'Veloria stared up at the monstrous creature. The very sight of its true form fracturing the very fabric of her mind. Nothing could be this gigantic. Nothing could be this...'
Grotesque? Shit! No, that's too pulpy. Maddening? No, we shun Lovecraft in this house.
Katie squinted at the annoying little cursor bar, willing the next word to come. The problem was that she wasn't all that fond of her writing to this point. Yes, it was just her first draft—infamously dubbed the vomit draft amongst writers—and the story itself was just a short to put into an anthology collection for the gothic horror genre. Yes, she had two other books that were in the editing process. Yes, her last published book—The Nightmare of Gott—had been a bestseller. Yes, she was considered to be one of the stars of the genre's promising new generation. But that didn't stop her mind from revolting at the words she was currently putting into a draft. It didn't mean she wasn't dealing with a block. It didn't mean that her other current project—The Severing of Sarah—wasn't lacking something vital that she couldn't figure out. It didn't bring the right words to her mind.
Katie was burnt out from trying to force the short into being—at least for the moment—so she sighed out her frustration and decided to give herself a distraction. She fished out her phone from her pocket and looked at her notifications. There were several from Alex and Josh—her agent and her editor, respectively—with requests for updates on her projects and recommendations for books they wanted her to check out. The biggest recommendation was from that author.
Charlotte Night.
Katie was not going to read anything by that gimmicky mystery of a hack. She had no idea about the woman's actual talents when it came to writing, but what Katie did know spoke volumes.
One: no one had ever seen her. Not even at her book signings. She always wore a formless mask and never spoke. None of her professional accounts had personal pictures or anything to suggest what she might look like under the mask. In Katie's opinion, it reeked of egotistical attention seeking behaviour.
Two: her pen name was so Byronic and basic. Katie's own nom de plume—Madam Tremaigne—may have first been looked at as something similar, but she was validated in that it was literally her last name and fit her in ways that her readers acknowledged. To them she was a Madam. They politely requested her to torture them with her words and she did. It was the whole point of her career. A girl like her didn't just become a gothic horror novelist for the money. Or they shouldn't. And authors with lazy names like Charlotte Night reeked of mercenary ideology.
Three: she was a social media troll. The reason why she was so popular was because she loved to taunt and tease and insult her fellow authors. Especially—for reasons unknown to all but her, probably—Katie. Charlotte seemed to enjoy saying things that could be interpreted as either flirtatious or targeted and mean-spirited. Katie was pretty sure it was latter, and it seemed nearly everyone agreed with her. In fact she had been the last person to realise that she was being trashed. It took her reading how people responded and how her loyal readers reacted for her to see that she couldn't trust the possibility that Charlotte's comments about her were anything but overconfident mudslinging.
Not everyone thought that about Charlotte though. It was the only reason why Katie held her tongue online. There was one person who was a fan of her rival that Katie absolutely adored.
Charlie.
Katie's Charlie.
The best man to ever exist on the other side of the screen. He had become a follower of hers after The Nightmare of Gott was released in bookstores, and he often tagged her when there were the early internet discussions about her work. His comments were the only thing that got her through the chaos. While others trashed her for everything from her being a woman to her open dislike of Lovecraft because of the man's bigotry, Charlie actually made fair points. More than that he gushed about his favourite parts and seemed to make connections that Katie thought only she would ever know about. She had reached out privately to him after that.
At first she kept it impersonal. Discussing his views as a reader and asking for more in-depth critiques on parts. But slowly it became a friendship. They discussed other things and gave reactions to stuff other than Katie's published works. Katie even started to seek out Charlie's opinions on projects in progress. She confided in him. Grew to trust him with her personal life despite not meeting him or knowing what he looked like. She even gave him her personal number and they had begun texting more than online chatting. They weren't always in agreement about things. Case in point: Charlie was literally a Charlotte Night apologist. He was always convinced that everyone read her posts wrong and kept suggesting that Katie would love her work. He also was the only person who she allowed to argue with her about the idea that she include relationships and romance in her gothic horror novels. Katie hated the idea. But it was that argument that changed things between them.
Katie discovered that Charlie could write.
She didn't think he was a professional like her, but he had skill. He was especially good at writing smut specifically for her sensibilities. It had started when he wrote a quick scene to prove his point that gothic horror could be steamy and not lose anything or become pigeonholed. What Katie learned was that she was turned on by it. Charlie avoided the gag worthy dialogue or overused descriptions of body parts—particularly the appendage most typically associated with penetrative sex—in favour of scenes that felt sensual and intimate and even tense or scary but in the best ways. They also read as queer if not practically sapphic which Katie appreciated. It had been a while since she had read something in her own genre that was a smut scene revolving around a woman's pleasure and gratification instead of a man's. And she instinctively gave her unedited reactions to it. That led to more such times. Each time, Katie would slip more and more into imagining it was her in those scenes. And then she imagined it was her and Charlie in them.
Eventually she opened up about it and asked if maybe they could try to have some long distance fun where they both wrote a scene together, her taking one of the characters and Charlie taking the other. And that evolved into them dropping third person perspectives in the scenes in favour of first person perspectives. They were sexting. Katie had stopped trying to convince herself otherwise since the beginning. What was more, Charlie was affectionate outside their scenes. It was teetering on the verge of something more than Katie had ever even hoped for.
She had never fallen for a man before. If asked before by a friend, she would have said she assumed she was a lesbian or maybe some form of asexual and aromantic. But now, it was obvious that she was falling for Charlie even without any idea of what he looked like. She wasn't even sure about his age or really anything. The only things she knew from the beginning were that his screen name was CharlieRiley, that he went by Charlie, and that he had said Riley was his last name. She had refused to cyber stalk him even though he had offered her his private accounts on social media to follow. Everything else had been gleaned from what he said and how he wrote. She knew that while he had an apartment in New York City and had grown up there, he often had to travel for his work. He kept late hours naturally and that his insomnia was what had led to his first introduction to the genre of books she wrote. She learned he had a dry and sarcastic style of humour that played with double meanings only someone who knew him would catch, though she wished he'd stop making the someday you might leave me for a man joke. She knew he was teasing because it didn't even make sense. The only man she could ever want was Charlie. She even knew that he had a cat named Lucifer—after the cat in Cinderella—making him one of the few people who actually got where Katie had taken her pen name from. She hadn't ever needed to check out his socials or ask for pictures. The words had always been more than enough for both of them.
Her mind stopped drifting when she saw she had a text from him. Immediately, she opened the message. And then she let out a mixture of a gasp and a shriek that she wasn't sure if it was from surprise or excitement. Either way, she wasn't prepared for this.
