Page 24 of Seashells and Daiquiris

I can feel the heat in my face intensify. “Maybe if I text you a screenshot.” His laugh makes my body feel small little needles prick through my nervous system, like my body is alight with desire for him. “Don’t you have work to do?”

He bites his lip, looking me up and down as he nods. “Get that screenshot for me.”

He taps the table and stands, sliding it off of the wood as I can’t stop imagining that hand⁠—

“I bet that hand would feel great against our butt, the one he clearly looks at.”

Liam turns around, our eyes locking as we both know the shell just what it did. Screw it. I shrug my shoulders, press my lips together, and reply, “It has a point.”

I kind of hoped it would inject some humor into this, maybe make him laugh, but instead his gaze intensifies like he’s considering the depth of that. He then turns his head away quickly, wiping at his mouth like he’s trying to pull away words he might have spoken, rounding the bar a little quicker than he otherwise might have.

Then he flashes that gaze at me one more time, half-smiling before shaking his head and getting back to work.

Oh, great.

That’s it. I’m a total goner, aren’t I?

His attention gets pulled away by a group at the other end of the bar, and I quickly open my laptop like it might help, but instead my heart races so fast all I do is stare at my laptop screen with a cursor that blinks.

I open my manuscript. I read the last paragraph I wrote, which was approximately four hundred years ago. I delete it, adrenaline coursing through as I can’t believe that we both crossed a line into real flirting. I write a new paragraph, and then delete that too. I watch Liam work and try to pretend I'm not using him as a character study.

I write: He moved behind the bar like water finding its path—never rushed, never wasted, every motion exactly where it needed to be.

I don't delete that one.

An hour passes, and the bar gets louder. I manage about three thousand words, which is more than I've written in months, and most of them are descriptions of a fictional bartender who bears zero resemblance to anyone in my actual life, except for the silver hair and the tattoos and the jawline and the—okay, it's him. It's entirely him. My editor is going to notice that I suddenly got very descriptive in this section.

I'm deep in a paragraph about my fictional bartender's hands when someone slides onto the stool next to mine.

"Hey there."

I glance up. He's tall, brunette, surfer-adjacent, with the kind of tan that says he lives outdoors and the kind of smile that says he knows he's attractive. He's holding a beer with a little condensation running down on the outside, leaning into my space with a confidence that borders on invasion.

"Hi," I say, in the tone that universally translates to I'm busy.

He doesn't take the hint. "I'm Brody."

"I'm working."

"On what?"

"Work."

"What kind?"

"The kind that requires concentration."

He laughs like I'm joking. "You're funny. You here alone?"

Before I can answer, something shifts in his expression, he tilts his head, squinting at my laptop screen, then at me, then at the screen again. I maneuver the laptop so he can’t read the screen anymore.

His eyes go wide.

"Wait. Holy shit. Are you Marlowe Indigo?"

The sound of my pen name in this bar, in this town, from this stranger's mouth, hits me like a bucket of ice water. My fingers freeze on the keyboard. My stomach drops. I glance back at the screen—oh. I work into two windows often, one with my Photoshop open, working on a graphic that has my face on it, announcing which conventions I’ll be at this year…

"I’m sorry, who are you⁠—”