16. Aurora
16
AURORA
THE BAD WEATHER CLICHé
R ain thrummed on the roof as Willow and Whitney chatted away on my computer screen. It had started to hurt less when they talked about all the cool projects they were working on. The ache hadn’t completely lessened. But like my ankle, it only bothered me when the weather was moody.
“What are you working on, Wander ?” Willow asked.
I glanced up from my email inbox. “ While the writing has stopped, the emails haven’t.”
They both groaned in understanding.
“How’s the income?” Whitney asked. “ Have you started earning royalties yet, or are you still earning out the advance?”
“I earned out the advance from Petrichor and, for that, my bank account gives thanks. I need to finish the house so I can get it on the market. I got the name of a local realtor. I need to give her a call. But honestly, I might try to sell it myself. I want to keep as much of the sale as possible.”
“And then what?” Willow’s question was the elephant in the room.
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” I let out a deep sigh. “ I don’t know. I’ve thought about going back to school and getting my teaching license. Then again, I’m not sure who would hire a failed author to teach people how to write.”
“You’re not a failed author,” Whitney snapped. “ You’re an author. Full stop.”
I could see the fierce determination in her eyes. Whitney wasn’t convinced that I was done, and I knew damn well that she would do everything in her power to get me writing again.
“Okay, question,” Whitney said. “ I’m writing this enemies-to-lovers and I’m afraid I’m taking it too far. Like , the characters still need to be redeemable so they can live happily ever after. If he calls her his dirty little whore while they’re angry banging, is that too far since they’re already enemies? Is it just reinforcing it too much?”
And there it was. Whitney could write an enemies-to-lovers in her sleep. She didn’t need our two cents. She was just trying to get me back in the drafting mindset.
“Does he call her a dirty little whore or his dirty little whore?” Willow asked. “ Because those are two very different things.”
I nodded. “ If he calls her his , it softens it up. I think you can get away with it. Especially if you keep “little” in there. It makes it cuter.”
There was something about a leading man calling the lady “his” for the first time. There was safety in it. Maybe a little lust. It was something that an innate part of me craved in real life and between the pages. I wanted that sense of belonging and trust.
A premonition of Jack flashed in my mind, and a chill raced down my spine. His eyes. His hands. His mouth.
I flinched again when a frigid bead ran down my back, then looked up.
“Everything okay? Whitney asked as her fingers clicked away on the keys.
I sighed. “ There’s a leak in the roof, and it’s raining.”
“Oooh!” Willow cooed. “ It’s your cliché coming true! Bad weather in the dead Great - Aunt’s beach house!”
I rolled my eyes. “ It wouldn’t be a problem if the roofing company wasn’t running behind on another job. They were supposed to be out here yesterday to finish it up.” Another raindrop pelted my head as the wind rattled the windows. “ Geez . I didn’t think the storm was going to be this bad.”
I eased off the couch and shoved it out of the splash zone. I needed to find a bowl or a bucket. The last thing I wanted was water damage on the floors. They had been secured and sanded smooth, with the exception of the branded floorboard. I wanted to keep the character as much as I could. All that was left to do was seal them, but I needed a clear day where I could have all the doors and windows open to let the fumes out.
I pawed around the kitchen to find a bowl or bucket to catch the rain. I didn’t have much as far as cookware went, but I had found some old metal pots and pans that I was able to scrub up to a respectable standard of cleanliness.
The question was, where were they?
The kitchen was in complete disarray. The old wall cabinets were out, but I hadn’t put up the open shelving to replace them, yet. If it was going to be a beach rental, people staying for a week didn’t need chunky old cabinets collecting dust that were mostly empty anyway. Besides , they blocked the sunlight from the kitchen window.
I yanked open one of the lower countertop doors and peered inside. The pots were gone. I could have sworn I had put them there . . .
I moved down to the next door and found what I was looking for. I grabbed the old stock pot and set it on top of the counter. I went to shut the door, then paused. A cursive A was etched onto the back wall.
That was weird.
I smoothed my hand over the mark, but there were no pieces to open or loose bricks to slide. I certainly wasn’t going to demolish a wall if I didn’t have to.
A drawer was right above the A on that section of counter space. I pulled on the handle but it didn’t budge. Something was lodged along the track. I pulled and wiggled the drawer as I reached into the cabinet and felt along the wood panel until I touched something cool and smooth. I pushed up on the bottom of the drawer just long enough to dislodge?—
What the hell?
I pinched the ornate pen between my fingers and studied it. To the average person, it would just be a regular pen. It looked like a tourist trinket from Shackleford Banks . Something that had been picked up on one of the island ferries that were promoted all over the place.
But along the outside of the pen where Shackleford Banks was stamped into the side of the metal, someone had added, “ and Trust .” I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, except there was a distinct cursive letter A on the opposite side.
“You okay?” Willow called from the video chat.
“Yeah,” I said as I grabbed the pot and hurried back to catch the raindrops. “ I found another Aurora Archer clue.”
“Seriously?” Whitney gasped. “ What was it this time?”
“A pen. Someone changed the engraving on it.”
