The trip got off to an inauspicious start, with me getting behind the wheel and fiddling with everything for as long as I could. I adjusted my seat, then my seatbelt, then the wheel, then the music—which had been turned on to make me look like I was a capable driver—then the music volume, then all of the mirrors, then my seat again. Sam watched the entire process from the passenger seat with benign interest.

I grabbed the wheel, my hands at ten and two. I gripped it tightly enough for my knuckles to go white; I didn’t want him to see me shaking. As much as I hated driving, I hated doing it way more with other people in the car, and I abhorred doing it in front of strangers. I’d taken my driving test six times before I passed, and it was pretty much just sheer anxiety that kept me from succeeding in the first place. Just drive! my brain screamed at me. Stop acting so weird and just drive, you overthinking piece of shit!

I shifted into reverse, got nervous, shifted it back into park, accidentally shifted to drive, and went back to park before Sam gently and politely cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said, as if he’d just thought of it, “would you mind if I drive?”

I looked up at him, surprised. “Huh?” I asked, struggling to focus on anything other than the several tons of death machine I was trying to pilot.

He shrugged nonchalantly. “I was just wondering if I could drive,” he said, the tone very pointedly conversational. “A Volkswagen Rabbit is kind of my dream car, honestly, so it would be really cool to drive. Plus, I’m a terrible navigator, so I won’t do you any good otherwise.”

I knew he was taking pity on me. The soft tone he used was almost offensively sweet, and I would have found it condescending if I wasn’t so incredibly relieved that I didn’t have to drive across an entire country. “Yeah, all right,” I said, affecting the same devil-may-care tone. “Whatever you want.”

We traded places, and I was instantly more at home. I hadn’t even owned the Rabbit when Paul was around, but being in any car with someone else and being behind the wheel still felt unnatural. I felt snug and secure, the same sort of feeling I had when I was young and my grandparents were driving me home from a camping trip, the feeling that let me fall asleep curled up in the back seat without a care in the world. It was the simple feeling of safety.

Knots in my stomach that I had thought were permanent started to unravel, if only just a bit, and I let out a long, slow breath that I hoped Sam wouldn’t notice.

We weren’t on the road long before Sam sheepishly asked if he could change the music. “I’m just not a big classical guy,” he said, looking a little ashamed, as if what he said had some kind of major impact on his intellect. He seemed to forget that I was the only one in the car who had dropped out of college. And besides, it wasn’t classical music at all—but I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him it was the soundtrack to the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

“Go ahead,” I told him. I unplugged my phone from the aux cable. “This actually works great. I have a ton of data left, so now I can read some of the fanfiction you were telling me about!”

“Uh.” A pink blush faded up Sam’s pale neck and into his cheeks. “I don’t know if that’s the best idea. Didn’t you say your agent told you that you shouldn’t read any of it?”

“And you told me that was bullshit. Plus, I’m a little tired of taking the advice of a guy who won’t use a computer.”

Sam frowned. “Really? He won’t?”

“Nope.”

“How does he get anything done?”

“He has his secretary print everything out and leaves her handwritten notes. If email is absolutely required, he has her do it. And,” I gestured to our surroundings, “in case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t always actually get things done.”

Sam just nodded and chuckled. “Fair enough.” He slipped the aux cord deftly into his cracked phone and flipped through the music without looking down. I found myself staring. It was weirdly hot to see someone so confident with their multitasking abilities after five years of being around myself all the time.

Man, I really needed to get out more. Or at least watch more exciting porn.

Maybe it wasn’t the confidence at all. I pondered that thought while I watched him deftly scrolling through artists and albums. No, it wasn’t just the sense of confidence or ability. I tried to connect it to something about Paul, as everything in my love life had always been: I had never slept with anyone other than him, never even kissed anyone other than him, and actively sought out masturbation material that included people who looked like him. I assumed any sexual feelings I had were connected to him, or something about him, in some way.

It wasn’t until Sam put his phone down and refocused all of his attention on driving that I realized it wasn’t that, either. For as much as I loved him, Paul had been a terrible driver who listened to music that felt like a drill piercing my eardrums. Sam was calm and relaxed and a textbook perfect driver who hummed along to a bluesy song with a heavy bass line and dreamy guitar.

I realized the long-dead tingle of arousal in my gut wasn’t coming from any of the expected sources. It was coming from Sam’s hands.

I always had sort of a thing about hands. Wrong though it may have been, it was the number one thing I used to judge people. If Paul and I returned from a party where I’d snubbed another attendee, my explanation was almost invariably, “I just didn’t like the look of their hands.”

Insane as it sounded, my first impressions were always proven right. Paul always said there was no correlation, that it was completely impossible for me to get so much information just from looking at a person’s appendages. “I think you just have good instincts,” he’d say. “You’re not a palm reader. You just...see certain things in people.”

