Just Like Her

Chapter 15

Emma

Tom stayed through the end of the weekend and caught the last train to London Sunday evening. While the festival had officially finished by that Monday, I stayed on an extra few days to catch lingering authors and festival organizers.

The delay paid off, and I managed to interview several industry bigwigs and the head of an up-and-coming publishing house—all rather loose-lipped due to their relief from the conclusion of the festival and their subsequent imbibing at the local pubs.

I submitted the final articles in the festival series by Wednesday, and, with no major rewrites, finished all of Rufus's edits by that Thursday. Prior to my departure for Hay-on-Wye, Trisha had convinced me to establish several new social media profiles and to post to them throughout the festival. I followed her advice and linked them with my profile on The Post's website. That, too, paid off. The traffic to my pieces skyrocketed, and my number of review queries nearly tripled.

To celebrate, Trisha insisted we all go out.

"For drinks, and maybe dancing depending on the number of drinks I get in me!" She exclaimed as she wiggled her bum around the kitchen.

I laughed at her attempt to twerk against the fridge and agreed, quickly picking up my phone to ping Tom.

While we had been inseparable during the festival—he attended most of the events I was covering and even kept me company by reading or doing his own work while I wrote—Rufus's editorial demands and Tom's own commitments had kept us apart for most of the week.

He responded to my message almost immediately promising he'd be there.

* * *

It felt ridiculous to be nervous.

We had only been apart a few days (3 ½ days to be exact) and we had only slept together a handful of (glorious, mind-blowing) times. It was too soon to be nervous to see him—and yet I was.

I wasn't so much nervous to see him as I was to be seen by him. In the days we had been apart, we had continued to talk on the phone nightly, still... a small part of me couldn't help fear something might change when we saw each other in London again. As if we had been under some romantic spell while in Hay-on-Wye and the moment we returned to the city the spell would snap, the well of our intoxicating chemistry would dry up, and when Tom saw me again a part of him would recognize the change, too. He would be polite, as would I, but the nightly phone calls before bed would stop and the invitations to get together would trickle to a halt.

That was one version I thought up.

In another more outlandish scenario, Tom was not polite about it. In this nightmare, he would loudly and publically point out all of my faults, call me a fraud among other things, and then storm off in search of something better.

In yet another adaption, Tom had already found that something better in a petite-yet-perfectly-voluptuous young woman, who was a brilliant scientist working to cure children's cancer.

Each rendition hit a tender spot with drone-like precision, and they were all oddly specific. Except for one, the last one, in which I had built up all of this—our conversations, our touches, our exchanged glances—in my head, only to make a total ass of myself in front of Tom, who in turn thought nothing of me or of our imaginary relationship.