Raindrops thwopped into the empty metal pot. My mind floated to the notion of summer showers performing in a symphony on a tin roof.
“Have you called your mom and asked her what she knows yet?” Willow asked.
I let out a short laugh. “ Yeah . My mom didn’t know she was an author. She said my great-aunt was always really eccentric and would make up stories when people asked what she did to be so wealthy. She’d say she had a rich lover in Spain . Or that she worked for the government. Or that she had divorced a Russian oligarch and took everything he had. Or that she was an oil heiress. I asked my mom where she got my name from when I was born, and she said that Aunt Juniper used to insist that, ‘ Aurora is the best name and was to be reserved for the most daring of women. ’ Since my great-aunt never had kids of her own, my mom named me Aurora .”
It had been years since I’d seen my aunt before she passed away, but my impression was spot on.
“Awww!” the girls said in unison.
Thunder crashed like cannon fire. The lightning strikes that followed were sword slashes through the sky. The video call buffered as the heavens collided in a civil war.
I had told the girls all about Jack’s and my discovery at the library. I ended up reading my aunt’s autobiography cover to cover four times.
One of those times was when I was snuggled up with Jack on his couch, but I wasn’t ready to unpack that phenomenon quite yet. It went completely against my “personal space” requirement.
But with him . . . I liked the closeness. I had started to crave it in his absence.
While Whitney and Willow chatted about the possibilities of what the pen could mean, my mind floated back to my aunt’s autobiography. Half of me was captivated by who she was. The other part of me was . . . confused.
She hinted at leaving pieces of herself in the house. By my guess, she meant the random pieces of manuscripts and trinkets, like a weirdly engraved pen. I hadn’t quite figured those out yet, but it was fun to think of my aunt sneaking around her house, chiseling out an old brick, and tucking away something that she had written and was proud of.
In the book, she talked about how she lived to spite the norms of ladylike behavior. She dressed and acted the way she wanted. She took up “method writing” and would immerse herself in the characters she was creating.
She romanticized everything, and had a fabulous time terrifying the locals in the process. I had smiled at the stories she recapped in the autobiography of her going to the grocery store in a petticoat or a hoop skirt. I idolized her inability to care what others thought—turning up her nose at the rumors and opinions that swirled about the crazy old spinster who danced along the waves. That kind of freedom would have been cathartic.
She didn’t walk on the beach. She danced along the shore, hiking up the hem of her dress and dashing across the sand like she was running toward a forbidden lover. She didn’t peel back the curtains or peek out of a window. She would stand in the widow’s watch, facing down a storm, staring at the ocean in her best dress as a salon-perfect blowout wilted in the rain.
Less romanticized and more of a poor life decision, she refused to evacuate for hurricanes. She claimed that it was exactly why she had moved to the Carolina coast in the first place.
Aunt Juniper —or Aurora Archer —declared that the beach was the moodiest of landscapes. It was happy. It was magical. It was raging and hostile. It was somber and sorrowful. It was a place for dreaming and an anchor to stay grounded.
She claimed the beach engaged all the senses, not just the basic five. It drove curiosity and wanderlust. There was a beauty in the sonder that bloomed as strangers met on the beach for one magical summer.
I twirled the Aurora Archer pen between my fingers as I settled back in front of my computer. Whitney and Willow both had their microphones muted and were studiously typing away on their books.
I had a cluster of emails still needing to be answered, but I didn’t feel up to responding to the overdue messages.
I felt as broody and irritable as the storm clouds looming over the coast. What I wouldn’t give for an evening sunset painting the sky in pink twilight as the breeze danced through the dry grasses that sprang through the sand dunes.
My cursor lingered over the stack of unread emails. But instead of clicking on the first one, I stabbed the Aurora Archer pen into the bun on top of my head, opened a blank document, and began to type.
There’s something overwhelmingly nostalgic about the summertime. It’s the sound of crickets chirping as dusk turns to twilight. Going for a long drive as the air cools after dinner as the lingering light glows.
Summers as a kid were everything. They were endless. There were no worries about mosquito bites on your legs as you ran through the grass. It was just freedom and fresh air.
Summer was a thousand senses all wrapped up into five. It was the sound of a country song full of angst, lust, and love on the radio as you drove with the top down; hair whipping in the wind.
And then you turn eighteen and those magical summers disappear.
The lights flickered overhead as thunder rolled and my fingers flew over the keys, bleeding the skeleton of a story onto the first page.
It felt like a purge. A cleansing.
It felt like cracking my knuckles—an ache that had lingered and needed to be released.
My fingers froze over the keys. I needed a synonym for moody.
I opened my internet browser and?—
No connection.
No. No . No . No . I wasn’t one of those people who could write and leave blanks to fix later. I had to type while thoughts were flowing in my head.
Touching the keys and creating prose was like turning on an old faucet. It sputtered and spat sporadically.
But maybe . . . eventually . . . it would run clear and easy.
Did I want to try . . .
I couldn’t linger on the thought. I had been so adamant that I was done writing for good. I didn’t want to be the boy who cried wolf. Or the author who cried “book .”
This was a fluke. It had to be.