“Yeah. And I see those things by looking at their hands.”

Paul rolled his eyes and groaned, but he learned not to fight me about it too much. We tended to do that after a few years; topics of arguments died off, filed under “never to be reconciled.”

I trusted Paul, and I even accepted that he could very well be right, but that didn’t change my impressions, and it never changed the fact that I always paid a great deal of attention to people’s hands.

Most writers—most people, really—will tell you that the eyes are the gateway to the soul. We believe that we can see guilt in them, or sadness, or regret. We think that just by looking into the little black voids in the center of a person’s eye, we can see all of their thoughts.

Maybe that’s true, to a certain extent. Maybe most people can see a momentary emotion, a micro expression, written in the striations of another person’s irises. But that wasn’t the soul. That wasn’t where the person really lived, and it wasn’t where you saw who they really were in broad strokes.

No. For that, you had to turn to the hands.

The way I see it, most people use their hands for just about every task, from the mundane to the magical. People write, knead dough, hammer a nail, and brush a tear from a cheek, all with their hands, and it leaves an impression. I don’t know if it’s something I feel encoded in people’s fingerprints or if calluses and nails and cracked skin just created the portrait for me, but I could feel something in them. I once shook a woman’s hand and immediately said, “You’re a painter.” She looked stunned, unsure of how I could know about a passionate hobby she practiced in the silence and privacy of her own home, but I just did. She had painter’s hands.

I watched Sam’s hands drum against the steering wheel as he hummed along to his dreamy music. They were large, and they had a greater capacity for strength than would be immediately assumed from his long, slender fingers. They had done hard work; even from my seat, I could see a few scattered calluses and a couple of small scars. They were also the delicately wrought hands of musicians and artists. They were hands that could be anything, really.

But mostly, they were kind hands.

I noticed a subtle shift in Sam’s gaze and looked away. What a creep, a voice whispered in my head. It was both unfamiliar and instantly recognizable, and just the phrase made my stomach turn. A tiny shudder ran down my spine.

Sam frowned. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just feeling a little cold,” I lied.

“Want to turn up the heat? I can always take my sweater off.”

I mentally slapped the part of myself that was wolf-whistling over the idea of him taking off his shirt. “Nah. I’m fine, really. I prefer it cold, anyway.”

“Okay.” He gave me a polite smile and turned back to the road.

I picked up my phone and clumsily navigated my way around the internet until I found the page Sam had shown me in the restaurant. I clicked on my series.

I hadn’t been prepared for the sheer volume of works that popped up. It’s one thing to see the number, but to scroll through pages and pages is very different. Even more surprising was the fact that more and more stories were being written and updated every day. In spite of the five year gap, people hadn’t forgotten about me or The Books of Veracity. If anything, they were just as tenacious as ever.

The stories, as Sam had said, were mostly about romance. It was weird to see my characters all being jammed together in such unusual ways. Phrases like “fluff” and “domestic” and “high school AU” were bandied about with total abandon. It was a little like reading in a language ever so similar to your own; I could understand the very basics of the words there. I wasn’t an idiot, after all, and I knew what the technical definition of each word was, but I couldn’t seem to string them together into anything meaningful.

I looked over at Sam. His face was serene. He hummed along to the music, looking completely comfortable and at peace. Somehow, he was in his element. The music itself was by turns lackadaisical and nervously discordant, but he didn’t miss a beat. I had never been able to connect with music in that way, even the stuff I really liked, but I didn’t feel any jealousy or envy. Experiencing it secondhand felt like enough. I didn’t want to disrupt it.

Eventually, he must have felt my eyes on him, because he shot me a look and smiled. “What’s up?” he asked.

Creep, the voice whispered again. I pushed it back.

“I’m looking at this fanfiction thing,” I said, not caring that I sounded like an old man, “and I don’t really understand it.”

“What is it you don’t understand?”

“The lingo,” I explained lamely. “Like, it doesn’t make sense to me. What’s a ‘whump’?”

The question prompted a snort of laughter from Sam. Normally I would have felt self-conscious, but the laugh was, instead, endearing. “Whump is, like, a genre,” he explained. “Basically, whump fics are fics where a character gets the shit beaten out of them, physically or emotionally.”

“Good Jesus, why?” I asked, horrified.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Because sometimes it’s nice to write or read about someone going through something really difficult and scary. It makes you feel a little less alone, and like your problems aren’t so big. Like, maybe your car battery died and you were late to work, but at least you didn’t break an arm and lose an eye. Plus, those kinds of stories make you feel something.”

“Yeah, it makes you feel like you’re reading about torture.”

“Not just that. It makes you feel sad and angry and worried and all this other stuff. And then when the fic is done, those feelings go away. It’s cathartic.” He shrugged and added, “Plus, it’s a good way for characters to hook up.”

