After My Ex Punched the Man I’m Falling For

The elevator opened directly into his loft.

I'd read about that in the building listing — private elevator, Tribeca, top floor — and I'd imagined something out of a magazine. Polished concrete. Art on the walls. A man in a clean shirt offering me a glass of water.

What I got was a wall of windows, a staircase crowded with paperbacks stacked three deep on every step, and a cat.

The cat was on the kitchen island. Enormous, gray, and furious about my existence.

"That's Mr. Whiskers," said a voice from the couch. "Don't take it personally. He's furious about everyone's existence."

I turned.

Julian Black was folded into the corner of a long leather sofa, laptop balanced on one knee, a coffee mug dangling from two fingers like he'd forgotten it was there. He was wearing a hoodie that had clearly slept in itself. His hair was doing something that could only be described as structural. Glasses perched sideways above his right ear, apparently by accident.

He looked me up and down without getting up.

"You're the editor."

"Melody Wright." I crossed the room and held out my hand. "Nice to meet you."

He studied my hand for a beat too long before he took it. His palm was warm and dry. The handshake lasted exactly as long as politeness required.

"Your grip's too firm," he said, letting go. "It's aggressive. You're compensating."

"For what?"

"Don't know yet." He flipped my résumé around — I hadn't even noticed it was on the coffee table — and tapped the header. "Also, this font. Did you pick this font?"

"It's Garamond."

"I know what it is. I'm asking why."

"Because it's readable."

"It's sentimental. It's the font of someone who thinks literature peaked in 1954." He set the résumé down. "And the smile."

"I'm sorry?"

"The smile you walked in with. It's tragically optimistic. You're going to need to lose that by Friday."

I felt my eyebrows go up. I felt something else too — a small, unfamiliar heat in my chest that was not embarrassment.

"Mr. Black." I kept my voice level. "I've been in your apartment for ninety seconds. You've insulted my handshake, my font, and my face. Is there a plan here, or are we just warming up?"

He blinked.

It was fast, barely a flicker — but I caught it. The tiniest recalibration behind the glasses.

"I'm testing," he said.

"For what?"

"Whether you'll cry."

"I won't."

"Noted." He reached for the coffee mug, then seemed to remember it was empty, and set it down again. "Lucy said you were tougher than you looked. Lucy doesn't lie, but she does occasionally oversell."

"She didn't oversell."

"So I'm finding out."

He gestured vaguely at the chair across from him. I sat. Mr. Whiskers hissed from the counter, for general principles.

"Here's the situation," Julian said. "My publisher wants a manuscript by the end of next quarter. My agent wants me not to be sued. I want to be left alone. These goals are in tension."

"And you want an editor because — "

"I want a babysitter with a literature degree. Let's not pretend."

"I prefer 'deadline enforcer.'"

"Of course you do." The corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The architecture of a smile, being considered and then rejected. "The last editor they sent me lasted eleven days. The one before that, six. You know why?"

"Because you're difficult."

"Because they treated deadlines as a moral issue instead of what they are, which is creative oppression disguised as project management — "

"No," I said.

He stopped.

"No?"

"Deadlines aren't oppression. They're a contract. You signed one. If you wanted to write without them, you could've stayed on a blog." I folded my hands in my lap. "What you're describing isn't oppression, Mr. Black. It's accountability. I understand they feel similar from the inside."

The loft went quiet.

Somewhere in the kitchen, Mr. Whiskers knocked something off the counter on purpose.

Julian looked at me for a long moment. The kind of look that had weight to it — measuring, cataloging, revising. Then he leaned back into the couch, laced his fingers behind his head, and said, very calmly:

"You're hired."

"I haven't asked about the salary."

"Lucy already told you the salary."

She had. It was generous enough that I'd read the email twice.

"Start Monday," he said. "Bring your own coffee. My machine hates strangers."

---

Monday, I sat at his kitchen counter with three hundred pages of his manuscript in a binder and a mug I'd brought from home.

I read for four hours without stopping.

The prose was good. Better than good — there were sentences in it that made me pause and reread them just for the pleasure of how they landed. The plot was airtight. The dialogue crackled.

The romantic subplot was a disaster.

I marked up the pages in pencil — light, careful strokes — and when Julian finally emerged from his study around two in the afternoon, barefoot, hair catastrophic, glasses on his head again, I slid the binder across the counter toward him.

"It's fixable," I said.

"What is."

"Your romance."

He froze halfway to the coffee pot.

"My romance is fine."

"Your romance reads like two characters filing a joint insurance claim."

The coffee pot hit the counter a little harder than necessary.

"Excuse me?"

"Page forty-seven. He tells her he loves her in a sentence that has three subordinate clauses. Nobody does that. Not even lawyers in love do that." I flipped to the marked page. "Page sixty-two, she's supposed to be falling for him and she asks him about his five-year plan. Page ninety, there is an almost-kiss that includes the phrase 'appropriate proximity.' Julian."

"I was establishing restraint."

"You were establishing HR compliance."

He leaned both hands on the counter. His ears, I noticed, had gone slightly pink.

"And I suppose you have a solution."

"I do, actually."

"Go on."

I closed the binder.

"You don't know what it feels like," I said. "Or you know, but you haven't let yourself write it. Either way, the page is going to keep lying until you have something real to draw on." I tapped the cover. "So we do field research."

"Field research."

"I take you on dates."

The silence this time was different.

He didn't move. Not his hands, not his face. Only his eyes shifted, very slightly, from the binder to me.

"Dates," he repeated.

"Simulated. Professional. You observe, you absorb, you go home and write better than you did yesterday. A horror movie. A ramen place. Coffee somewhere. Real scenarios, real sensory detail, no appropriate proximity." I held his gaze. "You're paying me to fix this book. Let me fix it."

He was quiet for a long second.

Then he pushed off the counter, picked up his coffee, and said, in a tone so carefully neutral it practically announced itself:

"Fine. I know a theater in the West Village that screens old horror on Fridays. We could start there."

"That was fast."

"I'm efficient."

"You had that ready."

"Don't flatter yourself, Wright. I had a list."

He walked back toward his study with the mug, and I watched him go, and I did not — absolutely did not — notice that the tips of his ears were still pink.

Mr. Whiskers hissed at me from the counter.

I hissed back.

He was so startled he fell off.