Untitled Stephenie Meyer Novel
While her son sweat through his orange-belted gi in the November air waiting curbside of the dojo across town, Whitney sleeved her venti caramel macchiato and told the barista she’d see her tomorrow. Feeling a gaze roaming her, she turned to the scruffy man a couple of tables away shimmering in the blue glow of his laptop screen, which bisected a convenient eyeline between himself and her rear end. He stroked his graying temple, immersed and troubled, until her own stare pulled him blinking from his trance and into her trajectory. Ensnared, she offered a pursed-lip nod.
“Anything interesting?” She gestured with her cup, then tried to mask her regret at the open-ended introduction with the wince of a scalding sip.
“Me?” he asked, clearing his throat and waving it off. “Just work. Deadlines, turd polishing…” A twitch in his cheek and gaps of pale, doughy flesh between the strained buttons of his shirt.
Her eyes rolled with empathy. “I’ve been known to turn a few sows’ ears into silk purses, myself.”
Not his type at all. Too lanky, confident, mature. But the thirst of recent weeks and his cooling bed suggested he at least needed the practice for the evening to come. His nostrils filled with her spoiled scent as she passed. A head-turning glimpse of the document captured her regard.
The non-title — this title — blackened the screen in twenty-four-point Times New Roman. Splitting two of the letters, a cursor throbbed with possibility. Whitney’s own pulse impelled to join its rhythm in perfect blinking sync. Glamored.
“Is that,” she stammered, hand over her laboring lungs, “is that what I think it is?”
He nodded meekly.
“You some kind of ghost writer or something?”
An ironic snort escaped his nose. Despite not knowing the difference between a lycanthrope and a misanthrope, a dangling modifier from a split infinitive, he managed, “I’m her editor.”
“Oh wow. So that means you get to read all this stuff in advance.”
He weighed his hands on invisible scales. “‘Get to’ … have to…”
Whitney summoned her resolve. “Do you think maybe I,” her voice cracked with audacity, “I could … read some of it?”
His face contorted as she radiated, her musk suffusing his space with instinct repellent. Still, he persevered. “Sorry. You have any idea how many people are dyin to get their mitts on this?”
“I didn’t even know there was gonna be another book,” Whitney said.
“Exactly.”
Nearing hyperventilation, “So … would you mind?” She thrust her face towards the screen, squinting, but in that mere peek before the man lowered the lid, all the body text below the title appeared greeked in characters unfamiliar.
“And in return, what?” He rubbed his hands together for effect, wringing from his mind the lecherous scenarios conjured.
“Come on, it’s for my daughter,” she lied, as her patient son and only offspring had no defense for the cold he was catching from her tardiness. Whitney lengthened her dress as she felt her appetite subside, replaced for the first time with shame yet unsure whether it was from her latent adolescent mania over this Twilight saga or the compromises she might endure to sate it.
“Mm hmm. Tell you what,” the man called her bluff, “you bring her by here this evening, and I promise she’ll get a look. No, I’ll go one better — I’ll have her written into the story; how’s that sound? Eh?”
Whitney backed away for the exit, clutching her purse and shaking her head. Violated.
The man exhaled with relief as the door chimed, her five-dollar cup left stranded upon the table in his peripheral. He re-opened the laptop lid and resumed his pensive, brooding study of the draft. No keystrokes, no page-downs. Just a zoo exhibit.
Ten minutes passed until a tentative voice captured his ear among the din of blending and frothing machinery. “Strix, right?”
He drank her in, wondering how he overlooked her entrance. Five feet of virtue and featureless femininity, despite her barrel torso poured into a threadbare sweater — a gift, no doubt. Auburn hair grazed her shoulders, brushed with compulsive precision. Her pallor rivaled his own, with maroon lipstick punctuating a sullen face wired for drama. And the thrice-pierced ear and book-weighted backpack were further indicators the two might be kindred, even though at forty-two human years, he was also about thrice her age.
The man, Strix, claimed himself and gestured for her to sit next to him, which she did with no small degree of eye-darting paranoia. The oxygen vacuumed out of the room when his hand touched hers with reassurance, offering to get her something, “a chai tea, maybe,” which she declined. “You are exactly how I imagined, Emma,” he said, shimmering with a delight that Whitney could not have elicited in her twenty most recent years.
She blew her bangs out of her eyes. “I’m not sure what I imagined. But here I am.”
“It takes a very special girl to—”
“So can I see it?” The nymphet twirled gum around her tongue, fumbling through her best flirtatious impression.
He recoiled from her unexpected disinterest in foreplay, closed his laptop, and patted the leather satchel hanging from his chair. Emma heaved it onto the table, unbuckling it to produce a ream of manuscript paper, the same non-title dominating its cover page. As she flushed with wide-eyed anticipation, Strix inhaled the apex of her innocence, pure as the winter breeze off the Black Sea. Fanning the pages, her crimson mouth hung open when noticing that each bore a watermark over the text with her name in large, outlined letters.
“For security purposes,” he said. “And you understand you can’t tell anybody of this, right?”
“Our secret.” She pinched her lips and made a zipping motion, dreading the inevitable call to action and ignoring the adhesive itch burning under her sweater.
“First, though,” he said, reclaiming the manuscript on cue, “we’ll chill out at my place for a bit, and then run through a few of those alternate scenes. That little ‘audition’ we talked about.” If only his heart still beat, his stagnant blood would have ruptured its arterial walls when Emma bit her lip with that embarrassed giggle he’d longed to witness in person.
“Right. New Honey-Moon.”
“It’ll be fun. You like champagne?”
She shrugged.
“All right, let’s get outta here, then. I gotta be on a call with Stephenie in a few hours.”
Tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear, she got up and said she had to use the restroom first. Before he could object, she and her backpack were halfway to the mug kiosk. That’s when he heard the voices of authority behind him.
“Face down, on the ground!”
“We will tase you!”
“Andrei Vladimir Dalakis, you are under arrest for the solicitation of sex with minors. You have the right to remain silent—”
“I ain’t done nothin,” the man seethed as he sunk to his knees. His lips trembled in silent, driveling prayer. When finally his face collapsed to the ground as commanded, blood pooled out from his center onto the hardwood floor, impaled upon a silver dagger.
Investigators would not know the full extent of Dalakis’s transgressions, or his literary ruse, until his laptop returned from the lab, along with the testimonies of three other girls.
“It’s ‘haven’t done anything,’” Emma corrected.
©2009 Gordon Highland