Page 35 of The Write Track
I swallowed hard. “This is going above and beyond.”
He shrugged. “It’s fine. My mother would love what I’m doing here. This is right up her alley.”
Was that why he was doing it? Before I could respond, I felt a set of eyes on me. I knew before looking who they belonged to because my skin had started crawling.
Slowly, I tracked my eyes to the bar, to where Preston stood with one elbow resting on the wooden countertop. He was watching us, sneering.
Nathan followed my gaze, his grip tightening on mine. “Don’t let that guy win,” he warned. “That’s what my mother would have hated more than anything.”
I sighed, resigned. “Fine, but we need to figure out a way to scare him off at the retreat. This has to be decisive. I don’t want to have to move again. I love Savannah. He’s going to leave me no choice, though, if he doesn’t go away.”
“He’s going away,” Nathan said, cocksure and smirky as he tipped an invisible hat for Preston’s benefit.
I loved the way my ex scowled.
“We’ll make sure of that,” Nathan added. “For now, wear the ring. It looks good on you.” He grinned. “When we get rid of Pukeston, you can give it back.”
I rested my hands on my knees. “He’s not going to go quietly into the night,” I warned him. “He’s going to fight.”
“Good. There’s nothing I love better than a good fight.”
A fight is on its way, whether he likes it or not.“Okay. Just remember, you asked for it, though.”
9
NINE
As far as I was concerned, there were three types of people in the world. Diamonds, turds, and those who were both. They could be great, or they could be terrible. Most people fit into the middle category.
My father fell firmly in the turd category, just like Preston Martin Charles III.
I was busy packing for the retreat—I still didn’t know how I’d been talked into it—when my father called for his monthly chat. I’d been distracted, wondering if I should take two pairs of underwear for each day, and I’d answered the phone without looking to see who was calling.
“Nathan,” my father said by way of greeting. That was it. Just my name.
I scowled at the phone as I held it away from my face, as if it were the phone’s fault he was such a pain, then adopted my most “you can’t hate me because I’m too bland to hate” voice. “Father.”
I’d taken to calling him that as a teenager.Father.He wasn’t a dad. Not like the dads of other kids my age. He never showed up for school events except when I was on the football teamand made it fairly far into the playoffs. I wasn’t one of the best players, but I wasn’t one of the worst. He stood next to the fence—Andrew Cooper was too important to sit on bleachers—and watched the plays. We won. After the game, all he said was “you didn’t play much.”
I shrugged. By then, I knew the routine with him. “No, I agreed. I’m only half good.”
“You could be better if you applied yourself.”
That had been his typical mantra.You don’t apply yourself, Nathan. You don’t put in a full effort. If you did, your life would be easier.
I did apply myself. He just didn’t see it, and he certainly didn’t care about the things I applied myself toward. When I called him to tell him my first book had been picked up by a publisher—one of the big ones—he’d been noncommittal.
Are they going to put money behind advertising it? What sort of book? Is it a finance book?
When I told him it was a horror book, he’d immediately lost interest and said it was a nice hobby. Of course, that had been followed by the sentence I dreaded most.When are you going to get a real job?
I’d stopped telling him about my writing career right then and there.
My mother would have been proud of me. Actually, she would have been beside herself with joy. She would have told all of her friends. Horror—movies and books—had been something we both loved. My father called it drivel. The only thing horror was better than in his book was romance, which was for empty-headed women. My mother had loved romance books too. He’d told her over and over again that romance was for people with their heads in the clouds. That hadn’t stopped her from reading it, though. Like me, she simply stopped talking to him about it.
“Do you have a minute?” he asked when the silence had stretched for too long.
Only then did I realize I’d been lost in my head, a sea of annoyance flowing around me.
