The Price of Inertia (The Seven Sins #4) - Lily Zante Page 0,31
not being in a work environment. Back at the hotel I had plenty of interaction with my work colleagues and the customers. I was surrounded by people, and I never realized how important it was to me until I took this job.
I don’t know how Ward does it, sitting indoors all day long. In all the time I’ve been here, he’s not been out once. Lately he’s in his study more and spending less time in the TV room. I’ve noticed that he also doesn’t wear that loose fitting robe of his.
I haven’t seen him in it this week. Instead, he’s been wearing sweatpants and baggy sweatshirts.
As I walk into his study, I’m surprised to see him and I jump back in shock. “I wasn’t expecting you in here so early.”
“It came to me,” he says, not looking at me. He’s scribbling away furiously as if I’m not even here.
“What did?”
“The twist. I slept on it, and I woke up with the perfect twist.”
“I’ll wait until you’re having lunch before I polish the surfaces,” I tell him but I pick up his litter from the coffee table and the sofa. He’s even got a half-full can of fizzy drink on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. I notice that he’s got a fire going. Usually when I come here, the blinds are always drawn, but with the fire going, there’s a dark, cocoon-like ambiance to the room.
He picks up his pen and taps it on the table repeatedly. He seems somewhere else. I know my place, and it isn’t here. He continues to tap away with his pen, and I, curiously, glance over my shoulder at him as I walk away, then trip over something on the floor. A box of cookies. The half empty bag of chips in my hands goes flying to the floor and some of them fall out leaving a mess. I scoot down to pick them up.
“Go,” he growls.
I look up. “But I’ve made a mess—”
“Go. Before I lose it.” It’s an order. I jump up at and leave.
WARD
I stop tapping my pen and flex my fingers before I start writing again. Moments like this are rare, when I wake up with a full scene in my head and the urgency to get it down on paper spurs me on. The problem which had stalled me last night vanished into a wisp of smoke and I was writing down new words, my pen flying, ideas pouring out of my head. Until she walked in.
Mari interrupted the flow. Her bending down to pick up something is a level of interruption I don’t need.
I didn’t mean to be so short with her, but what ordinary people don’t understand is that when words are stuck in my head, they need to come out. They don’t come out when I see Mari’s pert bottom facing me.
As it is, I’ve struggled to unsee her in her gym clothes, bent over doing her downward pose.
Freya never distracted me in that way.
No one ever did.
I don’t like live in housekeepers, and one such as Mari is the most dangerous of all.
I try my ritual again. Tapping the pen twenty times on the desk. All writers have a writing ritual. I’m not the only one. Something, anything, to get the muse working. Only, this time, she seems to have failed me. I can’t pick up from where I was.
When I’m in the flow, words gush out like water from a dam. I lose track of time, of who I am, of where I am and when I stop, my fingers are stiff.
I was on a streak until she came in. I’d been up early and writing for two hours. I flick through the sheets I have written. It’s all here, every single last detail of it.
Getting up, I flex my fingers and I pace around the study. I have to get my writing streak back. After a few more minutes of flexing my fingers, and rotating my shoulders and turning my neck from side to side, I hunker down at my desk and attempt to write again.
MARI
He’s been in the study all day and hasn’t even come to the kitchen to take his lunch. I debate over whether I should take it to him. The guy needs food and water. But I recall how annoyed he was when I tripped and made a mess on the floor and then started to clean it up.