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Amy favorites their interaction and texts him, You'd better be sending her all the postcards I know you've been hoarding for her.
The next time Laurie visits Florence, it's with his old college roommate Fred Vaughn, on the continent for two months to observe the European arm of his family's media empire. Amy glares at him behind Fred's back, but turns bright pink when he asks her for her number at the end of the weekend.
"You make it so hard to hate you," she sighs as she hugs Laurie goodbye at the train station.
"I hope Jo agrees with you."
"Just promise you won't put her through anything like that again, or I'll break your piano. You know I'm capable of it. And you're flying back with me for her graduation."
"I will if she invites me."
Amy rolls her eyes. "For someone who went to freaking Harvard you can be a complete dumbass sometimes."
*
Laurie expected rebuilding his friendship with Jo to be slow-going, but she's as surprising as always, treating him like they've never stopped talking. A few days after he mails her the postcards, she messages him an exhaustive bucket list for Vienna and express profound disgust when he admits he hasn't even heard of half the things on it.
Have you or have you not been living there since July? The Pennsylvania Explorers Club is ashamed of you. Redeem yourself or face impeachment as president.
You wouldn't.
I wouldn't even feel bad about it. You know I've wanted to be president since we were ten.
For the next three weeks Laurie ticks a new item off the list every day, and sends Jo a picture of each accomplishment. She calls him the day he finishes, and without even a greeting:
"It pains me to say it, but for now the Pennsylvania Explorers Club has deemed you worthy of keeping your position."
His mouth is dry. It's the first time he's heard her voice in seven months, and he has to grip the table at the sound of it. I've missed you, he longs to say, but he's vowed to let her set the tone of their conversations for now so he strives to match it.
It's easier than he expects to fall back into their rhythm. "I'm honored, old fellow," he intones with the over-the-top British accent he knows she hates. "Although I'm surprised you didn't just stage a coup d'etat and kick me out."
"I tried, but you're too damn charismatic," Jo sighs, and his heart hammers even harder in his chest. "But you're on probationary status, so you better watch yourself. I haven't given up on that presidency."
It's as close as she's going to get to an acknowledgement of his own veiled apology. For Laurie, it's more than enough.
*
They spend hours on the phone or on Skype after that. In the middle of her final semester at NYU, Jo's usually in the middle of writing yet another paper but she handles the multitasking with aplomb. Laurie tells her about the concerts he attends, Fred and Amy (going nauseatingly well, he's a better matchmaker than he thought), his growing interest in his grandfather's business.
"I never thought I'd like it so much," he admits as he walks back to the townhouse after a grocery run, "but I get to meet all these cool clients and the people I work with are great, really fun and crazy creative. And it's amazing actually seeing the campaigns we come up with passing by on a bus or flashing on TV."
"Bigshot advertising exec, Teddy Laurence," she says, and he grins at the nickname only she's allowed to call him. "And here I thought you were going to be a starving artist like me."
"I would've made a shitty starving artist. Can't pull off the beard."
"Or the poverty."
Laurie laughs. "Speaking of," he starts, "What are your plans for after graduation, Miss English major?"
"Not you too," she groans. "I already get that enough from everyone back here."
"As a graduate, it is my right - no, my duty - to put you through the same crap I had to go through last year."
"That's just cruel."
"Come on," he says, unlocking the door of the townhouse and pushing it open. "Seriously now. I won't laugh, whatever it is."
"Liar."
"Okay, fine, I'll probably laugh. But I'll still support you."
"Even if I decide that all I want to do is write kinky romance novels?"
Laurie snorts, pressing the phone between his ear and his shoulder as he dumps the paper bags on the kitchen counter. "I'm ninety-nine percent sure your dignity wouldn't allow it, but yeah, I'd buy every book. Just don't expect me to read them."
"Then what's the point of writing them?"
Jo's only joking, he knows, but his traitorous heart still skitters in his chest. Laurie used to be the first - sometimes the only - person to read whatever she wrote. She'd send him an e-mail with nothing but an attachment, and never say anything about it to him unless he brought it up first - and he always did, ready with a compliment that she always brushed off with a laugh to hide the pleased flush of her cheeks. He didn't so much enjoy the reading material - although they were generally pretty good, his own unrepentant bias and dubious worth as a literary critic aside - as he did being the one person she trusted with this, the glimpse of insecurity she hid beneath her fierce armor.
