Chapter Nine
“Then I said to my Ricky, I said, ‘Ricky, you get out of that tree!’”
The woman broke off another piece of the giant chocolate chip cookie she held in its wax paper wrapping and handed it to the preschooler at her feet without missing a beat in her story. Hannah watched as the child accepted the treat with a chubby hand and a toothy smile. “I said, ‘Jamie needs all your best Macomber turnips and he needs them now.’ And wouldn’t you know it, he didn’t have any Macomber turnips and that’s how Jamie got into this mess!”
Ethan shot a secret smile at Hannah. “Cheryl, have you met Hannah?”
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,”
the woman said, dusting cookie crumbs off her fingers by brushing them against her pant leg before extending her hand to Hannah. “Cheryl DaSilva. My husband Ricky and I run the farm around the corner from Ethan’s vineyard. We’re practically neighbors.”
“Oh, you’re the one with the rooster,”
Hannah said as she shook Cheryl’s hand.
Cheryl beamed. “Terrence.”
“The rooster’s name is Terrence?”
Hannah asked.
“Terrence McFancyCock,”
Cheryl said seriously. “He’s new. Still settling in. Like you, I imagine?”
“Hannah’s staying with me for a bit,”
Ethan supplied.
Cheryl’s smile spread, her eyes bouncing between Ethan and Hannah where they sat in the diner booth as she handed another piece of cookie to her son. “Well, I just love that for you! About time, if you ask me,”
Cheryl said. “We’ve all be wondering how long it would take before you settled down.”
“Oh, we’re not—”
Hannah said.
“Though, of course, I wouldn’t have minded if you waited another few months. Then Ricky and I would have won in the pool.”
“Excuse me?”
Ethan said, his eyes narrowing at lightning speed.
“You know, the little wager some of us have going about when you’ll finally meet your Mrs. Right. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about it? Mrs. Kemp mentions it in her weekly newsletter all the time.”
Ethan scrubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t really do email.”
“There’s a newsletter?”
Hannah asked, glancing between Ethan and Cheryl.
“The Kemp Report,”
Cheryl said, nodding. “I think she has more subscribers than the local paper, last time I checked anyway.”
“Of course she does,”
Ethan muttered.
“Mama,”
the little boy on the floor whined, tugging on Cheryl’s shirt.
“Yes, sugar bear, we’re going. It was so nice to meet you, Hannah. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
Cheryl took her son’s hand and led him out of the diner in a whirlwind of hollered goodbyes and blown kisses to the woman wiping down the tables.
Hannah stared at Ethan in shock, not quite sure what exactly she should say in the aftermath of extravagantly named roosters and a town-wide bet on when Ethan would get married.
“Anyway, that was Cheryl,”
Ethan said, pulling his milkshake closer with a shake of his head and taking a long sip from the straw.
“She seems nice.”
Ethan barked out a laugh that made Hannah smile despite herself. “She’s very nice. Just like her husband and most of the people in this town, who have apparently been betting on my dating life.”
“I guess we’ve both had our love lives put under a microscope recently.”
Hannah took a sip of her milkshake.
He frowned, stirring his milkshake with his straw. “How long do you think it will be before the press leave you alone?”
“I don’t know. We’re releasing a statement tomorrow that will probably fuel the fire for a bit, but hopefully it’ll die down after that.”
“A statement?”
He glanced up at her, but quickly looked away again. She wished she knew what he was thinking.
“Mmhmm. Saying we broke up a few weeks ago, before the pictures were taken of him on vacation.”
“So it doesn’t look like he cheated on you,”
Ethan said.
“Exactly. If he didn’t cheat, there’s no story anymore. At least, that’s what I’m hoping.”
She snagged a French fry off his plate and dragged it through her milkshake. The salt and sugar hit her tongue and she seriously regretted her choice to order a salad for dinner, but old habits die hard.
