Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,23
just run around kissing people without rules or boundaries. I like him, but I don’t want to like him like that. I don’t want him to think of me like that. It’s just too much pressure,” I said with the shake of my head. “Best to keep things professional.”
“I’m just saying, I don’t think you should rule it out. I bet he’s a good kisser. And it’s a scientific fact that men who smirk excel at cunnilingus.”
“That is not a scientific fact.”
She shrugged. “It should be. I read it in a romance novel, and it’s maybe one of the truest things ever written.”
“In all your worldly experience?” I teased, brow arched.
She mirrored me. “I’ve collected more data than you.”
“Most eighth graders have collected more data than me.”
A laugh shot past her lips.
“Anyway, I’m sure I imagined it. I’m nothing to him, just a means to an end. I’ve got his manuscripts, and we’re meeting tomorrow to go over them.”
“And when he kisses you—”
“He’s not going to kiss me, Katherine! Ugh, don’t even put that into the universe.” I set down the lemon and zester to give her a look. “It’s hard enough to do this—talk to him, put myself out there—without being worried he’s going to kiss me and confuse things even more. I have a job to do, and that’s all I’m planning on doing. Not only will my therapist approve, but my résumé will be so shiny and pretty with Thomas Bane’s name on it.”
“Your lips would shine with his name on them, too.”
I rolled my eyes. “You are the worst, you know that?”
She smiled, a thin curl of her lips. “I know. But I’m usually right.”
“Are not,” I lied, telling myself like a fool that it was the truth.
Dumpster Fire
Tommy
“So, what did you think?” I asked the next morning, trying not to sound too eager.
Amelia didn’t answer right away. I watched her unpack her bag, eyeing the stack of manuscripts now tagged with screaming neon-colored sticky tabs. I imagined that they annotated every failure.
I swallowed my bile.
“Well,” she finally started, setting her notebook and pen on top of the stack, “I can see why you haven’t been able to finish any of them.”
“Mmm,” I hummed noncommittally, wanting her to tell me the truth before I decided to light the whole stack on fire.
She took a steadying breath and picked up said stack of trash. “Your writing is impeccable—that’s a given—but none of them quite make sense. If it’s not the stories—which, for the most part aren’t fully formed—it’s the characters. They’re missing something…the…oomph. The spark. The thing that makes them real.”
I nodded. Once again, she was right.
“But each of them has a distinctive quality. I could feel what you latched on to. Like in this one,” she said, sliding one out for inspection, “it was your heroine. She’s the most real thing in the entire piece. Or this one.” She pulled out my mpreg werewolf story. “It was the dynamics of the pack. I could feel your inspiration, but you never quite grabbed it. To be honest, I think this one is your strongest story. But…well, I don’t think you can turn in a commercial novel about male pregnancy in werewolves, can you?”
“I’m a hundred percent sure Steven would fire me on the spot.”
She sighed, returning the manuscripts to their graveyard. “Right.”
“So what do I do? Can I use any of this?”
The look on her face said it all. “You want the honest truth?”
“It’s why I asked for your help in the first place.”
Amelia paused, watching me as if to make sure I was ready for the answer I’d already known I was going to get. “None of this will work. I thought there might be a way to…I don’t know…combine them, like you suggested. But I looked for a thread to pull and…well, there’s just nothing.”
I drew a long, steady breath through my nose and considered all the ways I could dispose of the manuscripts. Fire seemed too obvious. Paper shredder was pedestrian. Garbage disposal? That would probably be harder than it would be satisfying. I could tear it all into confetti and throw it off the Brooklyn Bridge, but I’d probably get fined for littering. Maybe I’d let Gus eat it. He’d eat anything. And together, we could deposit all the shit I’d written with the shit he’d eaten exactly where it belonged—the dump.
“Okay,” I said after a solid minute. “What do we do?”
She let loose a worried sigh, her eyes moving from mine to