The Last Edit

The flight into Cleveland was twenty minutes late, which I should have known right there was the start of something, because my whole year has run on late planes and bad news and editors calling me at six in the morning with problems I didn't create. I'm Jenna, I'm forty-two, and I run nonfiction at Beacon Hall Press in Blaine, which sounds fancier than it is, it mostly means I fight with finance about advances and fly to places like Cleveland in November. We landed, everybody did the shuffle to the overhead bins, and I had just enough time to check my email before the gate agent's face told me everything.

"The hotel shuttles are suspended," she said, before I even asked. "Weather's moving in off the lake. There's a shuttle in the morning but it's showing full."

"Full full, or full until somebody cries at the desk?"

She almost smiled. "Full full."

So that was that, I was stuck at the airport, forty minutes from the conference hotel with no shuttle until who knows when, and my phone was at twelve percent because of course it was. I called the rental desk at the airport, mostly as a ritual, and the guy there said they had exactly one car left, a compact, and it was going fast, and I said book it before somebody with better luck than me walks through that door. He gave me a confirmation number and a total that made me wince, and I did the math in my head about splitting it with nobody, because I travel alone, I work alone, that's kind of my whole thing.

The rental counter is down past baggage claim, this long beige hall with the carpet that every airport in America apparently buys from the same sad supplier, and I was third in line, which gave me plenty of time to notice the man two spots ahead of me. Tall, Black, gray coming in at the temples, coat that cost more than my first car, and when he turned around to check the arrivals board I felt my whole day get worse, because it was Aaron Gunderson. Senior fiction editor at Young and Finch, my imprint's direct competitor, the guy who has beaten us to two awards in three years and never once let me forget it at the panel discussions.

He saw me about the same time I saw him. "Oh no," he said, loud enough that the woman behind the counter looked up. "They canceled your shuttle too?"

"The whole shuttle line, apparently."

"Same here. My car service never showed. Some driver issue, they said, which I think means the driver looked out the window." He came back and stood next to me instead of moving up in line, which I decided was a tactic. "Please tell me you're not also headed to the Delano Grand."

"Three-day publishing conference, second floor, beige everything. That's the one."

"So we're both stuck, and that counter has one car, and I heard you on the phone." He held up his hands like he was showing me they were empty. "Hear me out before you say no. Split the car. I'll pay half, you drive or I drive, whichever, and we both get to the hotel tonight instead of sleeping in terminal C next to a charging station."

"I'd rather chew the upholstery."

"I know. Me too, honestly. But it's a compact, Jenna, there's no upholstery worth chewing, and it's forty minutes of your life."

He wasn't wrong, that was the annoying part, and I stood there doing the math again, half of a compact versus a full night in an airport chair, and my back had already voted. "Fine," I said. "But I drive. You talk too much for somebody in a small space."

"Deal," he said, and he meant it, which surprised me, because the Aaron I knew from panels talked like the microphone was a food source.

The compact turned out to be silver, dented on one rear door, and it smelled like pine trees and someone else's fast food, and it took me two tries to get the seat to move back far enough. Aaron got in on the passenger side with his garment bag somehow balanced on his knees without complaint, which I noted and didn't comment on. The rain had started while we were inside, that flat Cleveland rain that doesn't pour so much as just sit on the windshield, and the wipers did that squeak thing for the first mile before they found their rhythm.

We got maybe four minutes of silence, which was a record, and then he started.

"You know we've got the better list this year," he said, settling in as a man opens a folder. "The Cavanagh book alone. Half the judges have already read it."

"The Cavanagh book is fine," I said, checking my mirror before I merged. "Fine is the ceiling for it, though. Our Banks title is the one people are actually going to remember in five years. Cavanagh is a dinner party, Banks is a book."

"You would say that, you bought it."

"I bought it because it's better, that's how buying works."

"Oh, so you've never bought anything mediocre in your life? Fifteen years in the business, never had a list with a hole in it?" He was grinning, I could see it without turning my head, that easy competitor's grin he does at panels when he wants the audience on his side. "Your fall list two years ago had three memoirs about the same lake."

"Two of those sold well."

"One of those sold well."

"One," I admitted, because you can't win an argument with a lie when the other guy has the numbers on his phone. "But we led the market in narrative nonfiction overall, and the trade sheets said so, you can look it up."

"I believe you," he said, and something about how he said it, quick and plain, without the usual little jab after, made me glance over at him. He was watching the road signs instead of me, actually watching them, and when the sign for the exit came up too fast in the rain he said, easy, "Exit's this one, left lane, take your time," and didn't grab at the dash or do the passenger seat driving thing men usually do, just gave me the information like I was a colleague and not a student.

