The Pact by Niina Blake

Author:Niina Blake [Blake, Niina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-11T16:00:00+00:00

13

THE BIRD

The rest of book club is thankfully uneventful.

I spend almost fifteen minutes trying to un-puff my eyes with Elijah perched on my spot on the bathtub relentlessly teasing me. It’s almost weird how easily things go back to normal. It feels good to be just us again.

Although I can still feel a hum of excitement - like my own personalized tinnitus - whenever I think about what he said. I keep trying to push it down and silence it because I don’t want to be excited by him liking me. It’s just hard not to be after lusting over him for weeks.

He said he’s gonna prove that things would be different if we dated, but I don’t know how he’d do that. I’m just happy we’re back to friends for now, and I’m not going to think any further ahead than that.

Back downstairs Lucas is sure to make multiple jokes about our time upstairs together, but after about the fourth joke Mia whacks him round the head and I’m forever grateful.

Mia was right and only the actual book club members (plus Elijah and Lucas) sit down in another room to discuss the book. Another thing I’m forever grateful for.

The questions are easy breezy and the comments all lovely. Not one person asks me what I’m working on next or when I’m publishing again. It almost feels like that topic is off limits, like they’ve been warned off it, but I think I’m just reading into things, or perhaps just hoping they have been.

That’s true for everyone but Mia, who I swear is some kind of sorcerer the way she gets me to agree to things or tell her things I never meant to. In the kitchen after the discussion, she nonchalantly asks me about the future, and the next thing I know, I’m spilling the beans on my agent-less life developments. I make her promise not to tell anyone, which she only agrees to if I promise to come to another book club. I assume it will be soon, as she’s already begun distributing my second book around town.

I’m not even mad that Elijah already has his copy - I think that’s called personal growth.

I also think that my little tearful outburst meant that Elijah went easy on me tonight. He only gave me supportive smiles, encouraging comments, and only asked one question,

“What inspires you?”

I of course decided not to reveal that my latest writing is inspired by an artistic lumberjack living under the same roof as me. I don’t think that reveal would help our newly established friendship 2.0. Instead, I told him that little moments in my life and the lives of my friends give me the ideas, and then I just run wild with them.

In the car on the way home, he tells me that he has some more follow-up questions, but that tonight isn’t the night. He says that seeing as we live together, book club is basically every night for him, just without the hair twins.

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