Charlie closes his menu and regards me. “Before we go any further,” he says, thick black brows furrowing, his voice low and innately hoarse, “I should just tell you, I found Fielding’s new book unreadable.”
My jaw drops. I’m not sure what to say. For one thing, I hadn’t planned on bringing the book up. If Charlie wanted to reject it, he could’ve just done so in an email. And without using the word unreadable.
But even aside from that, any decent person would at least wait until there was some bread on the table before throwing out insults.
I close my own menu and fold my hands on the table. “I think it’s her best yet.”
Dusty’s already published three others, each of them fantastic, though none sold well. Her last publisher wasn’t willing to take another chance on her, so she’s back in the water, looking for a new home for her next novel.
And okay, maybe it’s not my favorite of hers, but it has immense commercial appeal. With the right editor, I know what this book can be.
Charlie sits back, the heavy, discerning quality of his gaze sending a prickling down my backbone. It feels like he’s looking right through me, past the shiny politeness to the jagged edges underneath. His look says, Wipe that frozen smile off your face. You’re not that nice.
He turns his water glass in place. “Her best is The Glory of Small Things,” he says, like three seconds of eye contact was enough to read my innermost thoughts and he knows he’s speaking for both of us.
Frankly, Glory was one of my favorite books in the last decade, but that doesn’t make this one chopped liver.
I say, “This book is every bit as good. It’s just different—less subdued, maybe, but that gives it a cinematic edge.”
“Less subdued?” Charlie squints. At least the golden brown has seeped back into his eyes so I feel less like they’re going to burn holes in me. “That’s like saying Charles Manson was a lifestyle guru. It might be true, but it’s hardly the point. This book feels like someone watched that Sarah McLachlan commercial for animal cruelty prevention and thought, But what if all the puppies died on camera?”
An irritable laugh lurches out of me. “Fine. It’s not your cup of tea. But maybe it would be helpful,” I fume, “if you told me what you liked about the book. Then I know what to send you in the future.”
Liar, my brain says. You’re not sending him more books.
Liar, Charlie’s unsettling, owlish eyes say. You’re not sending me more books.
This lunch—this potential working relationship—is dead in the water.
Charlie doesn’t want to work with me, and I don’t want to work with him, but I guess he hasn’t entirely abandoned the social contract, because he considers my question.
“It’s overly sentimental for my taste,” he says eventually. “And the cast is caricatured—”
“Quirky,” I disagree. “We could scale them back, but it’s a large cast—their quirks help distinguish them.”
“And the setting—”
“What’s wrong with the setting?” The setting in Once in a Lifetime sells the whole book. “Sunshine Falls is charming.”
Charlie scoffs, literally rolls his eyes. “It’s completely unrealistic.”
“It’s a real place,” I counter. Dusty had made the little mountain town sound so idyllic I’d actually googled it. Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, sits just a little ways outside Asheville.
Charlie shakes his head. He seems irritable. Well, that makes two of us.
I do not like him. If I’m the archetypical City Person, he is the Dour, Unappeasable Stick-in-the-Mud. He’s the Growly Misanthrope, Oscar the Grouch, second-act Heathcliff, the worst parts of Mr. Knightley.
Which is a shame, because he’s also got a reputation for having a magic touch. Several of my agent friends call him Midas. As in, “Everything he touches turns to gold.” (Though admittedly, some others refer to him as the Storm Cloud. As in, “He makes it rain money, but at what cost?”)
The point is, Charlie Lastra picks winners. And he isn’t picking Once in a Lifetime. Determined to bolster my confidence, if not his, I cross my arms over my chest. “I’m telling you, no matter how contrived you found it, Sunshine Falls is real.”
“It might exist,” Charlie says, “but I’m telling you Dusty Fielding has never been there.”
“Why does that matter?” I ask, no longer feigning politeness.
Charlie’s mouth twitches in reaction to my outburst. “You wanted to know what I disliked about the book—”
“What you liked,” I correct him.
“—and I disliked the setting.”
The sting of anger races down my windpipe, rooting through my lungs. “So how about you just tell me what kind of books you do want, Mr. Lastra?”
He relaxes until he’s leaned back, languid and sprawling like some jungle cat toying with its prey. He turns his water glass again. I’d thought it was a nervous tic, but maybe it’s a low-grade torture tactic. I want to knock it off the table.
“I want,” Charlie says, “early Fielding. The Glory of Small Things.”
“That book didn’t sell.”
“Because her publisher didn’t know how to sell it,” Charlie says. “Wharton House could. I could.”
My eyebrow arches, and I do my best to school it back into place.
Just then, the server approaches our table. “Can I get you anything while you’re perusing the menu?” she asks sweetly.
“Goat cheese salad for me,” Charlie says, without looking at either of us.
Probably he’s looking forward to pronouncing my favorite salad in the city inedible.
“And for you, ma’am?” the server asks.
I stifle the shiver that runs down my spine whenever a twentysomething calls me ma’am. This must be how ghosts feel when people walk over their graves.
“I’ll have that too,” I say, and then, because this has been one hell of a day and there is no one here to impress—and because I’m trapped here for at least forty more minutes with a man I have no intention of ever working with—I say, “And a gin martini. Dirty.”
Charlie’s brow just barely lifts. It’s three p.m. on a Thursday, not exactly happy hour, but given that publishing shuts down in the summer and most people take Fridays off, it’s practically the weekend.
“Bad day,” I say under my breath as the server disappears with our order.