I took the exit, and the hotel sign came up glowing through the rain, and I realized I'd been braced for him to be unbearable the whole drive and he mostly hadn't been. Arrogant, sure, he had the track record for it, but he'd also read the signs three exits ahead and told me about a lane closure on the parkway before it mattered, and he'd kept his voice down, like he knew the car was small and I was tired.

"Your driver really didn't show?" I asked at a red light, because it was still nagging at me.

"He showed at the wrong terminal, then canceled and charged me anyway. I'm disputing it tonight, in the bar, with a receipt and a grudge." He shrugged, careful even shrugging, keeping his hands off the dash as I braked. "Organizers were supposed to arrange shuttles, Randy said he'd handle it, and then Randy handled nothing, as usual."

"Randy handles nothing," I agreed. "He moderates as a man reads a phone book."

"See, we agree on things. This whole trip is wasted on arguing about imprints when we could be united against our real enemies." The light turned green and he nodded toward it before I even moved. "Left here, then it's the second entrance, the first one dumps you behind the loading dock."

I made the left, second entrance, right up to the doors under the awning, and a bellman came out into the rain for my bag, and I sat there a second with my hands on the wheel, thinking about how forty minutes with my rival had been the least painful forty minutes of my week.

"Half the bill," Aaron said, opening his door, holding out his phone with the receipt already up. "Paid my half to your card by Venmo before you even park. I keep my books clean, Jenna, you know that about me."

"Yeah," I said, taking the phone, looking at the payment already sitting there. "I'm starting to."

The lobby of the Delano Grand was beige in the way that hotel lobbies are beige, beige carpet and beige walls and beige chairs arranged in conversational clusters that nobody ever converses in, and it was warm, which after that rental car was nearly enough to make me forgive the place everything else. Aaron stood beside me at the front desk dripping on the tile while a young woman with a name tag that said Chantelle, assistant manager, worked the keyboard like it owed her money.

"Two rooms, king beds if you have them, we're both with the publishing conference," Aaron said, sliding his card across the counter before I could get mine out, which was the kind of small competitive move I'd have rolled my eyes at any other day of the year.

Chantelle typed, and then she stopped typing, which was the first bad sign, and she typed some more, which was the second bad sign, and then she looked up with the exact face that people make when they're about to deliver bad news and have delivered it a hundred times before. "I'm so sorry. We're fully booked with the conference. I have one room left, it's a double, two beds, and that's honestly all I can do tonight, everything downtown is slammed because of the weather."

"There's no way," I said. "Randy guaranteed rooms for the panelists. He told every one of us there'd be rooms held."

"I believe you," Chantelle said, and she did sound like she believed me, which somehow made it worse. "But the room block released at six and everything held under it went back into inventory, and inventory is gone. One double. Whoever takes it, I'm sorry, the other one is out of luck until tomorrow, and tomorrow's not looking good with the cancellations. People are calling from the airport already."

I looked at Aaron. Aaron looked at me. We had known each other for about nine years of panels and award ceremonies and quietly hating each other's acquisition strategies, and in all that time we had never once cooperated on anything, and I could see him doing the arithmetic same as me.

"I'll take the room," he said.

"You absolutely will not. I'm on the eight thirty panel, I need the sleep, and I'm already at a disadvantage because my flight was twenty minutes late and my shuttle got canceled."

"Your disadvantage is you flew into a storm, Jenna, that's not a disadvantage, that's a decision. I'll take the couch in the lobby, I'm disputing a charge at the bar anyway, I can sleep anywhere."

"Oh, that's very noble, the man who's beaten us to two awards in three years is going to sleep in a lobby chair so the competition is well rested for her panel. Nobody's buying it."

"Then what are you proposing?" he asked, and there it was, the actual question, sitting on the counter between us next to Chantelle's keyboard.

Chantelle held up both hands. "I just want to say, it's one double room, two actual beds, and I have a waitlist of eleven people behind you, so whichever way you decide, decide it soon, because I've got the Hendersons of Chicago coming back down in ten minutes and they will take it."

"We'll take it," I said, before Aaron could open his mouth and make it a negotiation, and I put my card down next to his, and he looked at my card like it had insulted his mother.

"You don't even consult me?"

"I just did. You heard me."

He paid, or we paid, it came to the same thing, and Chantelle handed over two keys with a relief that was almost embarrassing and told us the elevator was around the corner and breakfast was six to ten and she genuinely was sorry, and I believed that too.

The room was on the fourth floor, small and beige like everything else in the building, two double beds with a nightstand between them, a desk under the window, and a bathroom that two people were going to fight over by morning. The climate control unit under the window was already running, and it was already too cold, a rattle and a blast of refrigerated air that made the curtains stir.

Aaron put his bag on the bed nearest the window and