As if he could read her mind, Ethan pushed his plate closer to her. “And then you’ll go back to New York?”
“Are you sick of me already?”
She’d meant it as a joke, but as the words landed between them, she realized how nervous she was to hear his answer, to be reassured he wasn’t trying to figure out how quickly he could get her out of his house—out of his life.
Stupid. You were the one who turned him down, remember?
“No chance, Han,”
he said softly, nudging his plate even closer. “Don’t like the idea of people saying shitty things about you, that’s all.”
It was her turn to laugh. “Ethan, the things the tabloids write aren’t even the half of it.”
“What does that mean?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Let’s forget about it. I don’t want to think about the keyboard warriors right now.”
“Hannah—”
“What should I do tomorrow while you’re working? Tell me all the sights I should see.”
He seemed to debate letting her deflect, his eyes roving over her face, before he finally leaned back in the booth, bringing his milkshake with him. “What are you interested in?”
“I don’t know. Everything,”
she laughed. “I promised Tessa and the girls I wouldn’t hit the shops without them, though. We’re apparently having a girls’ day out on Thursday.”
“There’s some good museums in town, a historic farm, some old mansions, that kind of thing. It’s kind of cold for the beach but—”
“Museums sound great,”
she said. “Can I walk to them?”
He chuckled. “No, Han, you can’t walk to them. We’re a small town but we’re not that small. You can take my truck.”
He arched an eyebrow, the corner of his lip lifting. “You do know how to drive, don’t you, city girl?”
“Yes, I know how to drive!”
She threw a wad of napkins at him across the table, laughing. She hadn’t driven a car in at least five years, but he didn’t need to know that. Driving was like riding a bicycle—it’s not like she’d forgotten how.
He pressed his lips together to fight the smile as he fended off her napkin attack. “I’ll draw you a map.”
She rolled her eyes. “I have GPS on my phone, Ethan. If you can tell me what the museums are called, I’m sure I can find them.”
They ate in silence, sneaking glances at each other between bites. Each time their eyes met, Ethan looked away, but Hannah didn’t miss the way his eyes sparkled, his mouth curving into the smirk she saw so often in her dreams. His knee brushed against hers under the table, but neither of them moved away.
“So, what exactly does a vineyard owner do all day?”
she asked, stealing another fry.
He shrugged one shoulder and set his burger down, wiping his hands on the napkin in his lap. “Mostly paperwork, to be honest.”
“Scintillating.”
It was Ethan’s turn to toss a napkin at her and she giggled as she caught it out of mid-air. “Did you always want to work in the wine business?”
“Didn’t have much choice, really,”
he said. “Nuthatch has been in my family for three generations. My owning it one day was always the plan.”
“I didn’t ask about the plan. I asked if you always wanted to work there.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
He leaned back in the booth, his hands resting in his lap, and his knee still lightly pressed against hers. She wanted to focus on his words, but how could she be expected to pay attention to anything when she could feel the heat of his skin through his jeans?
“When I was six, I wanted to be a garbage man. I liked the idea of riding around on the back of the trucks.”
She crossed her forearms on the table, leaning forward with an encouraging tilt of her head. “Then, when I was ten or twelve, I wanted to be an engineer. Build bridges.”
“And then?”
He cleared his throat and moved his knee away from her, cold seeping through the thin fabric of her jeans. “And then when I was sixteen, I became a father, and it seemed like a pretty selfish thing to ignore the fact I had a built-in career that could easily support my family.”
“Ethan—”
“What about you? Did you always want to be an actress?”
He took a bite of his burger, chewing it slowly, his eyes focused on his food.
“Yeah,”
she said, sitting upright again and stabbing at her salad more aggressively than was necessary, spearing bits of lettuce and radicchio. “For as long as I can remember anyway. My mom says, when I was little, I used to stand on the front steps of our house and make up songs, sing to the passing cars and the birds.”
