photograph / ln4

nine

THE NEXT week was harder than the previous one. After Lando left on Tuesday morning, Eleanor felt as if he'd taken a part of her with him. With the new time difference and the therefore lack of contact between the two, she found herself delving head first into work.

Which meant spending more time sending emails back and forth with Dawson.

Eleanor desperately tried to direct all their communication through emails, not wanting to spend another session on Zoom where he tried to consistently shift the conversation into a less professional one. However, on Thursday afternoon, he "hit a writer's block" and asked her to schedule a meeting so that they could run things through visually.

With a sigh, Eleanor had accepted and was now logging into Zoom for her meeting with Dawson. She'd made herself a cup of spearmint tea and was very much looking forward to the end of the day—she'd promised herself this was the last thing she'd do before she would head off to do groceries and call Inez before lazily lounging on the couch for the rest of the night.

"Hey Ella!" Dawson's face popped up on her screen, and it took everything in Eleanor not to swoon a little bit. He was wearing a white dress shirt, the first couple of buttons undone, showing off his tanned skin. His hair was tousled, green eyes twinkling in the light as he leaned forward on his elbows and rested his chin on interlinked fingers. "How are you? Thank you for meeting me on such short notice."

"Of course, Dawson. I'm still on work hours so that's what I'm here for," Eleanor smiled softly as she pulled up her notebook, where she kept track of all the important details on his new novel. "So what are you struggling with?"

Dawson pulled his lip between his teeth, suppressing an awkward twitch of his lips. "Well, uhm... you know how I've been building up Mia and Charlie back up to love interests again, right? That there's still unresolved tension there?"

Eleanor's brows furrowed together, and she glanced back at her notes with her pen between her lips, before finding what she was looking for and nodding. "Yeah? Why? Are you no longer considering a Charlie and Faye endgame?"

"No, no..." Dawson shook his head on the other side of the screen. "I think I want to go with Mia. I think Charlie has to realise he did wrong by her, and part of his character growth would be realising that and fully apologising to her, you know?"

"Alright," Eleanor nodded again, seeing where he was going, where the dots where connecting in the story. "Okay, that could work. It would mean you'd have to go back and rewrite to add some more tension in the last couple of chapters, though. If you want that climax to happen soon."

"That's what I was thinking, yeah, but I'm not sure how to convey that he realised what a fuck-up he was. How does he communicate it? I've written the scene where he sees her with another guy, and that that triggers the realisation, but I'm stuck on the scene where he tells her how he feels."