The Author and Her Bodyguard

Chapter 1

The corners of my mouth ached from smiling so hard at the photo of my face peering up at me from inside the book flap. "That's me," I said in a squeak. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I refused to let them fall or else I'd be a scary mascara mess of chaos. I didn't need that. Not before I was hurled before a thousand people where I was supposed to look "put together" and not like the hyperactive, distractible and ungraceful author that I ACTUALLY was. I didn't want to become a meme, or a boomerang on someone's Instagram page in a permanent edition of author fails.

I heard my agent, Sanders laugh from where she stood behind me. She was grinning from ear to ear, holding the rest of the copies of my book in a large box. "You DO realize that is where an author's face tends to hang out when they make a book happen," she said with an amused snort. 

My hands shook as I held my writing— my mind in my fingers, pressing them harder to the book as I attempted to process the magic of the moment. "I wrote this." I blinked, half expecting the book to disappear in between my blinks. 

I was afraid to look anywhere else. Afraid the book would vanish and the moment would melt away and drag me to my old room, where I would wake up in my bed in a one-bedroom apartment which I had shared with three girls, all of who had wanted to be actresses. Their tap dancing practices, monologue rehearsing, and singing scales for hours on end had lead me to invest all the change in my Batman piggy bank (yes I had one of those) into a pair of noise-canceling headphones. 

Those glorious, dingy headphones gave me enough sanity to try and piece words together, wrestle them into coherent paragraphs, and left me with enough strength to pray that it would all sort itself into a coherent story that someone out in the universe would read and not hate.  And when I finished... I realized that it was all total crap. I had written a pile of crap, printed it out, and then had a physical copy of said crap that had done nothing but collect dust in a shame face of... well shame.

But here I was, staring at a totally different book, and people out there didn't think it was crap. They believed in it and my face and name were on it. "This is crazy."  

Sanders plucked the book from my hands and placed it at the top of the pile of books she was holding. She raised a brow at me, amusement making her brown eyes bright with golden flecks.  I loved how much she always smiled, the dimples that filled her cheeks, and the smile wrinkles that told me how much she had laughed in her forty-five years of life. She had a warm, calming presence in what had been a whirlwind of crazy ever since she had become my agent five years ago, plucking me out of doubt as a writer and throwing me into authorhood. Sure I was still full of doubt, but I had her and that was something I would always be thankful for.

She pushed her short-cropped black hair out of her face, several slick black strands falling again and framing her left temple. "You do this every time you know." I followed her as she moved down a hallway. 

"I do what?" I asked confused as my hands adjusted the peach blouse I wore so it sat straight on my shoulders. 

"You always look at every book like the first time. It's like you still can't wrap your head around being an author," Sanders said as she came to a stop at the edge of the hall. A crowd could be heard, boisterous and loud, around the corner. The excitement was clear in the air, electrifying. 

I tugged on a strand of my blond hair, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, suddenly shy. It didn't matter how many times I picked up a book. When I finally saw the cover, the words on the page, my face on the inside, it always felt like the first time. 

It didn't matter that this was my third story. I had just seen this particular book for the first time and I still got that feeling of disbelief. Of living someone else's life. Or that I was holding a piece of magic that someone else had conjured up, giving me all my dreams, or even more terrifying, that someone had brought me so close to everything I had ever wanted but would pluck it away just as I had gotten to know what that feeling of heaven was like.