He looked at her then, his eyes focused on her with such intensity she thought he might be able to see the memory playing in her mind. She looked away, pushing sunflower seeds and shredded carrots around on her plate. “I almost became a nurse instead, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“My mom was a nurse. It’s a good, stable job. And there aren’t a lot of parts in professional theatre for women who look like me.”
She immediately regretted saying it.
“Look like you?”
he repeated.
“Turns out I get squeamish at the sight of blood,”
she said quickly. “I changed my major before I’d even finished freshman year.”
“What do you mean, women who look like you?” he asked.
She sighed, setting down her fork. “Women who aren’t a size two. Women who aren’t delicate or dainty or whatever.”
He clenched his jaw, a low rumble of disapproval sounding in his throat.
“It’s just the way it is,”
she said, picking up her milkshake. She brought the straw to her lips, then changed her mind, and set it down again. Ethan’s eyes narrowed further. “It’s part of the job.”
“People criticizing your body is part of the job,”
he repeated as though it were the most unbelievable thing he’d ever heard. “You know, in other fields that’s considered an HR violation.”
“Welcome to show business,”
she said, flashing half-hearted jazz hands.
“Show business can fuck right off,”
he mumbled.
Her heart fluttered in her chest at the gruff protectiveness in his tone. After another few beats of eating in silence, he nudged her milkshake closer to her. “It’s gonna melt.”
She took a long sip, letting the cold liquid cool her rapidly heating blood.
“What was your favorite role?” he asked.
“Bridget in Bridget Jones’ Musical.”
She couldn’t help but smile thinking about it, how surprised she’d been to get the call back, the absolute shock when she’d gotten the part. Not because she hadn’t worked her ass off for it and nailed her audition, but because she’d started to think it might not happen for her. She might spend her entire career playing old women and witches, the occasional best friend, but never the romantic lead.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
So she did. In a red vinyl booth in a diner in Rhode Island, she told him what it was like to stand on stage and feel free, in a part that didn’t require her to squeeze herself into multiple layers of shapewear beneath her costume. She told him about the teenagers she’d meet at the stage door every night, girls in average sized bodies like her who said they saw in her the possibility of living out their own dreams, girls she wished she could spend the whole night talking to, encouraging, guiding them away from her own mistakes.
And when Ethan’s knee slowly pressed against hers beneath the linoleum tabletop again, she had a thought, fleeting and inconsequential, but so real she felt it in her bones—she’d sung for packed audiences, been picked apart and judged by thousands of people every night, and no one had ever seen her the way he did.
∞∞∞
Ethan hit the side of his computer monitor with the palm of his hand. “Come on,”
he grunted.
“Dad? Are you in here?”
Tessa’s call from the lobby had Ethan on his feet and striding out of his office.
“I’m here. Everything alright? Where’s Julie?”
he asked as he nearly collided with Tessa in the hallway outside his office.
“Everything’s fine. I came by to drop off some things for you and Hannah but I saw the light on over here.”
She lifted the stacked cardboard containers in her hands. “What are you doing in your office so late?”
Ethan took the containers from her, leading her back towards his office, the light spilling through the open door and casting shadows on the hallway.
“It’s not that late.”
“It’s almost midnight.”
Ethan set the containers on the edge of his desk and dragged his knuckles over his eyes. He’d been staring at the stupid computer screen for longer than he realized. “What are you doing out this late?”
“Julie finally went to sleep. I didn’t get a chance to bring these things over earlier.”
He gestured to the containers. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“We both know you don’t cook. You barely grocery shop. I wanted to make sure you had some things—muffins, a loaf of bread, a quiche. Nothing fancy.”
“Thanks, T. I appreciate it.”
“I know you do.”
“Next time, though, you call me and I’ll come pick them up. You don’t need to leave your house in the middle of the night for me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Why are you working so late?”
“Not working. Just…checking on some things.”
“Well, that’s cryptic.”
