Nervous Read online

  No stutter. His grip on my hands calmed me. Well. That and the way he just... I don’t even know. The way he was just Avery Phoenix, I guess.

  “Challenged me,” he answered, his voice so ominous that any possible calm I managed to hold onto fled. My insides were suddenly shaking. He went on. “This was supposed to be an easy, friendly meeting, Jules. Thank the man who discovered ‘This Terrible Juncture’, the man who recognized a gem buried under a plethora of useless adverbs. But now you’ve issued a challenge, and I can never resist a challenge. How long are you planning to stay in New York?”

  I scrambled to figure out where he was going with this. “Until they send me home.” I’d come on a one-way ticket, because no one could promise Avery Phoenix would be available for today’s meeting, but no one dared thwart him, either. Susan warned me it could be days before I was called in. Except it wasn’t. It was today.

  “Tell me, Jules, do you have a cat?”

  I must have looked startled.

  “A dog? Someone waiting for you at home?”

  I shook my head.

  I rented a room in an old lady’s house. No pets, no smoking, no parties, no guests. I added my grocery needs to her list. Stayed in as much as possible. Saved my earnings for the rent and my half of the cable bill, which I needed for internet access.

  Avery-fucking-Phoenix let go of my hands and returned to his desk. Sat down. Lifted the phone. Spoke without greeting the person at the other end of the line. “I need an ergonomic desk set up in here for Mr. Sparks. With a chair. By tomorrow.” To me, he said, “Do you work from a laptop computer?”

  I could do nothing but nod. He spoke into the phone again. “No need for a computer, just the desk.”

  This was out of control.

  “Mr. Phoenix –” I started to say, but he cut me off with a sharp wave of his hand and a glare, then slammed the telephone receiver onto the cradle.

  “You will not argue with me. Unless it’s to convince me that a book is worth my time and attention.”

  “But – ”

  Another glare, this one stern enough to cut off my words all by itself.

  “You will sit right here and do your job, starting at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  He just expected me to… accept this? How would I concentrate with him in the room, with him watching me?

  I tried to remember the breathing exercise, but it eluded me. I must have looked as bewildered and shell-shocked as I felt, because he said, “I’ll ask you, just this once, is there a reason why this is impossible for you to do?”

  One reason? Just one out of the million reasons inside my head that were screaming for attention? Okay. Think. I can talk my way out of this. If I could give him a reasonable, valid excuse, I could be on the next plane home, back to my simple, easy life of reading books and writing friendly rejection letters. Google comma splices to learn how to avoid them. Type a few pages of dialogue from your favorite book to learn how to correctly punctuate. Read your work out loud – you should be able to taste the awkward sentences.

  “I don’t…” I paused, trying to think of the best way to say this. “People make me nervous,” I said. “I try to avoid them.”

  He laughed.

  I can’t say that I blame him, really. It was the lamest excuse ever, to a normal person.

  I didn’t have ailing parents, a significant relationship, or even a pet. I had nothing that I loved except my job. And Avery was going to make me do that job here.

  Because he didn’t like my chewed nails.

  He ordered me to sit opposite him, in the visitor’s chair. While I sat in silence, he got involved in something on his computer and stopped trying to make me talk. The inside of me was still shaking. I was no less nervous than when I’d stepped through that door from the hallway into this office half an hour ago. In fact, it was possible I was more nervous. It was almost worse that he was ignoring me.

  The silence should have been a blessed relief, but it wasn’t. It was awkward, and I felt stupid sitting here doing nothing. I looked around the office, hoping to distract myself. Surely I could find a square to help me breathe properly. If my anxiety got worse, I could use the skill I called The Big Five. Five things I could see, four things I could touch. Three things I could hear. Two that I could smell, and one that I could taste. It was a way to ground myself in the here and now, and sometimes it worked when nothing else did. Not that I was quite to that point, but skills don’t do much good if you forget they exist.

