I stamped my foot in frustration. “I’m perfectly safe here. That guy was an idiot but I could handle him. Please call her.” I couldn’t help it: tears were pooling in my eyes. His audacity was without bounds.
Sighing, he made the call. “Claudia, disregard my last request. Sorry. Yes, I’ll be back in the office shortly.”
Ironically, that ended up being my last day at the shop anyway. The next day started my boss’s three-week buying trip to Europe and Indonesia, a yearly tradition of hers when she closes up shop. Consequently, I had a forced vacation of three weeks and then all that darkness went down with Blackmon and I left the country.
Life in Cambridge dragged by as I studied diligently and missed my friends. Weeks passed. In early February, I finally heard from a couple of my girlfriends who had received the book. They loved it and said it was the best present ever. Jade even said she was inspired to buy a bigger vibrator after reading one of the steamier scenes and I laughed hard enough to earn myself a stomachache, picturing the petite Asian beauty at the sex shop browsing for naughty toys. Mariah had passed her copy around to other friends and so had Kayla. I had a moment of panic when I heard that.
“How well do you know these people?” I asked Mariah.
“What difference does it make? It’s a great read, Ella. Just calm yourself and go have a cup of Earl Grey or something. I think I may come visit before your semester is over. Would that be a good idea?”
Kayla was just as savoir faire about the whole thing. “Oh, Ella, this novel is a surefire winner. I think you should try to have it published and—”
“No!” I screamed across the Atlantic into her eardrum. “Are you insane? I’m not a writer. Please, Kayla, don’t lend it around or you’ll embarrass me. I need my name to be respectable, after all, if I want to be taken seriously as a historian. The book is filled with kink, for God’s sake. Damn, damn, damn, if I had known how inconsiderate you all would be, I would have used a pseudonym. Damn.”
“Inconsiderate? I’m praising you to high heaven.”
“No, you just cannot pass it around, Kayla. Promise me.”
“Okay, my bad, please forgive me for being a loyal friend. Listen, I’ve got to run. Keep me posted on that new man you met. What was his name? Simon, right?”
“Just a friend, Kayla. I like him because he never makes a pass at me.”
“Really? What’s there to like about that? Ella, don’t you have any kind of libido?”
I laughed. If she only knew. Actually she did know but I can’t ever let her realize it. For the first time since I patted myself on the back over my book, I was beginning to realize it might have been a gargantuan mistake. Shit.
In March, Mariah came to the UK to visit. I met her at Gatwick and took her to Earl’s Court to have lunch—there’s a little Pakistani restaurant tucked into a dead-end street and the food is to die for.
“So, catch me up,” I said. “How is everything?”
Mariah’s brown eyes gleamed. “Everything is super good. I have news, Ella. Good news. Big news.”
“Really? What?”
“Well, you’ll recall you wrote a book entitled Three and a Half Weeks? I loved it so much that I loaned it to a few friends.” Before I could interrupt by strangling every last breath out of her, she rushed to continue. “My friend Tamara was in the middle of reading it when she started working as an intern for a hot literary agent, Mo Jackson. Anyway, long story short, Mo asked Tamara what she was reading and she told her about it. Mo asked to check it out, read it in one night and asked if she could represent it. Isn’t that super?”
“Just fucking super, Mariah. I’m absolutely thrilled that the whole world might learn that I like to write kink in my spare time.”
“Well, you know what Sarah did with her copy, right? She scanned big parts of it and put it on a literary web site and it went viral in one week. Ella, you’re a star. You’re going to make mega bucks on this book. You have to get past this sense of embarrassment—the book is good.”
I raked both of my hands through my hair as my frustration mounted. “It’s not good; I’m not a writer. I mean, it may contain titillating prose but it’s not well constructed and it’s not something I could be proud of. Don’t you understand?”
She shrugged casually, amusement lighting up her hazel eyes. “Well, I would say you could use a pseudonym but I think that ship has long since sailed.”
Burying my face in my hands in the blackest despair, I mumbled, “I could really kill Sarah. Damn, I should have just bought you all a pair of fucking gloves.”