“But do you really?” I teased. “Are the readers honestly begging for that?”
He laughed. “You know, maybe the reason you haven’t been able to finish your book is that you keep asking what someone else wants to read instead of what you want to write.”
I crossed my arms, bristling. “So tell me, Gus. How are you going to put a romantic spin on your suicide-cult book?”
His head tilted against the headrest, his knife-edged cheekbones casting shadows down his face. He scratched his jaw. “First of all, when did I say this interview was for my rom-com? I could just as easily set aside all my notes from this until I win our bet, then get back to work on my next official novel.”
“And is that what you’re doing?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “Trying to figure out if I can combine the ideas.”
“Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “Tell me the specifics. I’ll see if I can help.”
“Okay. So.” He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel. “The original premise was basically that this journalist finds out his high school sweetheart, a former drug addict, has joined a cult, so he decides to infiltrate it and take it down. But while he’s there, he starts moving up through the ranks really quickly, like waaaay past the woman he went there to save. And as he does, he starts seeing all this stuff, this proof, that the leader’s right. About everything. Eventually, the girl was going to get scared and try to back out, try to talk him into leaving with her.”
“So I’m guessing,” I said, “they leave, honeymoon in Paris, and settle down in a small villa in the south of France. Probably become winemakers.”
“He was going to murder her,” Gus said flatly. “To save her soul. I hadn’t decided if that was going to be what finally brought the cult down—got all the leaders arrested and everything—or if he was going to become the new prophet. I liked the first option because it feels more like a closed loop: he wants to get her out of the cult; he does. He wants to bring the cult down; he does. But the second one feels more cyclical in a way. Like every damaged person with a hero complex could end up doing exactly what the original leader of the cult does. I dunno. Maybe I’d have a young man or woman with a drug habit show up at the very end.”
“Cute,” I said.
“Exactly what I was going for,” he answered.
“So. Any ideas for the not-terrible version of this book?”
“I mean, I liked that south-of-France pitch. That shit’s fire.”
“Glad you see things my way.”
“Anyway,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. A cult rom-com does sound like a thing. What about you? What’s your book?”
I pretended to puke in my lap.
“Cute,” he echoed, flashing me a grin. Speaking of fire, sometimes his eyes seemed to be reflecting it, even though there wasn’t any. The car was nearly pitch-black, for God’s sake. His eyes shouldn’t be allowed, physically or morally, to glint like that. His pupils were disrespectful to the laws of nature. My skin started burning under them.
“I have no idea what my book was,” I said when he finally looked back to the road. “And little idea what it is. I think it’s about a girl.”
He waited for me to go on for a few seconds, then said, “Wow.”
“I know.” There was more. There was the father she adored. There was his mistress and his beach house in the town he grew up in, and his wife’s radiation appointments. But even if things between Gus Everett and me had warmed (the fault of his eyes), I wasn’t ready for the follow-up questions this conversation might yield.
“Why did you move here anyway?” I asked after a lengthy silence.
Gus shifted in his seat. Clearly there was plenty he didn’t want to talk to me about either. “For the book,” he said. “I read about this cult here. In the nineties. It had this big compound in the woods before it got busted. There was all kinds of illegal shit going on there. I’ve been here about five years, interviewing people and researching and all that.”
“Seriously? You’ve been working on this for five years?”
He glanced my way. “It’s research heavy. And for part of that time I was finishing up my second book and touring for that and everything. It wasn’t like, five uninterrupted years at a typewriter with a single empty water bottle to pee in.”
“Your doctor will be relieved to hear that.”
We drove in taut silence for a while before Gus rolled down his window, which gave me permission to roll mine down. The warm whip of the air against the open windows dissolved any discomfort from the silence we’d fallen into. We could’ve just been two strangers on the same beach or bus or ferry.
As we drove, the sun vanished inch by inch. Eventually, Gus fiddled with the radio, stopping to crank up an oldies station playing Paul Simon.
“I love this song,” he told me over the wind cycloning through the car.
“Really?” I said, surprised. “I figured you’d make me listen to Elliott Smith or Johnny Cash’s cover of ‘Hurt’ the whole way.”
Gus rolled his eyes, but he was smiling. “And I figured you’d bring a Mariah Carey playlist with you.”
“Damn, I wish I’d thought of that.”
His gruff laugh was mostly lost in the wind, but I heard enough of it to make my cheeks go warm.
It was two hours before we got off the highway and then another thirty minutes of ice-damaged back roads, lit only by the car’s brights and the stars overhead.
Finally, we pulled from the winding road through the woods into the gravel lot of a bar with a corrugated tin roof. Its glowing marquee read, THE BY-WATER. Aside from a few motorcycles and a junker of a Toyota pickup, the lot was empty, but the windows, illuminated by glowing BUDWEISER and MILLER signs, revealed a dense crowd inside.
“Be honest,” I said. “Did you bring me here to murder me?”
Gus turned off the car and rolled up the windows. “Please. We drove three hours. I’ve got a perfectly good murder spot back in North Bear Shores.”
“Are all your interviews at spooky dive bars in the forest?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Only the good ones.”
We climbed out of the car. Without the fifty mph wind, it was hot and sticky out, every few feet punctuated by a new cloud of mosquitoes or fireflies. I thought maybe I could hear the “water” the bar’s name referred to somewhere in the woods behind it. Not the lake itself, I didn’t think. A creek, probably.
I always felt a bit anxious going to neighborhood spots like this when I wasn’t a part of the neighborhood, but Gus appeared to be at ease, and hardly anyone looked up from their beer or pool tables or trysts against the wall beside the old-school jukebox. It was a place full of camo hats and tank tops and Carhartt jackets.
I was extremely grateful Gus had encouraged me to change my outfit.
“Who are we meeting?” I asked, sticking close to him as he surveyed the crowd. He tipped his chin toward a lone woman at a high-top near the back.
Grace was in her midfifties and had the rounded shoulders of someone who’d spent a lot of time sitting, but not necessarily relaxed. Which made sense. She was a truck driver with four sons in high school and no romantic partner to lean on.
“Not that that matters,” she said, taking a sip from her Heineken. “We’re not here to talk about that. You want to know about Hope.”