Plot Twist In Paradise
by IAmHerEmma

 

 

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Chapter Nineteen: Two Writers, One Table and No Good Deflections

 

 

 

Authors Note: Quick heads up before you dive in: next week’s posting is going to be a little off. I’m heading out on my yearly vacation, which means a full week away, and I won’t be back until Sunday next week. That means I’ll miss our usual Friday update, and I feel genuinely terrible about it.

But I’m making it up to you. The very next day, Monday, Chapter 20 goes up. Then that same Friday, right on schedule, you’ll get Chapter 21. Two chapters in one week. Consider it my apology gift for abandoning you for the mountains and the cold weather.

I thought about doing a blog post about this, but not everyone reads those, and I wanted to make sure everyone following along actually saw it. So here it is, tucked right where you’ll find it.

Thank you for your patience, and for reading. See you once I’ve thawed out.

 

* * * * * *

 

I was still looking at the screen, at the four words I'd just typed sitting there in the text field like a confession I'd accidentally made in a crowded room. Which, technically, I had. Renee was three inches to my left. Milo was mid-sentence about something. Talia was laughing. And I was staring at my own text like it might rearrange itself into something less terrifying if I gave it enough time.

My phone buzzed.

Sasha: I am screenshotting this and framing it above my bed so that every morning when I wake up I remember that miracles are real

Me: Goodbye Sasha

Sasha: MUH GIRL GONNA GIT SUM

I bit the inside of my cheek, locked the phone, and shoved it into the pocket of my sundress with more force than the pocket was designed for.

"You okay?" Milo asked, watching me with the expression of someone who had just finished baring his entire romantic soul to a breakfast table and was now hyper-attuned to anyone else showing symptoms.

"Fine. Sasha's being dramatic."

"About what?" Talia's fork paused halfway to her mouth.

"About everything. Always. It's her core competency."

"That's avoidance," Milo said, pointing at me with a piece of pineapple. "I recognise avoidance. I'm a nurse."

"Those two things are not related."

"Close enough."

Renee reached for the coffee pot without looking up from her cup. "Let her have her phone in peace, Milo."

"I'm not interrogating her. I'm observing. I went to school for this."

Cass set her cup down. "Nobody at this table appreciates nuance. We are five adults on vacation who just spent breakfast extracting details about your sex life."

"That was collaborative," Milo said, straightening in his chair. "Which was emotionally generous of me."

"You were buffering," Talia said.

"We retired that word." Milo pointed at her. "I'm retiring that word."

"It's been retired for eight minutes," Renee said. "That's not long enough to stop being accurate."

The table laughed. Milo went full wounded gazelle, and I used the chaos to finish my coffee and let my pulse come back to something approaching normal. The phone sat in my pocket like a small bomb that had already gone off, and I was pretending the blast radius didn't extend to the woman sitting next to me, whose knee was still close enough to mine that I could feel the warmth of it through my dress.

"So what are we doing today?" Talia asked, aiming the question at the table like a general surveying available troops.

"How about that cooking class?" Milo perked up immediately. "The one with the chef — what's her name?"

"Donna," Talia said confidently.

"Diana," Cass corrected without looking up from her coffee.

"Right. Jerk seasoning, rum cake, the whole deal. It's this afternoon."

"I'm in," Milo said. "Absolutely. Done."

"You want to learn to cook or you want to bring Nico rum cake?" Talia asked.

"Those are not mutually exclusive goals."

Cass raised an eyebrow. "They are if you're involved in the cooking."

"I'll be at the cooking class," Talia said. "Cass?"

"Do I have a choice?"

Talia smiled. "You always have a choice."

"That's a no." Cass looked at Milo. "You're my witness."

"That's a loving no."

"What about the kayaking?" Milo said, gesturing vaguely toward the water. "We never actually decided on that."

"Not today," Renee said. "Cooking class is enough for one afternoon."

"Tomorrow, then. Waterfall, the whole expedition."

"Tomorrow works," Talia said.

Cass said nothing, which Talia interpreted as agreement and everyone else interpreted as surrender.

"Ade?"

I looked up from the table. "Hmm? Yeah. Both. Cooking class, kayaking, whatever."

Milo's eyes narrowed slightly, in the way they did when he was about to say something observational and I was going to wish he hadn't.

"You just agreed to two physical activities in under three seconds. Are you feeling alright?"

