Chapter 16
POV: Maeve?
The next day…
I shouldn’t have cared. It shouldn’t have mattered.
I should have been happy that Liam had done me a favor by being seen with me, and Declan stopped calling.
But the truth was that it did—it mattered and it hurt like hell.
And I had in fact heard every word he said.
He said there was nothing going on between us.
He said it like he actually believed it.
And I felt like a fool, an absolute fool, believing that there was actually something going on between us.
When in reality, we were just at a standstill, pivoting in the same direction, at the wrong time, when my brain was one place and his brain was another.
The truth is, we weren’t synced up.
I knew I shouldn’t get my hopes up but I couldn’t help myself.
Because in reality, I liked Liam, and though he admitted liking me, too, and we had just engaged in passionate, rough, and soul-sucking sex against his bar countertop, I knew there was a lot of barriers between the two of us, I knew that things wouldn’t work unless he wanted it to.
And it seemed he didn’t.
He didn’t want it to. Because like he so bluntly said, there was nothing going on between us.
And that hit me in a place I didn’t know even existed.
My heart.
This whole thing screamed—-forbidden love, enemies to lovers, or maybe even enemies to enemies, and also, the worst two—-the female main character falls first and looks pathetic while doing so.
God, I hated those tropes, like most women, most independent women, we despised those two tropes.
Yet, here I was practically becoming one.
I let out a heavy sigh as I pressed myself back into a seated position and stopped sulking on the couch.
I needed to go outside. I needed to work on my work. I needed to make some progress.
I needed to turn my sad situation and my constant thoughts of Liam into something tangible—a manuscript.
So, here I sit, uncertain of the words I want to put in the first chapter of what should be my next bestselling novel.
The sky is the same shade of blue it always is, bright, even though clouds hover in the daytime sky, and the small wooden chair is surprisingly comfy, thanks to the plaid cushion but despite the constant thoughts of him—Liam—my main character who I’m cleverly going to rename as “Patrick’. And I cannot think of my first beginning sentence.
I lean back into the small chair and look up at the sky, closing my eyes and imagining what it felt like to see him for the first time.
Then the idea came to me.
The first line of my first chapter.
Arriving in Ireland is just like you’d imagine. Green hills that are further than your eyes can see. Quaint town pubs that are filled with the hum of fiddle and song and laughter. Then the most gorgeous man your American eyes have ever seen. Patrick Mahoney.
I felt a sense of relief as I typed the words out onto the page.
It felt…perfect.
And it sounded just the same.
So, I kept going.
Three hours finally rolled around and I finally felt content with the 40 pages I had just written.
I have written 4 chapters. 4 long detailed chapters of the main character, Patrick, and how my female main character, Jane, is totally falling for him, despite his grumpy, but enticing demeanor.
And all I could think about was how I was writing Liam, into the perfect man, for my sake. For the sake of my own delusional mind. I was painting him into the perfect character and giving myself false hope—false hope that maybe, one day he could be.
But for all of my hope, for the perfect proposal, with the perfect happy rom-com ending, I knew it was just that—heavily scripted into what I wanted it to be, and what readers wanted it to be. Blissfully happy, with challenges but a scripted ending and fresh new idea of what love is like.
I closed my laptop and let out a heavy sigh.
Because all I could think of was the way I described him in the last 40 pages. Physically.
Black ink dancing across light skin. A full beard of brown, thick, along with a full head of hair. Brown eyes that looked straight into your very soul. Muscles that rippled every time he so much as moved an inch. His smirk—-that smirk that showed signs of happiness or amusement, ones that he would never admit. His hands, rough, calloused, along soft skin.
But I hadn’t even gotten a chance to write about what I was dying to actually write about.
Sex. The literal way he fucked me.
Our main characters hadn’t gotten to the good part, the part where the two engaged in disruptive—desire-filled, rough sex. Just like the kind we had.
I blinked my eyes a few times, trying to cure myself of the flash of an electronic computer screen, and reacquaint myself with the sunshine that beamed above me.
And that’s when I saw it.
The figure moving towards me out of the corner of my eye.
Tall. Muscular. Holding something in his hands.
What was that?
A cooler? A lunchbox?
And who was holding it?
I squinted as the figure approached and realized who it was.
My face paled.
Liam.