“How does that work?”

“One gets the snot kicked out of them, and the other one is there to take care of them.” He smiled at my continued look of disapproval. “I know it seems weird, but it’s a big genre. And it’s weirdly addictive.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I mumbled. “And fluff is what, exactly?”

“Something cute. It usually has a pretty simple plot, and it’s just something meant to be cute and sweet that makes people happy. It’s sort of just what it sounds like.”

“Hm. Okay.” Something about that appealed to me immediately. I could use a little more fluff in my life. “And what about Elcest?”

I waited for an explanation, but it never came. When I looked at Sam, I saw he was frozen, his lower lip caught between his teeth. “Sam?” I asked.

“Yeah, I heard you,” he muttered. His face was practically glowing red. “It’s a pairing, not a genre. It’s not a big deal. I mean, people don’t even really like it much. I wouldn’t worry about it. Or read it.”

“It sure seems like people like it. There are a ton of fics with that word in the description.” I tried reading through a few summaries, but they were all incredibly vague. Eli tries to cheer up Elinor on Valentine’s Day. Elinor has a very special present for Eli. The twins think about their futures. None of it was anything substantial. The only other clues I had were words and phrases that made no contextual sense: “lemon,” “PWP,” “DLDR.” I glanced back at Sam, and I noticed he’d slunk down in his seat. He looked absolutely mortified. “Sam,” I said, a little more firmly, “what is Elcest?”

He grimaced. “If I tell you, you have to promise not to be mad.”

“Why would I be mad?”

“Because, it’s...Jesus, man. It’s weird. You always say in interviews that you feel really connected to the twins, and I don’t think you’d want to think of them like this. It might bother you.”

“They’re fictional people. What could possibly bother me? Who cares what a bunch of strangers on the internet are doing with them?”

“You say that, but...”

“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to Google it.”

“Christ,” he breathed. “Absolutely do not do that. I’m dead serious. That is not how you want to be introduced to this topic. It’s like ‘lemon party’ or ‘two girls, one cup.’ It’s not something you Google if you have any respect for your own mental health.”

“Well, then, it sounds like you’re just going to have to tell me.”

He glanced at me, his face still pulled into a grimace. He looked like he was about to tell me he burned down my house or something. Embarrassment and guilt rolled off of him in equal parts. “Okay,” he finally acquiesced. “But you’re not going to love it.”

I rolled my eyes. I had gotten plenty of weird fan letters over the years. I’d listened to frankly insane suggestions from readers and editors alike. I couldn’t think of anything that could shock me. “Try me,” I said.

“Okay.” Sam kept his eyes fixed on the road. “Some people like to...ship Eli and Elinor.”

I stared. “What?” I asked, confused.

“They ship them. Like, together.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they ship them, Lance.” Sam’s face was on fire at this point. “There are people—I mean, not me, but people—who want to see them together. In a relationship. Of a romantic and sexual nature.”

My own reaction surprised me. I hadn’t expected such a visceral feeling of revulsion to overcome me. I had often jokingly called Eli and Elinor my “babies,” but it was really only half a joke, and I was suddenly scandalized at what people were doing with the characters I’d created. “But they’re siblings!” I cried.

“I know.”

“They’re twins, for Christ’s sake!”

“I know, Lance,” Sam sighed.

“But...but they’re related!” I continued, aghast. “Do people know this? Did I not make it clear?!”

“No, no, you made it clear. They all know.”

“Well then...why?!”

“Because people are weird,” he said weakly. “I really don’t know what to tell you.”

“But that’s...“ I lowered my voice, “...that’s incest, Sam. Incest.”

“I know that,” he replied patiently. “That’s where the term comes from. People mashed up their names and the word incest. Hence, Elcest. There’s also twincest, but that’s not specific to your books. That’s used for any pairing with twins.”

“You mean other people do this with other books?!” I gasped in horror.

His lips twitched. I could tell he was doing his best not to laugh at me. “Well, yeah,” he said. “It’s just a thing that happens in a lot of fandoms. Hell, it’s canon in Game of Thrones. Some people just...like it, I guess. I’ve never understood the appeal, but it’s a thing that people like.” He gave me the most sympathetic look he could muster while trying to hold in his laughter. His humiliation seemed to have faded away in light of my reaction. “I’m sorry, man. I really wish I could tell you something else. But people will do what they do.”

“And what they do is write about twins having sex?”

He finally let a tiny giggle out. “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes.”

I sat back in my seat, letting the realization sink in. “I don’t think I like fanfiction,” I said.

“That’s fair.”

“I don’t think I even like fiction anymore. Or people.”

He just smiled. I knew I was being overdramatic, but it was nice to have him indulge me. “People do suck,” he agreed gently. “I’ve always believed that and I always will.”

