CHAPTER FOUR

DIGRESS

( — lose clarity or turn aside especially from the main subject of attention or course of argument in writing, thinking, or speaking. )

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          LINCOLN TAKES HIS TIME WHILE BREWING TWO CUPS OF COFFEE. Michaela, on the other hand, can't ignore the incessant repetition of the bouncing rhythm of her legs as she taps her feet against the carpet while waiting for him to speak. She's also trying not to think about the time she threw up on the previous carpet in front of a bunch of guests, which was what sparked the first pregnancy rumors.

          It's never a good sign, she thinks, when he has to take a break before telling her something. There was a time they trusted each other blindly, respecting each other's privacy but still knowing they could count on each other, but Michaela feels like she doesn't know him anymore. Maybe there's nothing serious going on and he just needs some time for himself because her presence was certainly unexpected; hell, if the roles were reversed, she thinks she'd have to lock herself up in her room for, at least, fifteen minutes to get used to it.

          She doesn't dare touch anything. The paintings hung on the walls, the plants, and the glass objects scattered around the room are the same as when she left, but Michaela doubts it was purely out of respect for her. Lincoln doesn't have an eye for decorating and let her be in charge of it, flipping through IKEA catalogs and dragging him there, knowing it'd be no use to ask him for his opinion, but she liked their time alone.

          He kept the apartment exactly how it used to be because he couldn't be bothered with redecorating it. She had enough money to spare to find a new apartment and decorate it, so she didn't feel the need to come back and take everything she had bought, and, let's be honest, as petty as she might have been in high school, she wouldn't strip his apartment bare.

          When he returns, carrying the two mugs, Michaela isn't entirely convinced everything is okay. Maybe it's the way his hands shake—as if she had never warned him about the dangers of ingesting too much caffeine—or the too frequent glances towards his office—she had also warned him about staying locked up for too long and forgetting about the passing of time; once, he spent almost twenty-four hours locked in there, writing, and skipped an important meeting thanks to that—but she's not an idiot. A six-year-long relationship comes with its perks, with one of them being the ability to read each other, but Michaela doesn't know if she can trust her ability after two years of separation.

          "I'm sorry about this," he begins, handing her a red mug, the same color as her lipstick, and sitting down next to her once more. "Interviews still make me nervous."

          "And here I was, thinking I was the one making you nervous."

          The words roll out of her tongue before she can stop herself and he blinks, straightening his back, so she forces herself to sip the scorching hot drink to mask her embarrassment. She has to remind herself they're not together anymore and he, most likely, has moved on—though he's not a professional musician, an actor or a model, celebrities always find a way of meeting each other—so these snarky remarks shouldn't be encouraged.

          So, when his lips twist into a tiny smile, she sighs with relief, finding his sense of humor is still there and maybe he doesn't resent her as much as she thought he did. His life was a lot more than just his relationship with her, and she hated that she'd let herself forget about it after complaining the press and the fans did the same thing to her.

          "Yes, that too," Lincoln agrees, sitting with a leg beneath him and setting his elbow on the pillows. While she lay in her bed for days after the break-up, he took a vacation to colorful destinations and wrote and wrote and wrote. While other people drink and hook up and destroy themselves to forget about the heartache, writers lock themselves up in tiny rooms and write. "It's still strange to see you here."

          She's too cold to cry, with pale-pink nails covered in a bluish tint. "What did you want to tell me? Because the have you been writing question is part of Ginny's list."

           Lincoln scratches his beard, momentarily lost in thought, and Michaela turns on the voice recording function on her phone. "A bit, yes. All I have so far is just a rough draft—a really, really rough draft that needs months of editing—but I guess you can call it writing." The fingers of his free hand twitch and Michaela sets her phone on the empty space between them, both to capture his voice a bit better and to prevent them from potentially scooting closer to one another. "My agent says I have to do a lot more than just write rough drafts if I want to keep my contract, but I didn't write a single word for a year, so I'm feeling a bit rusty. Listen, Michaela—"

          "Have you ever considered writing under a pseudonym?" Michaela tries to relax her shoulders, though her muscles are frozen and stiff. It's easier to avoid unnecessary drama by focusing only on what she came here to do while mentally cursing whatever Ginny had for dinner on Thursday night. "Because, sometimes, writing contracts want you to constantly deliver a very specific genre of book or you fear you'll lose your readership if you branch out to other genres."

          He briefly sighs, staring up at the ceiling before looking back at her. "Running the risk of sounding awfully pretentious, my readership is diverse enough to let me write a science fiction book or a fantasy one, so that wouldn't be a problem. My contract gives me plenty of freedom regarding what I want to write about, as long as it follows certain guidelines, so no. No, I don't feel the need to use a pseudonym." He pauses to drink more coffee. "I'm sure plenty of great authors have done it, but I don't see myself needing to use one."

          Michaela puckers her lips and he's watching her, his gray eyes fixed on her the same old way they used to eight, six, two years ago—they see beyond her, reading her, and she feels too exposed, almost naked. "How many unpublished or half-written novels do you have? You've been in the business for a while, so it might be safe to presume there are some things that have never seen the light of day."

