Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 86799 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86799 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 434(@200wpm)___ 347(@250wpm)___ 289(@300wpm)
With a laugh, he says, “Oh Hazel. Please.”
I smile, relieved to be enemies again. “Don’t worry. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
“Good. You wouldn’t want me to relent that easily. If I know one thing about you it’s that you love a challenge.”
“Oh, I do? And you’re a challenge?” I ask.
“I’m your Everest, sweetheart.”
I lean my head back against the leather chair, scoffing at his analogy. “You know I can’t stand outdoor sports.”
He snorts. “Who said climbing this Everest was an outdoor sport?”
I smack his arm. “You dog,” I chide.
“You know you want to plant your flag,” he says, crossing his arms, so defiant, so familiar. So entertaining.
“You think I want to plant my flag on my archnemesis?” I ask.
“I’m still your archnemesis?” He uncrosses his arms, delivering a hard stare through those black glasses. Hmm. Have those glasses always looked so sexy smart on him?
Wait. Nope. I can’t go there. I backpedal to enemy-land. “Of course you’re my archnemesis. What could possibly have changed?”
“You apologized. Doesn’t that make me a mere nemesis now?” he asks, intensely serious.
I nearly break first, but I hold my laughter. “You want a demotion from archnemesis to mere nemesis?”
“Sure. I thought we were regular…nemesises,” he says, attempting to make a plural of that word and failing. “Shit, what’s the plural of nemesis?” He grabs his phone as if world peace depends on the answer.
But before he can ask Google, I answer with, “Nemeses.”
He checks the dictionary still. Understandable. I’d do the same, since there’s no better way to drill home a word. As he reads the definition, he cringes, bemoaning his own mistake. “Nemeses,” he repeats as he bangs his head against the back of his seat.
“You know what this means,” I say, far too pleased.
“I do,” he mutters.
A vocabulary sin requires repentance. It’s a game we invented when I told him about my dad’s Draconian grammar rules. We took Dad’s ruthlessness and turned it into fun.
“Lunch is on you,” I say, delighted to celebrate this schadenfreude as I’d expect him to do if the tables were turned.
The last time we played was more than a year ago, when we were working on Lacey’s story. The brilliant and pretty ER doc was arguing with her annoying co-worker Noah, before she went home to prep for her date with her sexy new neighbor.
I wrote another thing coming in chapter three instead of think. Oh, the pain. The terrible pain I felt.
“You’ve got another think coming if you think I don’t know that about lunch,” he says.
“I do know that,” I say.
“Good. You understand the rules,” he says.
And I understand him too. Because ten months ago was when I broke up with Max. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that’s when Axel split with his agent.
“You left Max ten months ago?” I ask, wanting to be one hundred percent sure.
“I did,” he confirms.
“Because he’s a jackass?”
“And a liar,” he adds.
I take a few minutes and let this new understanding of Axel fall into place, like a room rearranged. A table’s in a different spot. A couch is up against the wall. But this new room layout makes so much more sense. It aligns with the man I knew.
It makes sense—intrinsic sense—that Axel would leave Max.
It makes me feel understood too. Like maybe we’re…frenemies.
I meander back in time to thirty minutes ago. To Axel’s dry mic-drop—I’m sure the reviews would love a smackeroo. To the smart dig in those words. My heart gives a happy little squeeze.
A few minutes later, as we prep for takeoff, I close my eyes then say quietly, “Thanks, Axel.”
“For what?”
“For leaving Max.”
He’s quiet at first, then, barely audible above the hum of the plane, he says, “I couldn’t stay with him after that.”
Maybe, just maybe, I can make it through this trip.
11
A TIDGE RUGGED
Axel
That was a close call.
But at least we only talked about the end of things with Max. Not the beginning of his romance with Hazel.
I’m happy to tell the truth about the demise of my business relationship with him. No interest in digging into that damn book party when I introduced the two of them.
They say hindsight is twenty-twenty but I may need to get my glasses checked, since I’m still fuzzy on what I should have done that night.
But what’s done is done.
At least Hazel and I buried a sliver of the hatchet. Maybe a sliver is enough. Sure seems to be, since we make it through the next few hours of the flight with occasional small talk, questions like do you want a beverage and excuse me, I need to step over you. Fine, I might watch her ass as she climbs over my legs. But the view. Dear lord, the view.
Hazel Valentine does not possess a writer’s butt. She’s got a peach rear, and I want to bite into it like a piece of fruit.