“I just don’t understand what’s wrong with people.” I shook my head, sliding back against my seat, the wind taken out of my sails completely. I recognized this was going to be funny, probably even in the very near future, but I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t anywhere even close to it. I shouldn’t have been taking it so personally, and I knew Damien was probably going to laugh his way towards a hernia when he found out about this, but for the time being, I was going to stick with moral outrage. I knew I was hardly internet savvy, but good God, some people were just creeps.

“I know it’s not much of a consolation,” Sam said, still smiling gently, “but there really is some great stuff in the fandom. I promise.”

“But how do I find it? How do I avoid all the weird stuff?”

“Well. There’s no way to avoid it entirely. That’s just Rule Thirty-Four for you.” At my blank expression, he added, “It’s a sort of law that states that if something exists, someone has made porn of it. So I’m sorry, but you’re going to find some weird and gross stuff in there. But some of it is weird, gross, and well-written.”

“I kind of doubt that,” I muttered, but Sam ignored me.

“Try filtering it through number of comments. You’ll usually get the cream of the crop if you do that.”

It took me a minute, but I was soon looking at the most-reviewed fics on the website. Not best-reviewed, mind you, because that apparently wasn’t something they worked out how to do, but most-reviewed. I was still feeling skeptical, but an encouraging smile from Sam was really all it took to destroy my resolve. I’d never been a particularly steadfast person, so why would I start then?

The next time I was aware of a world outside my phone was when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

I jumped, a spastic motion that knocked my nearly-dead phone out of my hand. Pressing a hand to my chest, I glared at Sam, who was looking back at me in confusion. “What?” I snapped, my heart still pounding from the jolt.

“I figured I should tell you that we’re here,” he said, amused.

“That we’re where now?”

Sam pointed. I followed his aim and saw a sign for a motel in front of us, surrounded by blackness on all sides. One of the letters was burned out on the bright neon marquee. Instead of KING’S INN, it looked more like KING SIN. Even worse, I felt that name was actually more accurate, considering what I was looking at.

It was a small, ramshackle affair. The building sat in the shape of a box around the ragged parking lot filled with potholes. The stucco on the sides of the two-story motel looked grimy and discolored; I had no clue what color it was originally, but whatever it had been, it certainly wasn’t that anymore. Some of the doors were different colors from the others, and I could tell they all had multiple sets of locks on them. A man in a massive, puffy coat in bright purple escorted a young woman wearing little more than a bikini out of one of the rooms as I watched.

“Um. Sam.” I licked my lips. “What exactly are we doing here?”

“Okay, look, I know,” he apologized. “It’s not the Hilton. It’s not even a Quality Inn. But it’s the only thing around here for over an hour, and I don’t know about you, but I really need to get some sleep.”

“I could drive?” I said. It was meant to be a statement, but it came out with an irritating question mark at the end. I was a bad driver in the best conditions, and not only was it pitch black, but I found myself yawning as well. I was tired and hungry. When I checked the gas tank, I saw it was nearly empty.

Sam shook his head. “There’s a good chance we won’t be able to find a gas station that’s still open. It’s nearly two in the morning.”

I gawked at him. “I spent that much time looking at fanfiction?” I asked.

“Of your own book series,” he reminded me with a smirk.

“Wow.”

“Yeah. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anyone do anything with this much focus. At least, not anyone who isn’t on Adderall.” He squinted at me for a second.

I sighed. “I’m not on Adderall,” I grumbled. It was true. I was supposed to be on a lot of medications, but Adderall wasn’t one of them. “I just got lost, I guess.” I looked up at the sign again. “So are you saying that we definitely have to stay here? As in, there’s absolutely no other option?”

“Sorry.” Sam shrugged helplessly. “This is going to have to do for tonight.”

I looked around at the squalor of the motel and swallowed hard, trying to ignore how dry my mouth had become. “Alright, then. Let’s go, I guess.”

The two of us grabbed our bags and, after I triple-checked that the car was locked, we went into the small office at the front of the building. A bell tinkled as we entered, and a mostly bald, skeletal old man glared at us from behind the counter. There was a cash register in front of him and a set of miniature aluminum mailboxes behind him. The rest of the room mostly consisted of faux wood paneling, shag carpeting, and a list of room prices, including hourly rates, which made my stomach twist uncomfortably and brought up a lot of images I would rather have avoided. It looked like nothing in the room had been updated since 1975: not the walls, not the register, not even the old man staring daggers at us from over a hawkish beak of a nose.

“What do you two want?” he snapped, as if we’d walked into his living room instead of the established business he was working at.

I looked at Sam, hoping he would see my desperation to get the hell out of there, but he was too busy making direct eye contact with the man—something I could hardly do with friendly strangers, much less the real-life Gargamel manning the desk—and smiling politely. “Hi!” Sam said, chipper as could be. “We’re going to need two rooms for a whole night. Do you have any available?”