Tessa rounded his desk, her eyes sweeping over his computer screen before they narrowed. “Are you Googling Hannah?”
“Trying to, but the stupid computer isn’t working.”
Tessa looked at him like he’d lost his mind. “You’re not serious. You don’t actually think this is how you Google something.”
She leaned closer to the screen and read off: “Google, plus sign, Hannah Matthews, plus sign, bad things?”
“Then what the hell am I supposed to do?” he said.
Tessa leaned forward, her fingers flying over the keys on his keyboard. “First of all, you don’t need the plus signs. It’s not the nineties anymore.”
He grunted, crossing his arms over his chest. “Second of all, it helps if you’re using an actual browser window and not the search bar on your desktop. That one’s for looking through your files and stuff, not finding things on the internet.”
She straightened, crossing her own arms over her chest in a posture that mimicked his so perfectly it would have been funny if he wasn’t feeling twelve kinds of foolish.
“And why are you looking up ‘bad things’ about Hannah? I thought you liked her.”
“She said something at dinner tonight about people writing mean things about her online.”
“And you wanted to read them because…”
“I don’t know! Maybe I wanted to get a sense of what she’s dealing with.”
Tessa considered his answer for a minute before nodding and typing something into his computer again. “Be careful what you wish for, Dad.”
With a final click, she stood upright and gestured for him to come take his seat in front of the monitor. The screen was filled with a list of articles with headlines like “Jackson Ditches the Dead Weight”
and “Heartthrob Moves On; Plain Jane Girlfriend Devastated.”
He scrolled and the list went on, a never-ending stream of articles picking apart photos, entertainment ‘experts’ weighing in on their body language, so-called sources close to the couple offering their two cents about the inevitable demise of Hannah and Jackson’s relationship.
“Jesus Christ,”
he said, clicking on the first headline. A photo of Hannah and Jackson at lunch in some New York City restaurant filled the screen, red circles drawn around Hannah’s exposed upper arms, the profile of her chin, Jackson’s hand holding his cell phone. The article beneath the photo called out what they claimed were signs the relationship had been on the rocks months earlier, starting with the ways Hannah had ‘let herself go,’ her alleged (but not visible) double chin their proof.
“Hannah probably wouldn’t like you reading that,”
Tessa said.
“Then she shouldn’t have told me about it. How do you leave a comment on this thing?”
“Dad—”
He jabbed a finger at the computer screen. “This dipshit—NotThatXtina97—is saying shit about Hannah that’s not true. Someone needs to set the record straight.”
“And that someone is you?”
“Look at this other loser—WannaFreakU—what the fuck kind of name is that? Mr. Freak—”
“Mr. Freak?”
“—thinks it’s okay to comment on a woman’s body on the internet. I bet he hasn’t even seen a woman’s body in real life.”
“Dad, they’re trolls. This is what they do. They go on the internet and they write shitty things in their own shitty little echo chambers. Do not feed the trolls.”
“I’m not going to feed them, T, I’m going to rip them a new asshole.”
Tessa leaned against his desk. “You like her.”
“What?”
He clicked aggressively on what he hoped was the ‘reply’ link, but instead an ad for Pure Sexxy Juice Enhancer filled his screen.
“You like Hannah.”
He glanced at his daughter, his jaw clenched so tightly he thought he might crack a tooth. “Come on, Dad. I already know she’s the woman from Boston.”
“How did you— I’m going to kill that husband of yours.”
“Jamie didn’t sell you out, don’t worry. We try very hard not to talk about you as much as possible,”
she laughed. “It wasn’t that difficult to put together. What I’m struggling to make sense of is why you’re trying to act like she doesn’t mean anything to you when you are so clearly into her.”
“I am not,”
he grumbled.
“You couldn’t stop staring at her ass the whole time we were at trivia.”
“Fucking hell.”
He dragged his hand over his face, leaned back in his chair and looked up at Tessa, meeting her challenging stare with a scowl. “I thought you and I had an understanding: we don’t talk about our love lives.”
