Page 37 of Bad Words

“If I wrote a two-hundred-page book, you’d still find some way to call it bloated and interminable.”

“Yes, because if you wrote a two-hundred-page book, it would still somehow feel bloated and interminable.” She drained the last of her gimlet. “Your short story felt interminable, and that was, what, three thousand words?”

“I bet you loved reading it.”

“Oh?” She looked amused. “Why’s that?”

“Because it fulfills the delusion of your life, where you’re the main character.”

Chan sighed. “Parker, we both know the main character of that story was you. Everyone who read it was forced to spend time in your company, not mine.” She marked her page—dog-eared, I hated that shit—and let her book flip shut. “Although I meant what I wrote. It was a nice change to see flashes of … what?” She snapped her fingers a few times, lazily. “Cognition, maybe? Drive?”

“You think I don’t have drive? You think anybody writes a nine-hundred-page book without drive?”

“Yes.” Her eyes flicked down to my dress shoes, then tracked up to the neck of my sweater. Heat filled my body as though she were pouring boiling liquid into me. “Don’t worry, though. I think if you really put your mind to it, you could write a twelve-hundred-page book without drive.”

The hot itch intensified up my ribs. I leaned over the bar and tucked a tip into the glass jar. My hand came within inches of her bicep as I withdrew, but she didn’t move away. She stilled in her seat, though, some tension in the clean lines of her forearms.

Her gaze lingered at the base of my throat. Christ. Why did she always look at me like she was deciding on the most efficient way to vivisect me?

I dropped my eyes to the book in her hands. “How’s your next victim? Are you enjoying reading alone?”

“I’m not alone. You’re here, unfortunately.”

“God, you’re so pedantic.”

“Better than being inaccurate, especially when using accurate language is your job. Anyway…” Chan flipped over the advance readers’ copy and considered its cover art: a bell jar with an albino weasel suspended inside, the title in elaborate capitals, DEUS EX ANIMALIS. It wasn’t one of the buzz books with the twelve-foot posters, nothing by a marquee author. Glancing at the ARC’s spine, I didn’t even recognize the publisher. I felt a pang of sympathy for this Ariana Okoro person, wherever she was, oblivious to her fate.

Then Chan said, “Yes, I’m enjoying the book. She’s funny, this author.”

I’d been so busy devising righteously angry responses, I found myself with absolutely no reply to this simple statement of enjoyment.

“Oh,” I said.

“She gets carried away with her dialogue,” Chan went on, “but she has such an ear for it, I can’t blame her.” Her eyes were intent on the cover, both fixed and distant, as though she were sliding out through a fissure in reality and seeing the world of the book unfold in front of her. This wasn’t the Selina Chan in the cartoon villain’s mansion I’d pictured, holding every novel at arm’s length with a premeditated expression of distaste, which any author had to clear some impossibly high bar to alter.

Chan seemed to remember that I existed. She glanced up at me. I realized with a sharp pang of discomfort how close we were, how I could see the dot of eyeliner caught in her lower lashes and the pink crease at the bow of her lip, the few light freckles laid on the tops of her cheeks.

I found myself saying, “That was weird. With Christian, on the panel.”

“Very,” she said.

A pause. Nearby, the bartender was firing soda water out of a small red gun into a tumbler. Why was I considering telling her that I’d never liked Christian’s books, either?

Why was I still standing here, looking at the bright wet sheen on her mouth from her drink? I felt strangely aware of the taste of apple on my tongue, the lingering sweetness, as though in counterpoint to the gleam on her lips, that leftover gloss of gin.

“Well,” she said, voice tart, sliding the advance copy into her tote bag, “I’m going back to Brooklyn. I assume I’ll see you online, unfortunately.”

I stepped back, my annoyance returning. “Yep. Bye.”

She strode for the door. On the bottom step she paused, took her phone from her purse, and studied its screen, unreadable. I thought I saw her shoulders tighten. Then she vanished upstairs into the lowering blue evening.

Chapter TenSelina

Search results for: Selina Chan

10m ago @richardpapensvape: lol that panel video. i love how selina chan so completely does not care about these impotent men and their feelings. low-empathy icon. emotionless queen

14m ago @infpcatlady: I mean, people hated Selina Chan for years before this, though? Did we all forget that being an asshole doesn’t make you smart or aspirational, even if that asshole is a woman??