The man smirked. I decided I liked his scowling better. “If one isn’t available, it will be soon,” he said. It sounded almost like a threat.

“Great!” was Sam’s response. He leaned against the counter, the benign smile still stuck to his face. I stepped behind him, glad he was taller than me. I was the kind of guy who looked like he worked out because of a fast metabolism and good genetics, but if a fight broke out, I’d be the first person ending up on my ass. Sam seemed confident enough to deal with just about anything, so I let him.

The man’s face slipped back into a frown, a heavy one that creased his face and outlined his jowls. Sam just continued on with his polite smile.

It was then that I figured out what was really going on: Sam was killing him with kindness.

We, admittedly, didn’t look like the typical sort of person that would go to a place like that. Or, well, maybe I did, considering my inability to care for myself, but Sam definitely didn’t. We were both dressed in nice, clean clothes—though mine were courtesy of my maid. We had actual luggage with us. The car we’d left in the parking lot was obviously superior to all of the others surrounding it and much newer and cleaner to boot. We looked like yuppies, guys that could be easily intimidated into just about anything, the kind of person the man behind the counter usually ate for breakfast. And it didn’t help that we were two men there together, especially not if he recognized me as a famous, openly gay author.

But Sam wasn’t afraid. Or if he was, he didn’t act like it. He just smiled on, as if nothing could possibly frighten him, as if we weren’t checking into the worst motel that wasn’t run by Norman Bates.

And that was going to save our asses.

It was like watching two wolves square off and growl at each other. Eventually, though, one of them would have to tuck his tail between his legs and back away, and that ended up being the man behind the counter.

He slid a couple keys across the counter. “Rooms fifteen and sixteen. Two hundred and fifty bucks.”

I was ready to balk at the price, but Sam thanked him, grabbed me by the shoulder, and steered me out. It seemed like the right move; the man behind the counter didn’t seem like the type who enjoyed a healthy debate over hotel pricing. Besides, I reminded myself, Damien was going to be the one picking up the tab for that hell hole.

We went to our rooms. I hesitated at the door to mine. Sam just raised an eyebrow and waited.

“I, uh.” I licked my lips. They felt uncomfortably dry. “I should thank you. For driving. And for dealing with that guy back there.”

“It’s not a big deal,” he assured me.

“I know it isn’t,” I agreed. “But you still didn’t have to do it, and you did it anyway. You’re a very kind person, and I appreciate that. Honestly, if I’d had to do this myself...” I sighed. “Well, I wouldn’t have done this myself. I couldn’t have handled it. So thank you, Sam.”

I could tell he was surprised, but he arranged his features carefully to hide it. “No problem, man,” he told me with a soft smile. “I’m more than happy to do it.” His smile widened. “And maybe tomorrow, when we’re out of whatever hole in the wall town we’re in right now, you can tell me how you’re liking the fanfics.”

I snorted, but nodded anyway, and watched Sam disappear into his room. I quickly followed suit.

I went through my usual hotel procedure, turning down all the covers in the darkness before flicking on a light and checking for bedbugs. Mercifully—and surprisingly—there were none. I took the cheap, flimsy top cover off the bed and gingerly set it on the worn carpet, holding it with two fingers. I was both relieved and disappointed to find that my black light flashlight wasn’t in my bag. If I used it, I would never get to sleep.

It wasn’t even so much that I was anxious about whatever was in the bedroom; it was mostly just the horror stories Damien had told me. “You always take the topper off, man,” he told me seriously during our first Fantasticon, when we were both just starting out and we had to share a room. “They don’t wash the toppers.”

“I’m sure they do,” I argued while I watched him bob and weave around the room in the dark, tearing back covers before switching on the lights.

“They don’t,” he said adamantly. “They don’t think people are sleeping directly under or on top of them, so they don’t wash them. Look.” He shut off all the lights again and pulled out a black light. I had to admit there were a terrifying number of mystery stains on each of the toppers. He then bent down to check under the beds, then lifted up the mattresses. “Just checking for bodies,” he told me.

I sat on my bed in my lonely, worn-out motel room and felt a pang of fondness for Damien. He may have screwed me over, but he was still the closest thing I had to a best friend and confidante. Plus, he made me feel sane by comparison.

And he was one of the only people willing to be around me for the past five years.

I realized, when I lost Paul, that one loss was never singular. It came with a whole chain of other, smaller, stranger losses. Texts to friends I thought were loyal went unreturned. A few people told me right to my face that, really, they’d been Paul’s friends, not mine, and without him, it didn’t feel right to spend time with me. Even the people who had minimal contact with Paul—hell, even the people who had hated him—stopped coming by to see me or check up on me. Losing Paul had broken the only part of me they seemed to like. I lost just about everyone.