  The office décor had a theme, with several silver-framed paintings that were depictions of… dragons? I studied them. They were silver and blue and gray, wings shrouded in white flames. The silver and blue made me think of dragons, because when I think of phoenix, I think yellow and red and orange. Phoenix. Phoenixes? I realized I didn’t know the proper plural for that word, and almost snickered. One phoenix soared, another fell. One seemed to leave the canvas on the left side of the office door only to arrive on the canvas at the right of it.

  The wall behind Avery’s desk was a movement of swirling white and blue, an illusion of water flowing, created somehow with a pane of glass and light, the words Phoenix & Phoenix streaming down in an endless scroll. I looked for book shelves, but no such thing existed in this space, which seemed odd for the office of a literary agent. There was a nondescript door breaking the expanse of the wall to my right, and I looked at it, then looked away. I didn’t like doors that were closed. Hush, I told myself. Now is not the time to worry obsessively about a door. It was probably a closet or something.

  The personal assistant who’d led me down the long hallway entered through the office door, between the phoenix leaving and the phoenix arriving. She played with an earring and questioned Avery’s furniture order.

  “It’s very simple, Stephanie. Jules needs a desk.”

  “In your office? This is highly unusual, Avery,” she said, with a tone that somehow contained equal measures of exasperation and humor.

  He didn’t even look at her. “Do I pay you for your opinion?”

  “It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. Send him to Submissions. I’m sure they have at least one vacant desk. No need to go to so much trouble.”

  “My decisions are none of your business. But. In the interest of quelling any office rumors you might like to start, I would like Mr. Sparks to work on site for the time being. Mr. Sparks does not prefer to be around people. My premise is that it might be easier for him to deal with just one person.”

  She barked a laugh. “You? Easier? You’re kidding me. Or maybe you’re kidding yourself.” She turned to leave. As she walked toward the door, she snapped her fingers five or eight times in a row, enough to get me to look at her. When I did, she rolled her eyes. “Good luck, Mr. Sparks.”

  “Goodbye, Stephanie,” Avery said, standing and making a shooing gesture. “And you, too, Jules.”

  And me? What about me? I hoped I didn’t look as startled as I felt.

  “Go back to the hotel. Eat something. Sleep. I’ll see you in the morning. At eight.”

  chapter two

  inhale 1…2…3…4

  I had trouble sleeping in new places. I’d always had trouble, although it was never a big problem because it’s not like I ever got invited to sleep over at other people’s houses. It took me weeks to get used to sleeping in my rented room in St. Paul. The house made noises, and the traffic patterns were different than they were in the house I grew up in. I could hear the owner of the house moving around, and sometimes I could even hear her television programs. One of the librarians I worked with finally suggested I get a fan for white noise, and that helped a lot.

  The hotel had an air conditioner that worked pretty well to provide white noise, and the first night I was exhausted from traveling, and, despite being nervous about meeting Avery Phoenix, I’d only tossed and turned for a couple of hours before my brain allowed me to rest.

  Last night, between being baffled and confused from my meeting with Aver
y, and worrying that I would oversleep, I hardly slept at all. So, despite being tired, I managed to be outside Avery’s office door by seven fifty-nine. Shifting from foot to foot, wondering if I should knock. Before I could decide, the door opened from the inside.

  A small, ugly desk, my desk – had been set at a right-angle to Avery’s desk, only this one faced the wall. Anyone who came in and looked left to right would have an immediate view of my profile, and then see Avery face-on, the decorative wall with the scrolling Phoenix & Phoenix logo behind him. That closed door, the one I didn’t like, would be behind me. Across the room, yes, but close enough to make me uneasy.

  Avery watched me study the whole space as if waiting for me to say something about it. I didn’t know what sort of response I was supposed to be having. It was like the anxiety made me numb. Or maybe Avery just stunned me somehow. My brain was on tilt, unable to think about anything except what might be on the other side of that door.

  Avery’s voice snapped my attention back to him.

  “Julian. If you’re not five minutes early, you’re late.”