She hasn't let him see any of her current work even now that they're back on speaking terms, and it hurts to think that she'll never trust him enough to let him see that part of her again.
"The money, of course," Laurie says now, striving to match her airy tone, "I hear literary soft-core porn's a lucrative business on Amazon."
Instead of the laugh or reprimand he expects, he gets dead silence. "Jo?"
"Teddy, do you think..." She starts, and then stops. "Never mind. It's stupid."
"It isn't if it's bugging you. What's wrong?"
"Nothing. It's just..." Jo's voice has grown quiet, hesitant, but now some of her usual resolve creeps back in. He can practically see her sitting up straight, shaking her bangs out of her face as she soldiers on. "Do you think I'm a sellout?"
Laurie has to pause to process the question. "Why would you be a sellout?"
"I was gonna wait until it was a sure thing to tell you, but... I heard back from a publishing house about my manuscript a few weeks ago, and they're interested - "
"Jo. That's fantastic!"
" - but they want me to change a lot. Like, I'd have to rework a character and cut out a huge chunk of the plot because they want to market it as a children's book and they said it was too dark as is."
"Will you?"
"It'd be stupid not to."
"It wouldn't be the first stupid thing you've done," Laurie says, and she snorts. "Look, don't think about whether it's stupid or not, just answer this - even with all the changes they're making you do... do you still want it?"
"More than anything - I could be a published author by next year, Teddy!"
"So do it. Easy."
Jo huffs into the phone, and he feels a sudden pang of homesickness at the familiar sound. "But Fritz says - "
He can't quite keep down the grimace that comes to his face at the name. He actually has nothing against Fritz Bhaer beyond the fact that he sees more of Jo than Laurie does, but he's both self-aware enough to recognize the irrational pettiness of his dislike and selfish enough to continue to indulge in it anyway.
" - it's my vision, and I shouldn't cave in to their demands to sacrifice parts of it just because they wave money and fame in my face, and anyway a true writer, a serious writer, shouldn't have being published as their end goal at the expense of their creativity - "
Laurie rolls his eyes. "Yeah, well, you want 'writer' to be your primary job description, it kind of has to pay the bills."
She laughs, and they settle into familiar, comfortable silence. He hums a melody he's been working on as he finishes unpacking the groceries, phone still pressed between his ear and his shoulder.
"So you don't think I'm a sellout."
"Jo - " he reaches up to grip his phone tight, as if by sheer force he can reach out across the Atlantic and reassure her. "Look. You rework the character, you cut out the bits of the plot they don't like, whatever. Details. But with what's left, at its core - is it still the story you want to tell?"
"I...yes," she says, slow and soft; then again, louder: "Yes."
"There you go," he says. "That doesn't sound like selling out to me. I meant what I said, Jo. You could write anything, even kinky romance novels - if it's the story you want to tell, I'm there. It doesn't matter if other people think it's silly or stupid - if it's what you want to do, then that's all that matters."
Jo huffs into the phone again, but this time it sounds more like a laugh. "When did you get so sage, Theodore Laurence?"
"Must be the water here," Laurie says cheerfully, leaning against the counter. "Full of centuries of knowledge and culture."
She only hums at that, clearly distracted, and they fall back into that easy silence. He closes his eyes, imagines her now: sprawled out on her bed, brow furrowed, tapping the end of her pen on her lip as she considers what he's said. It's so familiar that he has to smile.
*
A few hours later, Laurie's sitting in his grandfather's office, waiting for him to finish reading his proposal for an account, grateful for the distraction when his tablet beeps with an alert. His heart skips when he sees that it's an e-mail from her: no subject, no message, nothing but an attachment that he taps at so forcefully it makes a sound loud enough for Grandfather to glance up at him.
It's likely that Grandfather can't even understand his sorry, muttered as he stares in confusion at the document that's popped up on his screen. It looks like an assignment for school, a couple of questions followed by short essay answers. He's about to reply asking if she attached the wrong file, when he actually reads a sentence, and his breath hitches in his chest.
After graduation, I want to Teach for America.
It's not the kind of writing Jo usually sends him, but he knows it's just as important, just as personal, just as close to her heart. Just as big of a leap of faith to show it to him first, just as honest a glimpse of what she hides beneath her fearless facade, and Laurie nearly knocks over his chair in his rush to prove to her that her trust hasn't been misplaced again.
Her number's already dialed before he even reaches the door, calling out an apology to his long-suffering grandfather.