Page 124 of Bad Words

“No.”

“Selina—”

“I said no, Parker. You can’t come in.”

“That article,” he burst out. “The interviewer took me completely out of context. I swear to God, Selina. I knew him a bit in high school, and he let me think he was writing a profile of me. I had no idea I needed to have my guard up.”

“You know this guy?”

“Only a little! I told him I didn’t feel that way about your reviews anymore. I don’t feel that way.”

“You don’t? Even though you’ve been texting your publishing friends, saying—”

“No, listen. Those texts were from November. We were still saying things like that about each other in public at that point. You were still calling me juvenile and hopeless in print.”

“I said those things about your story, Parker. Your fictional story. I’ve never written anything about how your family or friends feel about—”

Down the hall, my neighbor stuck her head into the hallway.

My hand strangling the doorknob, I stepped back. Once Parker had strode inside, I shut the door and faced him. “Let me get this straight. You came here to say this isn’t that bad? And here I thought maybe you came to say you were sorry for airing my family’s dirty laundry.”

“But I didn’t mean to—all I said was that—that you spent holidays here on your own, and—”

“I don’t want anyone to know that about me!” I hated how thin my voice sounded, how abruptly vulnerable. “I don’t tell people that! You know that! Why did you talk about it at all? Let alone to a media contact you haven’t spoken to in fifteen years?”

His fingers flew to his forehead, his face crumpling. “I don’t know, I—”

“And what about these past few weeks? Acting like—like you really—” I felt his hands on my body, his mouth on my neck. Humiliation bloomed inside me. I was losing it. Losing my composure, my articulation, everything. “When this whole time, you’ve had this—this group chat with my name on it? Did you like checking in on how much your friends hate me? Secretly having the upper hand while we were—”

“Selina, no.” He reached for me. I smacked his hand away, stepped back. “It wasn’t like that at all. The last thing I said to these people was that they had the wrong idea about you. Do you want to see the texts? I’ll show them to you.”

I let out a miserable laugh. “Sure. Show me, if you want to. But I don’t know if you do.”

As he looked down at his phone screen, thumbing his way up through the conversation, he swallowed, and his brows drew together. I tried to imagine Parker drawing a hard line in the sand. I tried to picture him arguing with a group of people on my behalf, risking offense or unpleasantness to stand up for me.

“No,” he said, his eyes closing. He looked sick. “No, okay, I don’t.”

I wanted to stifle the hurt somehow. I wanted to stop the question spilling out, but I couldn’t. “What have they been saying about me?”

“Don’t,” he said hoarsely.

Pain and anger twined into a hard knot in the center of my chest. “What have you been watching them say?”

“Selina, it wouldn’t have mattered if I—”

“It would have mattered to me.”

“But they have these deep-seated—even compared to what we were saying last year, these people are way beyond—”

“I don’t care about them, Parker!” I said, halfway to a shout. “Do you think their opinions ever mattered to me? You’re the one I cared about! God knows why!”

He flinched. It felt good. My mind was a blank roar, and I smelled weakness, pain, pressed my advantage. “I should have known the whole time,” I said through my teeth, “that there would be some two-faced, cowardly shit like this with you.”

Something ignited in his hollow expression. Hurt sparking against anger.

“Are those texts,” he said, his voice low and restrained, “really so much worse than what you wrote about me? For years, people have been taking what you wrote about my books and turning it into an attack on who I am. And I know you think it’s different, because you didn’t talk about me directly, but Selina, it’s all the same. Nobody fucking cares that it’s fiction. They don’t care. If you say the book is idiotic, then I’m an idiot. If you say the book is a failure, I’m a failure.”

“It’s not my fault that people will take criticism and expand it past its actual boundaries.”