausted to cook—even her approximation of cooking, which was really just mixing things together. She unearthed her phone from beneath an empty bag of chocolate chips, mentally running through her favorite delivery spots. When she opened her phone, however, her text thread with Mason was still open. She smiled fondly down at it, perhaps assigning way too much significance to a GIF, but there had been a time when her need to give work her singular focus had driven away the person that was most important to her.

Mason might not be the most important person in her life—she couldn’t afford that level of distraction, making herself vulnerable to imploding her life again—but he was… something. A something she enjoyed. Drafting often left her drained and seeking solitude to recharge, but Mason’s presence felt like the only thing that could refill her. And so, even though she was out of words for the day, she forced herself to type a few more. She resisted the urge to apologize. She was done apologizing for working. Nonetheless, when she hit send—and even though her relationship with God had long been on the rocks—she prayed that her days-long silence hadn’t ruined everything. Again.