Except Damien. Damien had never cared about Paul one way or the other. His loyalty was to me and me alone. Whether that was because I was his meal ticket or because he was a genuinely good friend was still up for debate, but hell, at least he tried.

I slipped into the lumpy, too-small bed and curled up under covers that looked thick and plush but provided no respite from the cold. There was an old, chipped radiator in the corner, right below some ratty curtains, and it clanked to life with a horrible rattling noise, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. It only served to keep me awake.

I laid in bed for God knows how long, my eyes closed, trying to sleep in spite of the clattering, but sleep refused to come. I tried to force it, thinking the oppressive darkness of the room would work its usual magic on my brain eventually. How was it that I could sleep for days on end at home, but I couldn’t stand one night in a crappy motel? Was I really such a little, spoiled rich boy that a collapsing mattress and a loud radiator made it impossible for me to sleep? I twisted and turned, but I couldn’t find a comfortable position. The best it got was when I lay horizontal on the bed, curling up on the musty-smelling pillows by the headboard.

I was just finally starting to drift when I heard a loud, echoing bang. I jumped so hard my back slammed into the headboard. I scrambled to my feet, looking wildly around me, but I couldn’t see anything. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t happening in my room.

And, from the sounds of the screams outside, whatever was happening was between a man and a very frightened woman.

“The fuck you think you’re doing, you bitch?!” a man screamed. The bang came again, and I felt a cold ice chip of fear slithering down my throat. The explosive sound was unfamiliar to me, but I didn’t doubt at all that it was a gun. It went off a couple more times, accompanied by more screams.

I crept to the window and twitched the curtains open as delicately as I could manage. I looked down on the cracked asphalt of the parking lot.

A tall, broad man covered head to toe was standing there, gun in one hand and a woman’s long, lustrous hair in the other. He shook her, and she shrieked, sobbing hysterically. She tried to scramble away, but her heels were so high they hindered any movement. Her feet skittered uselessly against the ground like a little fawn learning to walk. “I swear,” she gasped, “I was trying to get the rest of it, but he wasn’t giving in!”

“Shut the fuck up!” The man shot into the air again, and the woman curled into a desperate little ball. “I know you’ve been going behind my back, taking everything they give you! What do you do with it, huh?! You trying to score more crystal? Trying to make yourself so ugly I can’t use you no more?!”

“No!” she cried, still trying to twist away from him, but her long tresses were wrapped around his fist, and she was so thin and scantily clad that I couldn’t imagine she had many options for movement. “I ain’t done a thing but a little bit of rock, Randy! I swear to you!”

He pointed the gun at her head, and she wailed, her whole body trembling. “If that was true, you’d have my fucking money, wouldn’t you, bitch?!” he roared. His eyes looked wild, completely devoid of rational reasoning. I guessed it had something to do with drugs, though that was hardly a tough conclusion to reach.

I tried to move, but I was frozen. Go out there! my brain bellowed at me. Why are you still standing here?! He’s going to kill her, and you’re just going to sit here and watch! Go help her, you coward! Come down from your ivory tower and do something for once in your life!

I wanted to obey my thoughts, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I could hardly blink or breathe, let alone dart down from the second story to thwart an attempted murder. Worthless, the voice in my head hissed. Completely worthless. What do you ever do? You should run out there, get him to shoot you now, finally take care of this bullshit pity party you call a life. Let him just unload his whole clip into your fucking head, maybe then he’ll let the girl go...

Without thinking, I found my hand creeping towards the handle of the door. The voice, I had to admit, was pretty damn convincing. And really, I was being heroic by taking those bullets for her. I was doing this to be a hero.

Right?

As soon as I touched the door handle, the scene changed. I saw a dark flash run right in front of me, then reappear in the parking lot with golden brown hair projecting a glow around the flash’s head, painting it as a guardian angel.

I wasn’t even surprised when I realized it was Sam.

“Hey!” he snapped loud enough to break both the pimp and the prostitute’s trains of thought. I realized then that he had never quite stood to his full height around me, and I was a little bit stunned. I hadn’t expected him to look so strong and tough, especially not next to a massive gangbanger.

The pimp growled at him. “This isn’t your place, asshole. I’m in charge here. Mind your own fucking business.”

“You treating this woman like this makes it my business. She doesn’t have to do a damn thing, no matter what you say,” Sam snapped. “And you’re letting her go.”

“Or what?”

Sam’s hand darted towards the inside of his jacket. The pimp ducked out of instinct, dragging the woman with him.

There were a few tense moments where Sam, hand still in his jacket, and the pimp, gun still in his hand, stared each other down. I thought I was going to throw up from the sheer tension. Oh my God, Sam is going to die.

And then, as if by magic, the pimp released his grip on the woman, who fell to her knees before staggering up, kicking off her shoes, and running as fast as she could away from the motel.