“So you admit there’s something to talk about.”
Tessa grinned.
“It’s complicated,”
he finally said.
“Why? Because of Jackson Hayes?”
she asked. When she looked at him like that, all defiance and laughter mixed together, she looked so much like her mother it made him almost lose his breath. “She said it’s been over for a while, long before you two had your little weekend getaway.”
“She told you that?”
Tessa shrugged, so he continued. “It’s not about Jackson. She lied to me.”
Tessa’s eyes went wide. “About what?”
“About all of it. About her relationship, and her job, and—all of it.”
“Did she lie to you, or did she just not tell you?”
“Same thing.”
“Did you tell her everything? Did you tell her you like her?”
When he didn’t answer, Tessa huffed out a half laugh. “Was that lying too?”
He deflated, the last of his bluster slipping from his shoulders. His daughter was right. He hadn’t told Hannah anything about himself, not really, so what right did he have to expect she should have told him about her life? To punish her for holding things back?
Tessa tapped the tower of cardboard containers as she stood, moving towards the door. “Don’t forget to put these in the refrigerator.”
Alone again, he turned his attention back to WannaFreakU and the other trolls filling the comment section with their abhorrent views on Hannah’s appearance. He wasn’t sure what to do about the visceral longing filling his chest when he thought about her or the way his pulse had hammered in his throat when she’d pressed her knee against his beneath the diner table that evening, but he knew how to tell a patriarchal jerk to shut the fuck up.
Dear Mr. WannaFreakU, he typed.
From The Lady’s Knights by A K Wild, narrated by Slade Hardcastle
Sir Llewellyn watched from the edge of the forest outside the castle’s walls as the rider drew nearer, a billowing cloak thrown over their form and shielding them from his view. The figure rode astride the great horse, their face in shadow, and his heart sank. She had sent someone in her stead, no doubt to tell him his lady would never come to him again. She was a married woman now, after all, even if he knew it to be unconsummated, a marriage in name only. A marriage nonetheless. A prison in its own way.
Bile rose in his throat.
The horse slowed a few feet from him and the rider threw back their hood, Lady Windtorn’s long, raven-dark braid tumbling loose from the cloak. She smiled, the curve of her lips slicing through him sharper than any scythe or sword. He met her in two strides, lifting her from the horse and kissing her before her boot-laden feet ever touched the soft earth beneath them. He kissed to consume, to claim.
“I thought you would not come,”
he confessed when they pulled apart, gasping for breath.
“I will always come,”
she promised.
“Your husband may disagree,” he spat.
"My husband is not here.”
She caressed his cheek, the leather of her glove a cursed barrier between their skin he refused to tolerate. He tore the glove from her fingers, dropping it at their feet as he pressed her palm to his lips.
“I have made for us a refuge,”
he said as he trailed his lips along her jaw. “Our own kingdom, where none shall find us.”
He nipped at her ear with a wicked grin. “Save those you would like to join us, my lady.”
“A world within worlds,”
she said, her limbs soft and pliant as he swept her into his arms, leading her and the horse deeper into the forest, towards the glowing torch light he’d left behind at the encampment.
“The one true world. Where your only duty is to yourself, to pleasure.”
“And to you.”
He shook his head. “Your pleasure is my own, my lady.”
He set her on her feet at the edge of the circle of canvas tents, each one guarded by one of his men, their mail glinting in the firelight. “As it is theirs.”
Lady Windtorn scanned the circle of knights, men who had fought for her, loved her, who would gladly die for her, and her eyes brimmed with unshed tears. Sir Llewellyn bracketed an arm around her waist, pulling her snugly against his chest as she looked out at the men, at the world they’d built to give her respite from the weariness of her life. He ran his nose up the length of her neck and pressed a kiss behind her ear.
“Tell me, my lady, what is your pleasure?”