Trinity and Lance started bantering about something, but I was a kid in a candy store. I barely heard them.
I did a little hopping dance of excitement as I walked. Lance and Trinity shared a roll of the eyes and a grin on my behalf.
Lance was a former baseball player who had a serious chance of playing his way up from the minor leagues until he blew out his shoulder. He still looked the part, even down to the blue eyed, all-American look he had.
Trinity, like me, was allergic to exercise and probably couldn’t throw a baseball through an open barn door. Her biggest dream was to get an internship in a French kitchen to jumpstart her goal of opening her own pastry shop. Neither of them really cared at all about an author’s conference, but they were good enough friends to tag along without complaint for my sake.
“I still can’t believe you bought us tickets to this thing without telling us,” Lance said.
“Well,” I said. “I wasn’t going to come alone.”
“At least tell me these tickets weren’t too expensive,” Trinity said.
“We’re here, aren’t we?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. They both knew my financial situation. Grim would’ve been an understatement. I was basically the starving artist type, except minus the artist part, because I still hadn’t even finished writing a proper book. It was all made worse because my big brother made a monthly plea to “just give me a few mil to take the edge off.” The guy seriously thought handing someone a couple million dollars was as casual as offering an aspirin from his medicine cabinet.
Stubbornly, I always refused his help. I had a dream, damn it. Someday, I wanted to look back from my castle mansion and say I’d built it all with nothing but words. I didn’t want to have to mutter under my breath about how my brother kinda sorta financed the shit out of me and gave me a leg up on all the competition.
We were fast-walking—mostly because I was too excited to walk at normal speed—toward the room where Sebastian St. James was going to be speaking. I sort of managed not to shove my way past any poor old ladies trying to shuffle to the same room.
“You know,” Trinity said. “The only way to keep my sanity and be your friend is learning when I shouldn’t ask more questions. But I have a feeling you really went overboard this time. You were just telling me last week how you had to bat your eyelashes at some guy to bum his subway card. You can’t afford to take the subway, but you can afford three tickets to this?”
“What?” I asked, already growing breathless. “I got a really good deal.” Liar, liar.
Lance was keeping pace with my small, churning legs easily, but Trinity was huffing and puffing to maintain my speed. I didn’t care if I got there sweaty and panting; I was going to get a seat in the front row.
“I’m just—excited,” I said, having to gulp for air between words.
“Yeah,” Lance said. “Like a dog who just spotted the park out the window. If you had a tail, it’d be wagging right now.”
“Her butt does kind of wiggle when she walks this fast,” Trinity said, leaning her neck back to get a look.
I ignored them. We’d reached an auditorium style room with hundreds of chairs arranged in a wide semicircle around the central stage. We were some of the first in the room, but I still kept up my breakneck pace until I had secured seats for us at the very front. I melted into the chair and mopped sweat from my brow. “Success,” I whispered.
Trinity and Lance sat on either side of me. “What’s so special about this author, anyway?”
I blinked. “Weren’t you listening when I explained all this to you?”
Trinity gave me a level stare. “You mean when you got drunk on wine coolers and ranted about some “amazing book” for like two hours? You also had to interrupt yourself like fifteen times to get up and pee. Besides, if I gave you a two-hour lecture on anything, how much do you really think you’d remember?”
“Wine coolers go right through me,” I muttered under my breath.
“You read this guy’s book before anyone else, right?” Lance asked. “I remember that.”
“See?” I said. “Somebody listens to me. I’m on his advanced review team and I’m confidently going to say this book is going to be a global bestseller the moment it releases. Seriously. The guy is an absolute. Freaking. Genius. He’s already getting all the big publishers fighting over future contracts. All kinds of awards are coming out from the early review copies they sent out. And nobody knows what he looks like, so.”
“Wait,” Trinity said, a grin forming. “Is that why you were in such a hurry? You want to get a look at this author guy you have a ladyboner for?”