"I'm on vacation."

"You're on vacation," Milo repeated, looking at Renee. "She's on vacation."

"I heard her," Renee said, and reached for another piece of fruit without looking at me, but the edge of a smile was there. I could see it from where I was sitting, and I decided very firmly to stop cataloguing her expressions, effective immediately, starting right after this one.

Breakfast wound down. Talia was showing Cass something on her phone. Milo was stretching in his chair like a cat who'd found a sunbeam and intended to live in it permanently. Renee was still next to me, and at some point in the last few minutes her knee had moved from "almost touching" to "actually touching," and we'd both acknowledged this by completely ignoring it.

We pushed back from the table, gathering the scattered debris of a long breakfast — sunglasses, phones, Talia's backup sunscreen that she carried everywhere like a security blanket. The group started drifting toward the path, the plan roughly assembled: pool or beach for a few hours, cooking class at two, tomorrow was the waterfall.

"Adrianna?"

I turned. Alina was standing a few feet from the table, notebook tucked under one arm, a glass of something that looked like iced tea sweating in her hand. I hadn't noticed her during breakfast, which either meant she'd been discreet or I'd been distracted. Given the morning I'd had, both were equally plausible.

"Hey," I said.

"I don't want to interrupt your plans, but would you have a few minutes? I've been wanting to pick your brain about something."

The group was already walking. Milo had launched into something animated with Talia. Cass was following at the pace of someone conserving energy for later. Renee had paused a few steps ahead and looked back.

"Go ahead," Renee said, and it wasn't permission — just acknowledgment. She was going wherever the group was going. I was staying. That was fine.

"Save me a lounge chair," I said.

"No promises."

She turned and walked away, and I watched her go for exactly one second, which I justified as a perfectly reasonable amount of time to watch someone leave a restaurant, and then I turned back to Alina.

We settled at a table closer to the railing where the morning sun came through and made patterns on the wood. The breakfast crowd had thinned to a few stragglers. It was the kind of emptied-out morning space that felt like it belonged to whoever was still in it.

Alina set her iced tea down and opened her notebook to a page that already had something written on it, then closed it again — a reflex, I thought, more than an intention. The notebook was part of her the way my laptop was part of me, always within reach, always half-open.

"Nice morning," Alina said.

"It's been a lot of morning."

"Those are the interesting ones, usually."

"Or the exhausting ones."

"Same thing, in my experience."

She smiled and looked out past the railing for a second. "I've been the same, honestly. I keep sitting down to work on the piece and ending up staring at the same paragraph for an hour."

"That's not writing. That's a hostage situation."

"It is. The piece is evolving but I keep circling and I can't figure out what it wants to be."

"You're stuck."

"I'm not stuck. I have material. I have more material than I've had on any assignment in years. I just—" She turned her glass in her hands. "I keep writing around the thing instead of writing it. You know what that feels like?"

"I wrote around the same thing for months. I know exactly what that feels like."

"What changed?"

"I don't know. Something shifted. The writing started moving again and I don't totally understand what it is yet."

Alina nodded slowly. "See, that's what I keep coming back to. Not the resort. Not the inclusivity angle. It's the writing question."

"What writing question?"

"The one you're living in." She took a sip of her tea. "I cover travel. I interview a lot of people who are doing interesting things in interesting places. Most of them give me the version of themselves they've rehearsed. You're the first person I've met on assignment who I think is more interesting than the version she's offering."

I leaned back in my chair. "That's either a compliment or a very sophisticated way of calling me a liar."

"It's an observation. Writers are allowed to have observations."

"Writers are also allowed to decline being observed."

"They are. But they usually don't, because we're all narcissists who want someone else to tell us what we already know about ourselves."

I laughed. It came out before I could decide whether I wanted it to, which was annoying and also the first sign that this conversation was going to be more than shop talk.

"Okay," I said. "What's the writing question?"

"You write erotica," Alina said. "Successful erotica. Commercially successful. That's not easy to do."

"Thank you."

"But is it the genre you'd choose if you were starting from scratch today?"

The question sat on the table between us like a drink I hadn't ordered. It was a good question. And good questions were the ones that made you want to answer with the rehearsed version and hope nobody noticed.

"I chose erotica because I love writing about intimacy," I said. "It's not a consolation prize for people who can't write literary fiction. It's a form. It has its own discipline."

