Page 21 of Based on You

I laughed at my own ridiculous words. Sloane looked at me flat, one arched eyebrow climbing toward her hairline.

"I only want one Paige in my bed," she deadpanned, "and it's definitely not you."

I gasped and clutched an invisible string of pearls. "You want my dad?"

She burst out laughing, grabbed a crumpled tissue, and threw it at my head. I caught it and laughed right back, the client on the table shifting with a muffled sound of amusement. Sloane pressed her lips together, shook her head at me, and went back to her work. I sat on the stool, letting the familiar hum of the shop wash over me.

Once she finished with the client and walked her to the door, she came back, dragging a stool across from mine. She sat down, wiping her hands, and leveled a look at me.

"So, talk to me. How's your boring life been?"

I gave a shrug. "You said it yourself. Boring."

"You liar." She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees. "I look at you and I feel like you're hiding something major. Is this about your hot boss?"

Over the years, I'd tried hiding things from Sloane and failed so reliably that I'd mostly stopped trying. I told her everything. The emergency board meeting. The slide with my secret pen name across it in bold text. The notebook left careless on my desk. Agreeing to run the search myself. The late-night text, the phone call that followed, the ninety-one minutes of it.

Sloane listened to the whole chaotic timeline without one interruption. When I finished, she stayed quiet for three long seconds, then exhaled.

"One week of us not seeing each other," she said, shaking her head. "And you took it upon yourself to ruin your life. Wow."

I reached out and smacked her knee. "What's your problem? You're supposed to help me, not leave me stranded on a sinking ship."

She threw her hands up. "Violet. This is your life and your doing. If my opinion mattered to you, wouldn't you have called me before you took a corporate bounty job to find yourself?"

I pouted. She had a point. The hour Simon had given me to think over the offer could have gone to calling Sloane. She'd have talked just the right amount of brutal sense into my head.

"But I have a solid reason. What if he finds out I'm Ashby?"

"So what?" she cut in. "What happens is you lose your assistant job, and then you stay home and focus on your writing. You make it sound like the end of the world."

I pressed my lips into a tight line.

The books had been paying well for four years. But the corporate job wasn't only about the income. Losing it meant my parents would find out, and that meant my father's crushing silence, my mother's unbearable certainty, an intervention dressed up as parental concern, and someone pushing the paralegal program again.

I'd been using the Beckett Media job as a bulletproof cover for the writing since I started. It was the respectable face of what I did with my time, and losing that cover before I was ready to explain what was underneath it wasn't something I had the stomach for.

"My parents already think the worst of me," I said quietly. "If I lose the job, there'll be a full-scale intervention."

Sloane rolled her eyes. "Oh, please. Like your parents are so flawless themselves. Have you taken a long look at the people they produced? If they were such model parents, would both their kids choose to live this many miles away from them?"

I pursed my lips. Easy for Sloane to say. She'd already walked through the explosive version of this that I was still standing terrified outside of. Her conservative family openly called her a disgrace. She paid her own invoices, answered to no one, and what lived on the other side of that fallout looked, from where I stood, like a much better deal.

"I think," Sloane began, tilting her head to study me, "that you not wanting to lose your job is half about dodging your parents, and half about your desperate need to stay right next to your hot boss."

"That's not true." I said it too fast. "I just think he's cute. I don't have actual feelings for him."

"Sure," Sloane deadpanned.

I leaned back on the stool and blew out a long breath. "Do you have any actual, usable advice?"

She shrugged, chin lifted. "My advice is to drop the pen name and tell him the truth. But given the way your body goes haywire when you so much as see him, I doubt you're going to do that. You want him close. I'm sure you want him right next to you, or preferably on top of you, and knowing you⁠—"

I grabbed a glossy tattoo magazine off the side table and hurled it at her head.

She caught it easy, laughing hard. I pressed my lips together, fighting a smile, before giving up and letting a small laugh slip.

Coming out publicly as V.M. Ashby wasn't impossible only because of Simon. It was impossible because being V.M. Ashby was something I did in private, in silence, wrapped in the safety of total anonymity.