          "Michaela, the book is about you." Her mug sways in her hand, spilling hot droplets of coffee on her hand and leg. This time, her eyes are on him, never once moving away, but he purposely avoids her, staring down at the couch and pausing the recording. The shift in the air currents between them doesn't go by unnoticed, especially when his fingers brush against her leg, and she stiffens. "I mean, it's not just about you, but you're a big part of it—"

          "And I told you I didn't want you to involve me in your work like this!" She leans to the side to set the mug on the coffee table, where it doesn't run the risk of getting knocked down. "It's a huge disrespect of my privacy and you've been writing this thing for, what, a year? You spent a year writing about me without my permission?"

          "Mickey," he insists, and she shoots him a deadly glare. Counseling taught them how to solve conflicts using healthy coping methods instead of being at each other's throats, but this . . . this is different. This is him breaking a promise he had made to her years ago, one that actually puts her personal life at risk, and that's not something she's willing to let go of. "Listen to me, just this once, will you?" She scowls. "Of course it's not a carbon copy of our relationship because I would never do that to you and not just because you'd sue me in a heartbeat if I ever went forward with it."

          "Oh, you bet I'll take you to court if you publish this thing and people start pestering me about whether what you wrote is true or not!"

          Lincoln's lips expel a nervous laugh. "Yes. Yes, of course. There are plenty of changes, obviously, but it's more of a . . . personal project, in a way. I'm writing everything down, the essential parts of it, anyway, to, hopefully, figure out where we went wrong." He rubs the side of his neck. "That's the title. Where We Went Wrong. 4W, like my agent calls it."

          Michaela exhales, hiding her face behind her hands. If she closes her eyes and focuses enough, she can almost feel the cold silver of her engagement ring against her skin. "My God, Lincoln."

          "You can read what I have so far, if you'd like." His voice falters, and she's glad she's not looking at him. She never knows what to do when the masks fall—both his and hers. "I'd appreciate it if you did, actually. Why don't you stay for lunch and flip through it just to see what you think? If you think it's too . . . intrusive, I'll strike it out."

          "Tell me." Michaela drops her hands, stomach turning like a typhoon. "Is she pretty? Tall?"

          Lincoln knits his dark brows together. "She? You think I've been seeing someone?" She stays silent. "God, no. No. My commitment at the moment is merely to my writing."

☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ:⠀ *⋆.*:･ﾟ .: ⋆*･ﾟ: .⋆

          GINNY CAN RUN, BUT SHE CANNOT HIDE. Therefore, when Michaela storms into the office on Monday morning, the poor girl jumps in her seat when the door slams open. Michaela accidentally forgets everything is made of glass and is awfully prone to shattering if one uses too much strength.

          It's not Ginny's fault, obviously. Michaela has been in a terrible mood all weekend and having to get up early to go to work and write about her ex-fiancé were the two last things she wanted to do. She even considered calling in sick, saying she had caught whatever Ginny had, and she could work from home, but the guilt was too heavy, so she kicked away the covers and skipped her morning work-out.

          4W has received a green light from her and she's sincerely hoping she won't regret having given Lincoln permission to keep writing it. Like he had said, it's a rough draft and his style has changed a bit, but that was bound to happen after a one-year-long writer's block. It has to go through several layers of editing and polishing before it's ready for publishing, but she saw herself in those pages. She saw them, even with all the differences he wove into the story.

          People won't leave her alone after the book is out. That's something she'll have to brace herself for and what she spends the entire morning doing, sipping her black coffee, nibbling at dry apple slices, and ignoring the furious typing sounds coming from Ginny's desk. The girl works hard, Michaela realizes, and it's unfair for them to be sharing this story when Ginny was the one who pulled Lincoln out of interview retirement.

          Not that Ginny would ever let her quit.

          When the typing sounds become too much, Michaela gives up on pretending to work and decides to organize her desk instead, the red words on her planner burning the back of her eyelids. She doesn't allow herself to break her plans because she'll break. The extra minutes she spent in bed this morning, debating whether she wanted to face the world or not, ended up costing her her Pilates.

          It was worse a few years ago, when she spent two hours crying and yelling at everybody because her doctor's appointment had been postponed and ruined her plans for the whole week. She likes to think she's a lot better now and less of a spoiled brat, but she still wishes she could be more like Ginny, who plans everything to exhaustion, but still finds room for last-minute occurrences.

          "My parents wouldn't mind having you as a daughter," Michaela confesses, before she can bite her tongue.

          "How come?" Ginny replies, standing by the printer. On her hand, there's a stapler she once almost threw at Blair.

          "I don't know. They just wouldn't."

          Ginny sighs, turning to her. "Mich . . . is everything alright? You seem . . . strange. So not like yourself."

          "I'm fine," Michaela mutters, shooting a brief glance towards her phone when it lights up with an Instagram notification. She posted a photo from this morning, a shot caught by Kelsey Blue from the art department, but hadn't even looked at it since then.

lincolncalloway replied to your comment "@michaelatate it's a . . ."

          Of course. That's why her phone has been buzzing nonstop for the past fifteen minutes, flooding with notifications, and she wonders why she still allows comments in her posts, as if she knew he was going to comment on it. He rarely uses Instagram, but of course he'd go after her whenever he does.

          With a sigh, Michaela opens the app, ignores every comment yelling at her and Lincoln to get back together, and disables all comments on the photo. It sucks because there were plenty of nice ones, especially before he commented on it, but she's not in the mood for this. Not now, not ever.

          Today, she's the most powerful piece on the board.