"I'm not diminishing it. I write travel pieces. People think I describe hotels for a living. I get the genre-respect problem."

"So what are you avoiding?" I asked.

Alina blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You said you keep writing around the thing instead of writing it. You have more material than you've ever had. But the piece won't come together. That sounds like someone who knows what the story is and doesn't want to write it."

She was quiet for a second. Then she smiled.

"Maybe," she said. "The travel stuff is comfortable. I'm good at it. I describe places and people and dynamics and I keep myself out of the frame entirely. That's the deal with travel writing — you're always the observer, never the observed."

"And?"

"And maybe the piece I can't write is the one where I'd have to be in the frame."

I looked at her. She looked back, pleasant and patient but less armored than she'd been two minutes ago.

"Welcome to the club," I said.

"It's a terrible club."

"The coffee's bad and nobody wants to be here."

"And yet."

"And yet."

We sat with that for a second. Two writers who were good at describing other people's truths and less good at sitting with their own.

"So what are you really asking me?" I said. "About the erotica, the genre, all of it."

"I'm asking whether the form is where you live or where you hide."

I leaned back in my chair and let the question sit for a second while I figured out how to respond to it.

"That's a big question for a Thursday morning."

"It's a big question for any morning. That doesn't mean it's wrong."

"I didn't say it was wrong. I said it was big."

"And you deflected."

"I didn't deflect, I contextualized."

"You contextualized by changing the subject to the day of the week. That's deflecting."

"It's stalling," I corrected. "Deflecting implies I have an answer I'm avoiding. Stalling implies I'm building one in real time. Give me credit."

Alina smiled. She seemed like she was genuinely enjoying this. "Fair. Take your time. I'll wait."

I looked out past the railing for a second.

"I think," I said slowly, "that writing bodies honestly is harder than people give it credit for. Most people write sex like choreography — tab A, slot B, everyone finishes at the same time, nobody has an awkward elbow situation. Writing it like it actually feels, the mess and the vulnerability and the way people say stupid things at exactly the wrong moment — that's not hiding. That's exposure."

"Agreed. But it's exposure of a specific kind. You're exposing something universal. Bodies are bodies. The vulnerability is real, but it's also... transferable. A reader sees themselves in it without you having to put yourself on the page."

"You're saying I use other people's intimacy as a shield."

"I'm saying you're very good at writing what people feel with their bodies and I'm curious whether you've ever tried writing what they feel with everything else."

"Everything else is a lot of territory."

"It is. That's what makes it scary."

"Says the woman who can't write her own piece."

Alina laughed. "Okay. Fair. We're both hiding."

"At least I have a genre. You have a notebook full of observations and no thesis."

"I have several theses. They're all wrong."

Alina wasn't doing this to be cruel. She was sitting in the same mess I was, and talking to someone else who understood the mess was easier than sitting alone with it.

It was different when it went both ways.

"At the bonfire," Alina said, and I braced for whatever was coming. "You said something that stuck with me. About writing making you feel less alone."

"I said a lot of things at the bonfire." I'd also kissed someone at the bonfire, but that wasn't on Alina's spreadsheet.

"You did. And most of it was honest. But it's easy to be honest with good rum and an audience that's rooting for you."

"You think there's a worse version?"

"I think there's a harder version. The one you'd write at two in the morning with nobody watching."

I didn't say anything for a moment. The warmth of the morning was doing something complicated — the sun on the table, the quiet of the emptied-out restaurant, and under all of it Alina's question sitting where I couldn't quite reach around it.

"I'm working on something," I said.

"I know. You mentioned it."

"Yeah."

"How's it going?"

"I don't know yet. I was blocked for months, and then something shifted. The writing started moving again. I don't totally understand what it is yet."

"But it feels different?"

"It feels like mine."

Alina nodded.

"Can I ask about something else?"

"You're going to regardless."

"Probably. Milo and the bartender."

I let out a breath that was closer to a laugh than I'd intended. The tonal shift was welcome — like stepping off a highway onto a side street and realizing how fast I'd been going.

"What about them?"

"I've been watching that situation develop all week and I have theories."

"Everyone has theories. Milo's theories about his own situation change hourly. He's given us at least four definitive readings of every single thing Nico has said to him, including the word 'enjoy.'"

"But it worked out. He came to the bonfire."