Sam just glared, then slowly removed his hand. “That’s what I thought,” he said coldly. “Get out of here.”

The pimp glared, trying his hand at the same sort of stare down I’d witnessed at the front desk, but he gave up quickly. “Fuck you,” he spat, then whirled away, getting into a beaten-up, old Mercedes and tearing out of the parking lot with a squeal.

It wasn’t until he was gone that Sam’s body relaxed. The poor guy practically wilted. I could see his legs shaking from my vantage point at the window. When he finally collected himself enough to walk back up the steps to the second floor, I noticed him clinging hard to the railing for support.

As soon as he reached the second floor, I burst out of my own room. He jumped hard, pressing a hand to his chest. “Lance, good lord, you can’t just jump out at people like that,” he admonished gently.

“What the hell was that?” was all I could think to ask.

“What was what?”

“That...that Tony Montana bullshit you pulled down there!” I cried, completely aghast at the idea I would even have to clarify. “I mean, good God, Sam, the guy had a gun! A real one! You could’ve died!”

“Nah,” he said, which wasn’t the response I’d been expecting or the one I’d been hoping to receive. I was about to get pissed off when he continued, “I heard how many times he shot. I knew he’d emptied his clip. And guys like that act really tough until you actually stand up to them. I knew he wasn’t going to mess with me if I got him to believe that I had weapons too.”

“So you gambled your life on a bluff?” I asked, astonished.

His eyes were cold. “Sometimes that’s what you have to do,” he said, and his voice sounded deeper, somehow darker and richer but also much more terrifying. It sent a little shiver through me.

My discomfort didn’t have to last long. He tore his eyes from me and stormed into his room, slamming the door behind him.

I realized immediately what I should do was go back in my room and quietly wait out the rest of the night, but as soon as I was back in my room, the sharp pangs of fear returned. What if there were more gunshots? What if someone actually got killed?

What if I tried to get myself killed next time, instead of almost trying it?

The room was too small, the bare white walls too sparse, the bed too collapsed and lumpy. I would never fall asleep there. Fear and loneliness mingled together in equal parts and created an ugly, hopeless cocktail in my chest.

I grabbed my suitcase and quietly slipped out of my room. I took a deep breath, then unceremoniously knocked on Sam’s door.

He opened it almost instantly. It seemed he’d been just as unable to sleep as I’d been. “What?” he asked. His voice was, for the first time since I’d met him, irritable. I stumbled over my words for a moment, trying to recalibrate. It was weird to have my biggest fan talk to me like I was a piece of dirt, especially when I didn’t know if I’d actually done anything wrong. It was a moment before I realized he wasn’t pissed at me—he was just still in “tough guy” mode.

It took me a second to find my voice. “I can’t sleep,” I finally said, my voice barely above a whisper. “The whole gun thing really, really freaked me out, and I can’t sleep. I don’t feel safe.”

I hadn’t meant to say that last bit, but when it tumbled out of my mouth, I could feel the truth of it.

Sam softened. “Oh,” he murmured, looking sheepish. “Shit. I’m sorry, Lance.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said, but he was already waving me through the door. I didn’t protest.

His room was just as bare and cold as mine. He’d kept the topper on his bedding, which was somehow calming and reassuring to see. Even though it meant I was the craziest person in the room, as usual, it also meant he was probably at least as capable of handling me and my weird problems as Damien, which was a rare find. Plus, it meant far fewer lectures about the dangers of filthy hotel rooms.

“I’m sorry for waking you up,” I said, sitting delicately at the edge of the bed, not wanting to move too far onto it until invited to do so. There was no other furniture in the room, so I just made do with the very corner of the mattress.

“You didn’t wake me up.” Sam sagged onto one side of the bed. I looked at him nervously and he smiled, patting the pillow beside his. I gratefully scooted up, huddling under the covers.

“Can’t sleep?” I asked.

“Nope.” He sighed. “I never can in places like this. I always feel like I need to be on high alert.”

“That’s sort of good though, isn’t it? You being on high alert is the only reason that woman is alive right now.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. And I may have kept her from dying tonight, but I hardly saved her life. Those are two very, very different concepts.”

I thought that over for a second. “I guess it is,” I agreed quietly. “But that doesn’t make what you did any less important. I’m sure that she’s happy about it, no matter what you think you should or shouldn’t have done.” When he didn’t respond, I added, “I know I’m happy you did what you did.”

That got his attention. He shifted onto his side, our faces only a few inches apart. “Yeah?”

“Of course. You’re a good person. A lot of people wouldn’t have done anything.”

He shook his head. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

I wanted to tell him it was true, and that I knew that for a fact, considering I was the one who had, indeed, just stood and watched the whole thing happen. I wouldn’t have even considered interceding if it wasn’t for my chronic depression. Somehow, that thought only depressed me more. Am I really anything other than a sack of negative emotions at this point? I wondered.

