“Busted.” Clark paused for a moment, like he was gathering his thoughts, then said, “If it were as easy as just getting organized or sticking to a schedule, I’d have done it years ago. But you can’t rush these things, even though I know I’m holding things up. Everyone wants the new book. My publishers keep putting it on the calendar. I’m getting pushback from the people who want another movie. . . . At this point, I don’t even think it would matter if it was good. As long as there was something they could put out.”
“But what’s the problem?” I asked, beyond glad that medicine didn’t have any of these issues. You didn’t take an extra-long time to do a heart bypass, or tell someone you weren’t feeling inspired to fix their brain hemorrhage. You did your job, that was all.
“Well . . .” He cleared his throat. “In terms of where I am with the third book . . . It’s complicated, because in the last one . . .” He paused and looked at me for a moment before saying, “I wrapped up Tamsin’s story at the end. Pretty definitively.”
“Oh,” I said, then paused. “But wasn’t she your main character?”
“Ah,” he said, pointing at me. “Now you’re beginning to see what the problem is.”
• • •
“Biggest fear?” I asked around a yawn, leaning back against the wall. Clark had gone and gotten us pillows after the Skittle sugar buzz had worn off and we’d both started to crash. I had a pillow behind my head and one underneath me. We’d tried to get Bertie out to a more comfortable location for us—like one with couches—but he’d just curled more tightly into a ball and made a little moaning sound when we tried to move him, so we decided to leave him where he was. Now that most of the adrenaline and panic had left the situation, I was feeling how late it was. It was starting to feel like two a.m. at a slumber party, when everyone is sleepy and a little bit punchy (and usually hopped up on sugar) and you’re too tired to tell anything but the truth—that fuzzy half-awake, honest feeling. It was how we’d found out Bri had kissed her second cousin—by accident, she swore—last summer at a wedding.
“Haunted houses,” Clark said around a huge yawn, half-muffled by the hand he raised in front of his mouth.
“Oh,” I said, a little surprised. But I supposed it stood to reason that if you wrote fantasy novels, you believed in things like ghosts. “Well, I guess that makes sense.”
“Not actual haunted houses,” Clark said dismissively. “I don’t believe in those. I mean the kind they have at Halloween, that you can walk through and people jump out and scare you.”
I just looked at him. “That makes less sense.”
“My parents took me to one when I was, like, four. Way too young. It scarred me for life.” He shuddered, like he was reliving something, then turned to me. “Yours?”
“Driving the wrong way on a highway on-ramp,” I said immediately. I’d been driving Palmer and Bri home last spring, talking with them and not paying attention, and this had nearly happened. I’d had nightmares about it for weeks.
“That is a very logical fear,” Clark said, and I realized that even without looking at him, I could tell he was smiling.
“Thank you.” I smiled as well, choosing to take this as a compliment.
• • •
“Hey, bud,” I said softly to Bertie as I stroked his ears. Clark had gone to turn off the lights and make sure all the doors were locked, and it was just me and the dog. His eyes were closed, but they no longer seemed like they were squeezing tight against the pain. He seemed like he was peaceful, his breathing slow and even, though every time there was a pause in his breath, I would start to panic, fearing the worst, until he’d start again, the sound of his snuffly breathing letting me relax once again. “Hang in there, okay? We need you to pull through.” I ran my fingers through his fur and then left them on his back for a moment, letting my hand rise and fall with every breath he took, feeling a little more reassured with every one.
• • •
“So how old were you?” I asked, as I adjusted the pillow under my head. I had told Clark that I wasn’t going to sleep; I just needed to lie down for a little bit. We needed to stay awake in case something changed with Bertie, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t rest for a little bit. Maybe because of the walls-down, sleepover feeling of it all, I’d started asking the kinds of questions you ask at slumber parties—like how old you were when you had your first kiss.
“Uh,” Clark said, and I could hear, even through his fatigue, that he was a little thrown by this. Probably boys didn’t have slumber-party questions like this, which was really a loss for them. “Twelve, I think?”
“Whoa. You middle-school stud.”
Clark laughed and shook his head. “Not at all. Exactly the opposite, in fact. But when you grow up in the middle of nowhere, you take the opportunities you can—like when family friends with cute daughters show up.” He looked at me and slid a little farther down the wall, like my proximity to the floor was pulling him down as well. “You?”
“Um.” I was now slightly embarrassed, even though I had asked the question. “I was fourteen.” In the silence that followed, I hurried to say, “It wasn’t like I didn’t have other opportunities.” I thought about all the middle-school games of Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven that I’d avoided like the plague. “I wanted my first kiss to mean something.”
Clark looked over at me, his eyebrows raised. “Did it?”
“It did,” I said, thinking about Topher, in a different laundry room, and everything it had started. It had meant something—I just hadn’t fully realized then what that something would be.
“There’s this thing in the world of my books,” Clark said, and I realized it was getting a little bit more normal to hear him talking like this. The same way it had been strange when Tom had been talking about agents and headshots and casting directors and now it was just something we were all able to ignore.
“What thing?”
“This idea that the person who kisses you first gets, with that kiss, a little piece of your soul. And they have a hold over you. Most people don’t ever use it against you. But some people do.”
I turned this over in my mind, feeling like maybe I would have to read Clark’s books now. “So where’d that come from? Is that what happened with your first-kiss girl?”
“No,” Clark said, laughing. “She’s fine. We’re friends online, and I get to see pictures of most of her meals, even though we haven’t spoken in seven years.” He turned to look at me. “What about you?” he asked. “Ever think about your guy?”
“Well . . . yeah,” I said, realizing I was starting to choose my words carefully again. It was one thing for my friends to know about Topher, but I wasn’t about to give out details that could identify him. “He—I mean, we still occasionally . . .” I trailed off, not exactly sure how to put this. “We’re kind of off and on.”
“Oh,” Clark said, and he sounded much more awake now. “Are you now? On, I mean?”
“No,” I said quickly, now feeling more awake myself. “Are you? On . . . with anyone?”
“No,” Clark said just as quickly, and I felt myself let out a breath. “I was . . . My last girlfriend and I broke up at the end of the semester.”
“Semester?”
“Yeah. She was a freshman at Colorado College, and I was living in Colorado Springs, so we started dating. But when school ended for the year, she said she wanted to explore life’s possibilities. That’s a direct quote, by the way.”
I made a face, and Clark laughed. “But I thought you said you lived way out in the woods. Near Wisconsin?”
“Wyoming.”
“Right.”
“That’s where my parents live,” Clark said. “It . . . I moved out last year and got my own place. It just seemed easier.”