Page 57 of Not on the Same Page

He chuckles and pushes his glasses up his nose. “I’ll tell her.” Glancing between the two of us, he stands. “I take it you two have some business. I’ll leave you to it.” He points at me. “Let the trash take itself out, Casey. It almost always does.”

Huffing a laugh, I nod. “Excellent advice. I’ll engrave it on a plaque as a reminder.”

“You absolutely should.” He waves as he reaches the door. “Don’t stay too late. Almost everyone is gone for the night.” And then he leaves, closing my office door behind him.

There’s a moment of tense silence between Trina and me. We study each other for a moment, neither of us seeming like we want to make the first move.

“Hi,” she says eventually.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Imani finished her manuscript.” She dips her chin toward my computer. “You should have it now.”

Without looking at the laptop, I close it. “You drove all the way out here to tell me that?”

“Would you believe I was in the area?” she hedges.

No, I wouldn’t. She lives in the city and has no reason to come out here aside from visiting the press offices, and as far as I know, she doesn’t have any work with any of the other editors in the building right now.

But Trina has always loved a negotiation, and this feels like a warmup.

“Were you?” I return.

Her lips form a fine line, and she narrows her eyes again. “No. I…uh… I wanted to apologize.”

That’s surprising. My eyebrows shoot up my forehead involuntarily. “For what?”

“Well, you introduced me to your brother in a really stressful moment, and I don’t know if you wanted to share your family with me or you felt like you had to because I happened to be there. But you did, and that’s fine…” She furrows her brow, and I have the urge to reach across the desk and smooth it out. “I mean, obviously this was something really personal for you. And we don’t do personal. And then I ghosted you for like a week. I realized today that me going quiet might have come off like I’m not okay with your brother.” Her frown deepens as she shakes her head. “That doesn’t sound right. I’m not doing a good job of this. I swear I rehearsed this the whole way over here.”

Normally, I’d let her keep talking and try to work it out, but she’s so cute as she struggles for words. I fear if I don’t stop her verbally, I’ll have to do it with a kiss.

“I get it,” I say quietly. “You weren’t avoiding me because of him.”

“Avoiding isn’t the word.”

“Is it inaccurate?”

“Yes,” she says quickly. “I was…processing. Not him. All of it.”

I think I see where she’s going. “His disability doesn’t scare you.”

Tilting her head, her hazel eyes bore into me. “I don’t know why it would.”

My heart beats a little faster. “But the window into my family does.”

She sighs, clasping her hands tightly in her lap. “Not necessarily? But I’d be lying if I told you that wasn’t why I needed some space. We don’t do that, you know? We do this”—she waves at the office around us—“and we fuck. That was the agreement. And I know you didn’t mean for us to do family, too. It just happened. But I wanted to tell you it’s okay.”

I have to try very hard not to smile. “After you took a week deciding whether or not it was okay.”

Rolling her eyes in a full circle, she eventually pins them on me. “I’m not perfect.”

Yes, you are, I want to say, but I narrowly stop myself from letting the words slip out. “We’re good, Trina. We’re on the same page.”

She inhales sharply, then lets the breath out. She doesn’t seem sure, but she changes the subject quickly. “I want to counter your offer to Imani.”

I have my reservations about whether or not that conversation is finished, but if this is where she wants to go, I’ll bite. “One hundred fifty thousand,” I say. Her jaw drops, and I can’t help but continue. “Royalties on paperbacks, hardcovers, and audio are twenty, fifteen, and fifteen percent respectively. We control sub rights, but royalties on those will be thirty percent. We’ll foot the bill for a two-month book tour, one month on either side of her debut release. If she wants to extend it, she can, but it’ll be on her own dime. We have money for more tours for subsequent books, but we can negotiate that when we get there, depending on how she’s feeling about multiple tours along with writing and editing the rest of the series. We have exclusive rights to anything in the series she may conceive of after these five books—any spinoffs, novellas, extra books, or bonus chapters. We’ll release two books a year, six months apart until the series is completed. I think that should about cover it?”

Trina blinks at me, her jaw still on the floor. “You said fifty thousand last week.”