"Off duty. In a dark henley. Sat next to Milo without being asked."

"And Milo's face when he sat down—"

"Was a medical event that the table is still processing, yes."

Alina laughed. "I love watching people navigate that. The distance between 'I think he likes me' and 'oh God, he likes me.' It's completely different energy."

"It's the same energy at different volumes. Milo's volume is just permanently set higher than most people's."

We sat with that for a second, both of us smiling at someone else's happiness like it was uncomplicated. Which, from the outside, it was.

"And you and Renee?" Alina said, with the careful ease of someone slipping a question into a conversation the way you'd slide a card into a deck — smooth enough that you might not notice until you'd already answered.

"What about me and Renee?"

"The dynamic's different than it was at the beginning of the week. I'm not asking for details, I'm asking as someone who's been watching the group and noticed a shift."

"We get along now. We didn't at first."

"You get along." Alina's expression didn't change, but something behind it did. "She looks at you like you're the only person in the room who isn't blurry."

"She looks at everyone like that. She's a focused person."

"She is. That's not what I'm describing."

"Alina."

"I'm not pushing. I'm observing."

"Isn't that your whole thing?" I leaned back in my chair.

"It is my whole thing. Doesn't make the observation wrong."

I looked down at the table. I tried to think of something to say to that.

"I like her," I said. Quieter than I'd meant to. "That's — yeah. I like her."

The words came out simpler than they had with Sasha. With Sasha there'd been a whole detonation sequence — the buildup, the caps lock, the shock of admitting it through a screen. With Alina it was just a sentence. Offered to a woman I'd known for six days, at a breakfast table after a morning that had already required more honesty than I'd budgeted for.

Alina looked at me for a second. Not surprised. Not not-surprised. Just taking it in.

"Can I say one more thing?" Alina asked. "And then I'll stop."

"That's what journalists always say before the part that makes it into the article."

"This isn't for the article. This is writer to writer."

"Fine."

"You asked me earlier what I was really asking. About the erotica, the genre, all of it." She set her glass down. "I think you already know what you want to write. I think you've known for a while. And I think the reason you keep deflecting isn't because you don't have the answer — it's because the answer means something and you're not sure you're ready for that."

She didn't soften it with a joke or a redirect.

I didn't answer. Not because I was deflecting — I'd run out of those. I didn't answer because the answer was too close to something I'd been circling for days, in notebooks and manuscripts and four a.m. typing sessions, and I wasn't ready to say it out loud to someone who would hear it accurately.

Alina leaned back in her chair. "So is the fish at dinner actually worth ordering, or has everyone just been too polite to say it isn't?"

"The fish is fine. Everything here is fine. It's a resort — they're contractually obligated to make everything fine."

"That's a ringing endorsement."

"I'm a writer. I don't do ringing endorsements. I do qualified observations." I looked at her. "When does your piece need to be filed?"

"End of the month. Plenty of time. Too much, probably — I'll rewrite it six times and submit the first draft anyway."

"That's every writer I've ever met."

"That's every writer who's ever lived."

Alina gathered her notebook and stood up.

"Thanks for the conversation," she said. "I mean it."

"Thanks for the interrogation."

"It wasn't an interrogation. It was a professional consultation."

"It was an interrogation."

"It was a vigorous exchange of perspectives."

"It was an interrogation, Alina."

Alina smiled. "Maybe a little. You held up well."

"I'm a professional."

She left, and the table was just me and the remains of a conversation that I was going to be thinking about for a lot longer than the conversation itself had lasted.

I sat there for another minute. Maybe two. The cooking class was at two. I could write. I could find the group at the pool and let Talia talk at me about tomorrow's kayaking logistics while Cass read her book and Milo updated us all on which angle of the pool provided the best sightline to whatever part of the resort Nico was currently occupying.

I could sit next to Renee on a lounge chair and let the morning carry forward into the afternoon and the afternoon into the cooking class and the cooking class into the evening.

I stood up, pushed my chair in, and walked out into the sun.

The path back was quiet. I walked slowly. The cooking class was hours away. The bungalow wasn't far.

Nothing Alina had asked me was unfair. That was the part that made it hard to put down. And underneath all of it, like a frequency I couldn't tune out — Renee's voice at the table this morning. "Go ahead." Two words. The same way someone says "I'll be right here."

I kept walking.