Wildfire

Chapter 5

Lauren's penthouse felt charged when she entered, as if her lunch with Jayson had somehow altered the energy of her space. She kicked off her heels, mind spinning between the publisher's deadline, Friday's promise, and that glimpse of something - someone? - in her reflection.

The cursor on her laptop blinked accusingly, a metronome counting down to her professional ruin. Princess Aurora waited, poised and expectant. Gallery Books waited, checkbooks at the ready. Seven figures waited, dancing tantalizingly out of reach on the other side of a sequel she couldn't seem to conjure.

But her fingers had other ideas. Instead of the sequel, she found herself typing about the park, about birds moving in impossible patterns, about a man who bent reality with the same precise control he used to time cabs and fill silences heavy with unspoken meaning.

The words disappeared as she wrote them, the document remaining stubbornly blank despite her typing. Like his notepad during their first session. Like the objective reality she'd always taken for granted asserting itself, refusing to be overwritten no matter how fervently she tried to capture in black and white what was happening just beyond the veil.

Her phone lit up - Rachel, again. The movie rights people were getting anxious. Everyone wanted updates, pages, proof that the golden goose named Lauren Morrison was still reliably producing expectations on demand and was still in control of her perfect career.

She glanced up at her kitchen, half-expecting to see Casimir materialize out of the shadows, speaking riddles that sounded like answers to questions she didn't know to ask. But the elegant space remained maddeningly empty, yet somehow humming with displaced energy. As if even her tasteful apartment was holding its breath, waiting for something - someone - to blow the whole pretty illusion wide open.

Night fell, then morning came. Tuesday stretched before her like a countdown. Every hour that ticked by was another hour closer to Wednesday's deadline, another hour of staring at a blank document, another hour of her agent's increasingly urgent messages.

By Tuesday afternoon, the walls of her usually comforting home felt like they were slowly constricting inward, the air too thick and stale to pull into her lungs. The mocking cursor just kept blinking in arrhythmic counterpoint to the throbbing pressure building behind her eyes. The sequel kept stubbornly refusing to write itself. And somewhere between her fifth bitter cup and Rachel's tenth tersely worded text, Lauren realized she needed to escape.

Needed to get out. Needed a drink that burned going down. Needed to be anywhere but trapped inside these walls with their modern art and suffocating expectations, anywhere but drowning inside her chaotic head and fracturing identity.

Her reflection in the window caught her eye - but it wasn't quite her reflection anymore. Something darker lurked at its edges, something that wore Jayson's face but none of his careful control.

The city lights blinked on one by one, each one a reminder of another hour wasted. Lauren paced her penthouse, the space feeling both too large and too small. Her phone showed 8:47 PM. Fourteen hours until her deadline, and all she had to show for it was coffee stains and deleted sentences.

Princess Aurora's voice used to come so easily. Now all she could hear was Jayson's measured tones asking who decides what's real, all she could see was the way light bent around him in the park, all she could feel was-

No. She couldn't let herself fall back down that particular rabbit hole. Couldn't think about him, couldn't think about the implicit promise hanging unspoken in the charged air between them come Friday. Couldn't think about anything except the soul-deep certainty that if she didn't generate something brilliant in the next few hours, the only reality that would matter was her plummeting bank balance and the unforgiving judgment of a cutthroat industry - and the even more unforgiving verdict of her own brutally high standards.