  I went into an instant sweat, clasping my fingers around my laptop bag, holding it in front of my crotch like a shield. Clenching, loosening, clenching. I looked up at him for a split second, but it was too much, so I dropped my eyes to my own feet. “Okay. I understand.”

  “Okay, I understand what?”

  My thoughts spun uselessly, trying to figure out what he wanted. Did he want me to repeat the rule? “Okay, Mr. Phoenix, I understand if I’m not five minutes early, I’m late.”

  His lips twitched. “Yesterday you addressed me as ‘sir’. I think I prefer it.”

  Was he teasing me? I risked a glance at his face, but he wasn’t smiling. I had no idea if he was joking or serious. “Yes, sir.”

  “Very nice. Well, come in. Do you want coffee? Did you eat breakfast?”

  “Um.” Shit. Two questions at once. Which one should I answer first? Did he want to know more about if I wanted coffee, or was he asking if I needed to eat? If I said yes to coffee, would he send me to go get it, or would someone bring it? And if I said no to breakfast, would he make me eat? I couldn’t eat this early in the morning. Should I lie and say I ate toast or something? No. Pretty sure lying to him would be a terrible idea.

  “Jules?”

  “Sorry. I mean… no to coffee and yes to breakfast. No, wait. The other way around, I think. I don’t know, I’m confused. Which one is more important?”

  Avery ginned. “Do you drink coffee while you work?”

  I nodded. “Usually.”

  “And how do you like it?”

  “Milk or plain creamer and two sugars.”

  “There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

  I shook my head. “I never eat breakfast.”

  “Okay. Good job. We’ve got a regular stream of information coming now.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Avery. I mean, Mr – um. Sir. I never know what to say.”

  “I’ve noticed.” He stepped back. “Go ahead and get set up for the day. Is that desk going to work for you?”

  “Yes, it’s fine.”

  That unknown door lurked behind me. Avery would be to my right. I was okay about facing the wall. Anyone who came to see Avery Phoenix would hardly be interested in me. And if my headphones were loud enough, I should be able to ignore anything that happened in this office. Or at least I hoped so.

  I hoped I’d remembered to put my headphones in the bag with my laptop. I could count on music to calm me. I could get lost in music, and then get lost in the words on my screen, if I could find something good from the unsolicited manuscript feed. Sometimes days would go by and there would be nothing good. Just an endless stream of bad writing that forced me to compose gentle responses.

  It took me a few minutes to set up my computer. The tabletop was a little high, but I was able to compensate for that by making the chair higher. My feet barely touched the floor. A footrest would be nice, but I didn’t suggest it because I didn’t want to attract any more of Avery’s attention. This would be fine. If I was very quiet and ignored Avery Phoenix, maybe he’d ignore me, too.

  I opened my browser, and was met with a request for a password to access the server. I typed in my codes, but got an error message. You are not connected to the internet.

  Hm.

  Well, of course I wasn’t.

  I cleared my throat. “Sir?”

  “Yes, Jules?”

  My formality and his familiarity established a very clear power differential. I wasn’t stupid. I noticed it, I just didn’t understand why. It made me want to be quiet as a mouse, so I didn’t annoy him. But I couldn’t do any work without access to the submissions feed. I chewed my lip for a second, then said, “I can’t connect to the internet.”

  “Of course you can’t.” His voice came from directly behind me, and I jumped when I felt his hands on my shoulders. “Get into your settings, and I’ll enter the password.”

  It was hard to focus and make the mouse move correctly with the warm weight of his hands, but after two wrong clicks, I finally managed to keep the pointer balanced on the icon for settings.

  He stayed behind me, leaning over my right shoulder. His arms came around me as he reached for the keyboard, and I cringed to the left to give him room.

  I could smell him again. That scent of an impending blizzard. It’s hard to explain the smell of winter, how cold can feel anticipatory and dangerous in your nostrils. That’s what he smelled like, swirling winds, falling snow, and the premonition of a forming storm.

  He typed on my keyboard, and my laptop noted that it was connected.