But then my eyes met Sam’s, and any negativity that was lurking in the dark corners of my brain seemed to fall away. His eyes were round with long lashes that seemed too dark for his complexion. His green irises sparkled like little iridescent gems in the center of each. Even in the dull moonlight, they were dazzling. How was it that I’d looked at him in full daylight and come away unscathed? It seemed like I should have been wearing the same kind of protective eyewear they start selling before an eclipse.

“You’re a good person,” I said suddenly, without provocation. “I can tell you are. And what you did out there tonight was good too, even if you think you could have done more or done something better. You don’t have to be perfect, you know.”

“I know,” he murmured, but I didn’t believe him.

“Besides,” I continued, “it’s not your job to save her. It’s not your job to save anyone. She needs to want to be saved. She needs to try too.”

“You really think so?” he whispered. His voice was shaking just a little, but his eyes were still clear.

“I do.”

“I’m surprised,” he admitted. “I would have thought you would want me to start a crusade to aid others. I always thought that when I met you, you would tell me that I need to go out there and get to saving the world.”

I frowned. “Why would you think that?”

He thought for a second, his lips quirking to the side and his brow furrowing as he concentrated on finding just the right words. Normally I would have been worrying about what he was about to say, but I couldn’t bring myself to. He had such a cute thinking face I could barely remember what I had just said, much less concern myself with whatever he was about to say. “I guess,” he finally murmured, “I always thought that’s what you believed because that’s what your books are about. The Books of Veracity are about taking down a corrupt government, a corrupt system, and a corrupt way of thinking with nothing but what life has given you. I mean, the books literally fell into Eli’s lap, and he and Elinor used them to take on the entire world. It was all about two people, regular people with no special powers or abilities or whatever else, burning down an establishment that was destroying its people. That’s what people are supposed to do, isn’t it? We’re supposed to do the most with what we have. We’re supposed to fix things.”

My frown deepened, and I felt a pang of guilt. Not only had I apparently messed with Sam’s head with my books, but at least a few other fans of mine were bound to feel the same way. Did all of them really believe they needed to carry the entire world on their shoulders? “No,” I said quietly. “That’s not...No. That’s not what this is about. That’s not what I actually believe. That would be insane. No one person should have that kind of pressure on them.”

Sam pulled the blankets tighter around him like they were some kind of defensive shield. “So if you don’t believe in that, what is it that you do believe in?”

“That’s a big question,” I hedged. “I’m not sure how to answer it.”

“Okay, then. Why would you write about something you don’t believe in? Especially if it’s a series about the importance of the truth?”

After another few moments of confusion, a wave of understanding crashed over me, and I could have slapped myself for not even thinking about it earlier. Sam didn’t know what the series was about, not really. None of the fans did. The only people who understood it were me and Damien, because we were the only ones that knew what was going to happen. We knew the truth was a lot harder to understand than right versus wrong, good versus evil, or even fact versus fiction.

I didn’t realize I’d been letting everyone down even before I stopped writing. I told them all they needed was to do everything themselves and to be hypervigilant, but then I’d stopped speaking to them through my work at the most critical moment: the fifth book. The one where the story was going to pivot and change in ways none of them could imagine.

“Well?” Sam prodded. He sounded almost defiant. His glistening eyes hardened as he watched me flounder. “What is it that you really believe, Lance? Were those books really just a story to you?”

“No,” I told him. “No, they weren’t.” I swallowed around a lump growing in my throat and tried to push back the absurd desire to burst into tears. “The books just weren’t telling the story you thought they were.”

He looked like I’d slapped him. Actually, he probably would have looked significantly less hurt if I’d actually physically attacked him, but I didn’t even have the decency to do that. Instead, I’d torn up the thing he believed in most, the thing that had given him comfort, and stomped it into the ground right in front of him.

Good going, Lance. You fucking piece of shit.

“I’m sorry,” I tried to say, but Sam had already flipped over onto his other side. I could feel anger and hurt radiating off of him, even though I could no longer see his face. I waited for him to tell me to leave, but he didn’t, and as much as it sucked to lay there in bed next to someone who was—probably rightfully—fuming at me, it wasn’t quite as bad as the sucking loneliness I felt in my chest when I’d been in my own room.

I turned onto my other side as well. The small bed could only hold so much, and even though I tried not to touch Sam, my back ended up pressed against his. I could feel his breathing, including the little hitches of upset and sniffs of disdain, all of it rattling through my body like I was the one feeling it in the first place.

I shut my eyes tight, trying to block out the room around me, and instead tried to rewrite the story of how I’d ended up in bed with Sam. I tried to imagine he was sleeping peacefully beside me, and that the warmth of his body against mine was intentional, gentle, and good.

I tried.

I didn’t succeed.