“So, you’ve never read it?” she asks, sounding surprised.
I shake my head. “Just saw the movie. Sarabeth Collins’s house, remember? Sleepover for her twelfth birthday party.”
Chess shakes her head, putting Lilith Rising back on the top of the bookcase. “I didn’t get invited to that one, clearly.”
Except she did, I’m sure of it. I didn’t know Sarabeth that well, and I was a shy kid. There was no way I would’ve gone if Chess hadn’t been there, too. But it’s not worth contradicting her.
“Well, it was on TV that night, and we missed, like, the first twenty minutes, but we watched the rest of it, and even though we made fun of it the entire time, I don’t think any of us actually slept afterward.”
I’d never watched the movie again, and more than twenty years later, I have only hazy memories of the plot. I remember the lead actress, her face covered in blood à la Sissy Spacek in Carrie, and I remember these shots of the house, this big, looming Victorian mansion against a very blue sky. That had made it scarier, I’d thought. Awful shit was supposed to happen in the dark, late at night. But when Victoria kills her family, she does it in the middle of the day, the blood almost garishly red in the sunlight.
“Maybe this can be my pool book,” I add, and Chess wrinkles her nose.
“Kind of dark, don’t you think?”
I shrug. “Might be neat. I mean, we listened to Aestas the other night, why not read the book that was written here, too?”
“Because Aestas is gorgeous and vibey, and this book has literal blood on the cover and the movie scared you so badly you wouldn’t sleep in your own sleeping bag.”
I laugh, but what she’s just said snags in my brain. She’s right, I hadn’t slept in my own sleeping bag that night. I’d curled up on someone else’s. I thought it was Chess’s but she just said she wasn’t there.
I almost push her on it, but shake it off. What does it matter if she was there or not, if she remembers or not?
Still, I can’t help but feel momentarily strange.
Disoriented.
It reminds me of those long months when I was dizzy all the time, my stomach lurching, and every doctor telling me there was nothing there, nothing wrong with me at all, and I shove the paperback back onto the shelf, suddenly wanting nothing more to do with Lilith Rising.
“You’re right,” I tell her. “No murder talk, no creepy books. I’m gonna go dig up an issue of Town and Country on my iPad instead.”
“That is such a solid plan,” Chess agrees as we leave the room. “And I am going to have a shower and then get to work.”
“Perfect,” I say, pulling the door closed behind me. “But first, can we go back to the fact that your next book is called Swipe Right on Life?”
She laughs, throwing her head back in that way she does. “The title was my publisher’s idea, and it’s gonna sell fifty bajillion copies, so you’re not allowed to make fun of it.”
As we head downstairs, we continue teasing each other （“It really bothers me that your alliterative titles are in alphabetical order, but you don’t see me bringing that up, Emily Sheridan.” “Okay, but at least none of my titles enthusiastically reference dating apps”）， and just like last night, it’s as if no time has passed at all. Like we’ve been in each other’s pockets, in each other’s lives, every day for years.
I knew this trip would be good for us.
And if I feel a little sting that, just as I’d predicted, Chess doesn’t bring up the idea of us writing something together again, I do my best to ignore it.
CHAPTER SIX
“Petal still in peril?”
I look over the top of my laptop at Chess. We’re sitting in the formal dining room, a room we haven’t eaten in once in the week since we’ve been at Villa Aestas, but which we have repurposed as a sort of working space.
Well, Chess is working. Earbuds in, tiny cup of espresso at her elbow, her fingers clacking away on her extremely expensive and whisper-thin laptop. I don’t think she’s stopped typing from the moment we sat down.
Meanwhile, I have … opened a Word document.
And we’ve been in here for nearly two hours.
“Always,” I reply, not adding that I’m beginning to think I’m the one actually in peril these days. If I can’t finish this book while we’re here, I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’d thought getting out of my house, situating myself in a brand-new space, would be all the jump-start I’d need to finally finish this damn thing, but so far, no good. I have maybe two workable chapters, and just got an email from my editor, Caleb, this morning with a less-than-gentle nudge asking how the book was coming along.
Worse, there was an email from my new fancy attorney’s bookkeeper, a reminder that I still owe part of last month’s bill and a link to how I can “easily pay and catch up!”
No book, no money, I remind myself, but I’ve never worked well under stress, so that’s not exactly the most helpful thought.
Not for the first time, I wonder if I should just tell Chess what’s going on with Matt and the divorce. Just how much Matt is looking to take from me. She’d understand, I know she would, and she’d hate him as much as I did for it.
But then it would just be another thing in the Litany of Things Going Wrong in My Life, and I’m tired of being that friend. The sick one. The divorced one. The one fighting to hold on to what, to Chess, is probably a negligible amount of money.
Poor Emily.
Chess stops typing and looks up at me, her head tilted to one side. “Are you just not feeling it?” she asks, because of course she saw through my chipper response, of course she knows I’ve been over here reading celebrity gossip for the past hour or so.
Sighing, I lean back, the ancient dining room chair creaking. “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I first started working on the books when I was living with my parents and feeling really stuck. They were an escape, and now … now it’s like I need an escape from them.”
That sounds overly dramatic out loud, so I shake my head. “Or maybe the series has just run out of steam, you know? Nine books is a lot. Maybe it doesn’t really merit a tenth.”
“Plus, Dex is Matt, so writing him must blow.”
Surprised, I close my laptop, leaning my elbows on the table. “You could tell?”
Chess gives me a look that’s somewhere between affection and pity. “Sweetheart,” is all she says, and I roll my eyes at myself, burying my face in my hands.
“It was so obvious, wasn’t it?”
“You were in love,” Chess replies. I can’t see her, but I can hear the shrug in her voice. “I mean, I never got it, but you clearly were.”
That makes me look up. She’s still typing, her eyes now on the screen, but the earbuds are out. She’s wearing another one of the seemingly endless linen outfits she brought here, not a wrinkle in sight. Maybe rich people have some special kind of linen the rest of us plebes don’t have access to. That’s the only explanation I can think of.
“I thought you liked Matt,” I say. “I mean, you two talked on the phone and texted and stuff. You even took him golfing in Kiawah, even though you hate golfing.”