  “You don’t want your feet dangling like that. Here.” The legs of the desk had brown knobs, and he went down on one knee to turn them, one at a time. He pressed his hands on the top of the desk until it lowered a few inches, then he tightened the knobs again. “Find me another gem,” Avery said as he turned back to his own desk. “And don’t chew your nails.”

  I pulled a pen out of my laptop bag and held it between my fingers. Scrolled the subject lines of the unsolicited submissions, and picked one titled The Mysterious Door.

  Forty-five seconds later I was chewing the end of the pen in total aggravation. The door. It was Mysterious. It was a Mysterious Door. I craned my neck to look at the door behind me. Yeah, I knew that feeling. The world is filled with Mysterious Doors. Doors that are closed to most of us, most of the time. The kind of Mysterious Doors that we mere mortals shall never walk through. And why would we want to? It’s more fun if they remain Mysterious.

  Ugh. I glanced down the page. Lots of capital M’s and capital D’s, and other random capitalized words. Oh, there was a phrase in all caps. Big surprise coming here. MYSTERIOUS DOORS. The pen cracked a little between my teeth. It was a Bic stick pen, the kind that’s hard plastic and hexagonal between my fingers, not ideal for chewing.

  No. I saved the doc in my letter writing file, and returned to the submissions in-box.

  “What are you doing?” The words came from my right, sharp and pointed, like the tips of knives.

  “Um. Reading.”

  “With the pen, Jules. What are you doing with the pen?”

  I looked at the end of the pen. Saw the crack. “Not chewing my nails.” I was instantly half terrified, because while I was trying to make a lame joke, it sounded like defiance.

  “Give it to me. And any other pens you have in that bag. No biting your nails. No biting foreign objects.”

  Well, now I was shaking, digging through my laptop bag collecting pens. A part of me wanted to fling them at him, but I knew I didn’t have the nerve. Instead I laid them out beside my laptop, all five of them, and he was suddenly beside me, collecting them.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Sir,” he prompted.

  I took a breath. Was he humiliating me on purpose? Was this, then, the moment to take a stand? Was the matter of how to address him what I wanted t
o take a stand over? Was I prepared to take a stand over anything? No, I wasn’t. I certainly didn’t want him angry with me again. I didn’t want him focusing on me any more than he already was. “You’re welcome, s-s-sir,” I said, and while I had planned to make the ‘sir’ sound sarcastic, it came out perfectly deferential.

  “Does the stutter come with nerves?”

  I bobbed my head yes.

  “I’m glad to know that. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.”

  The next submission I picked was called Through A Red Door.

  I craned my neck to look at the door behind me. It wasn’t red. It was actually the same color as the wall paint, trim and all, so it almost blended into invisibility. But I knew it was there.

  I started reading.

  “Now what are you doing?”

  “Still reading, sir.”

  I was also chewing the tip of my finger. I whipped it away from my mouth. “Sorry, sir, I forgot.”

  Three more times he caught me biting my fingertips. It wasn’t that I couldn’t remember not to, it was just a habit when I was concentrating on something that frustrated me, or when I became deeply absorbed in something that interested me. When my fingers hurt, I chewed on the ends of pens. I never thought about it much. Well. I was sometimes embarrassed when I caught a glimpse of my hands as I handed money to a store clerk, or when I lied to my mother and step-father when they periodically asked if I was having any luck fixing my OCD. It was anxiety, not OCD, but they didn’t seem to understand there was a difference.

  “You need to stop that,” Avery said. “You’re inviting infection into your body, having constant wounds like that. It’s dangerous, as well unsanitary.”

  I bobbed my head, not really agreeing with him, but unwilling to argue.

  He picked up his phone. “Stephanie. Is there a tie with my stand-by suit? Good. Bring it in. No, not the suit. Just the tie.”

  I stopped any pretense of work and spun my chair so I could see him. He smiled at me. It wasn’t friendly. It was more like… a fox smiling at a rabbit.