Work Text:
It was becoming an addiction. Each time a new draft would come in he would print it twice and take one home. He’d read that one first. He’d read it and he wouldn’t consider the grammar. He wouldn't consider whether it was marketable. He wouldn’t consider the pacing problems or the analyses.
He just read it.
Her drafts were idiosyncratic. There were flashes of brilliance and moments of lyrical prose but she was prone to tangents and odd phrasings like she’d been born more than a century out of date. She was astronomically knowledgeable and painfully unresearched - sometimes in the same paragraph. Reading her drafts was like sitting with an old friend as they told you a treasured story. They were personal and intimate.
He had them all. Four drafts of four novels, they were on the shelf with his copies of the published versions. He had the published copies of all the manuscripts he had brought through revision and made into published books people would actually buy but the drafts were another story. Most drafts went to the shredder at the office when it was all done. Few got printed out at all. There was one writer who he had been granted by a higher up at the publishing house and whose draft he had poured whiskey on and burned once the process was finally over and he was free of ever reading the the awful thing again.
There were only 4 he still had. Tessa Gray’s were the only ones he kept.
He reread them. At work, he made her take out the tangents and the superfluous characters, he marked out every archaic phrase, he sent her documents of notes and red pen marks. He read over the copy writer’s corrections before he sent them on to her. He argued grammar and had learned to check 3 times that he corrected her history because she was rarely wrong. Her writing came to him intimate and idiosyncratic and he made it publishable.
He had never met her. They communicated by email, by telephone call, by microsoft word mark-up comment bubbles. He had seen her in interviews when the third book had shot up the best seller lists in a brief flash of notoriety. She had been beautiful and poised but reserved, like she was too old to possibly be only 26. Few people saw the intimate and idiosyncratic person hiding underneath.
But he knew her because he had read those drafts before they were touched by anyone else.
When he finished this one, late at night with grainy eyes and a heart the wrong size for his chest, he sent her a text message, “It’s beautiful,” and then left his phone on top of the pile of papers and went to bed without waiting for a response.
It was there when he got up and dragged himself toward the coffee machine and the office: “As always, you’ll make it even better."