Still, I couldn’t get the whispers of a story out of my head. They swirled like screaming phantoms, demanding release to rest in the afterlife.
I tried connecting to Jack’s WiFi network again, but nothing happened. The network was still live and the electricity hadn’t been knocked out, but I was just far enough away for the storm to disrupt my access.
The video call disconnected as the connection was lost entirely.
Shit . . .
I expected the disruption to scare the words away, but they just kept piling in my mind, one on top of the other.
Without giving it a second thought, I unplugged my laptop and shoved it under my shirt to stay dry as I bolted outside and down the stairs.
Jack’s porch light was on, but he had to go on duty in the morning which meant he was probably getting ready for bed. I sent up a silent prayer that he wouldn’t turn me away.
I cut through the hedge and scurried up the steps to his front door as the storm howled and the wind whipped. Flecks of sand scraped my skin as they blew off the dunes. Mother Nature was showing off all her fury today. Lightning flashed, stabbing the sea as I knocked on Jack’s door. I pounded harder, hoping he would hear it over the thunder.
Interior lights turned on, one by one. I knocked again as the storm drenched me to the bone.
Jack peered out of the blinds. His eyes widened as he ripped the door open. “ What the hell are you doing, Roar ?” An arm jutted out and wrapped around my waist, dragging me in from the rain. “ What’s the matter? Are —are you hurt? Or sick? Did something happen at the house?”
“I have a confession,” I said through chattering teeth as the air conditioning hit me like a bitch slap from Jack Frost .
“You’re gonna have pneumonia,” he said as he shuffled me farther into the house. “ Shoes off. I don’t want wet carpet.”
I kicked my flip-flops off in the entryway and followed him in. “ I’ve been stealing your internet.”
“Yeah. I know,” he said as he dipped into his bedroom.
“It’s just not an expense I can handle right now and it was just a few times. I mean, I wasn’t streaming movies or anything like—hold on.” I blinked. “ Did you just say you know?”
Jack came back carrying a stack of clothes. “ Yeah . I know, Roar . I got an alert on my phone the first time you logged in. Personally , I thought I had a pretty good password.”
“It was predictable.”
He pushed the clothes at me. “ What’s going on?”
I pulled my laptop out from under my shirt. “ I started writing and I know I said I was done, but it’s kind of like a sneeze where, if you try to avoid it, you feel cloudy.”
“Cloudy?”
I nodded. “ It’s better to just sneeze.”
“You’re not making any sense. Do you need some allergy medicine?” He yawned. “ What does this have to do with the internet that I’ve been so graciously letting you steal?”
“I had an idea and I started writing, and I need internet access so I can keep going before it disappears and I? —”
“Go change,” Jack said as he took my laptop from me and dropped the clothes into my hands. “ I’ll put on a pot of coffee.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “ Just like that?”
Jack cocked his head toward the bathroom door. “ Go on.”
He had given me an old fire department t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. The t-shirt was basically a tent, and the sweatpants had to be rolled over four times so they wouldn’t drag on the ground or fall off my hips. But they were warm, dry, and comfortable, and smelled just like him.
I tiptoed out to find Jack clearing off the kitchen table. He had set up my laptop beside a fresh cup of coffee, and was moving his mail and a basket of folded laundry.
“You didn’t have to do all that . . .” I said.
“You can sit at the table or on the couch or the recliner if you want. Whatever’s most comfortable,” Jack said. His muscles flexed and rippled as he picked up the laundry basket and tucked it under his arm.
“I promise I’ll be quiet,” I said as I bounced on my toes.
He cracked a smile. “ I’m a heavy sleeper. You won’t bother me.”
We went our separate ways, him slipping back into his bedroom as I settled into the kitchen chair.
I had just pulled up the document I started when Jack walked back into the room with something in his hands.
“One more thing,” he said as he came up behind me. Jack set a thick white notebook beside the mug of coffee. The edges were singed and seared. Char marks streaked the cover, but the pages inside were mostly untouched. “ I think you might need this.”
I gasped as I smoothed my fingers over the cover. “ You . . . saved my plotting notebook?”
Jack shrugged. “ Looked pretty important. I figured I’d keep it out of sight, out of mind if you weren’t ready to revisit writing again. And if you were, it was safe and sound waiting for you.”
I couldn’t help myself. I jumped out of the seat and kissed him square on the mouth. Jack’s momentary surprise quickly dispersed into a deep, soul-stealing kiss. His hands wandered around my waist, pulling me in as close as he could while he tipped his head to the side to deepen the connection. His tongue slid against mine, stroking and massaging. The taste of toothpaste and coffee was a potent combination. I pressed my body to his, seeking more, but it wasn’t enough. A torrent of gratitude and lust melded with the realization that he saw me. He understood me.
I broke first, desperate for cool oxygen while Jack held my hands against his bare chest.
“That was a hell of a ‘thank you,’ Roar ,” he murmured against my lips.
“You don’t know how much that means to me,” I said as we rested our foreheads together.
Jack squeezed my hands once before letting go. “ Get to work, Wander . I believe in you.”
“You going to bed?”
He nodded. “ Holler if you need anything.”