Chapter Three
As the summer shifts from June to July and from hot to hot as hell, there are fewer short-term guests and fewer planned activities.
As it climbs to near 118 during the heat of the day, there are no cribbage games outside. Not even after dark.
I’d love to say that here in my second California desert summer, I’m used to it.
The eighth time the words it’s so hot come out of my mouth, Alice looks up from her romance novel—my romance novel, in that I wrote it—and says, “Why did you move to the desert, then?”
“A great question, Alice,” I say as I move past where she’s seated in the lobby with her feet propped up on a bright-pink ottoman. “Today, I don’t have an answer.”
But I don’t feel like I might run away.
I’m preparing a barbecue for later. It’s the only thing we do outdoors this time of year, because the alternative is cooking indoors, and no thank you. The long-term residents have rooms with kitchenettes, but no one wants to heat up their room when it’s like this. It makes the most sense for us all to grill together.
“Because of the people,” Alice says defiantly as she grabs a cookie off the plate beside her with crooked fingers. I made those cookies, and I’m warmed that she’s eating them—in a good, emotional way, not a scorching-desert way—and in that moment, she’s right.
The people are why I’m here.
Albert comes into the lobby holding a stack of plates that I asked him to get from the store earlier, his glasses fallen all the way to the end of his nose. “Alice,” he says, looking over the thick black rims, “I would think a woman of your gravitas would be reading something more worthy.”
“I like to read books with penises,” Alice says, waving a hand, not bothering to look up. “Because I don’t have them in my real life, and I don’t want them. They’re best in fiction.”
I’ve never loved her more.
Albert is clearly appalled. He also clearly has no idea Alice is reading my book, which has my pen name, Belle Adams, right there on the cover, so chosen for my love of the animated Beauty and the Beast . I wouldn’t be surprised if Albert doesn’t remember my pen name. On purpose.
“It’s a good fictional penis,” I say.
“Damn straight,” says Alice, taking another cookie.
“This is why I must go and fetch paper plates,” he says, “because literary works are—”
“Boring,” Alice and I both say together.
I wouldn’t be so mean, but I wrote the book he’s trashing without reading. I don’t care if he loves literary works, and I think people should read whatever they want—though, I’m with Alice—but in this instance I’m going to be a little bit reverse snooty since he started it.
He gives us a dry look but doesn’t storm out because the thing about Albert is he’s opinionated. When you’re opinionated back, he just deals with it. It’s why I like him. He’s not a hypocrite. He’s free with his feelings, so if you want to, you can be free with yours right back.
“Does it bother you?” Alice asks, fixing Albert with a steely glare. “The claiming of female sexuality.”
“Alice! You know it doesn’t,” he says.
“But you do agree that penises lack gravitas,” I say.
“Well, that’s not—”
“You’re being toxic and elitist,” I say, setting his plates down on the front desk. “Just because we want to read about big, throbbing peeeen—” I whirl around as that last syllable catches on my tongue and holds. Oh God oh God oh God , he’s standing in the doorway. I let it die. I do not try to redirect, because that will only make it worse.
I’m in a slapstick comedy, and I don’t even like slapstick. What’s next? Am I a breath away from a pratfall? Is there a paint bucket I’m unaware of that I might step in? Is a pack of armadillos that don’t even live here going to come through my office in a stampede?
The possibilities are endless, and all bad.
“We’re debating gender politics,” I say, fighting to keep my expression neutral.
Fighting to keep myself from imagining him as I saw him two weeks ago, with water dripping down his muscular chest.
“The outlet by the desk seems to be having a short,” he says, his tone killing the manic joy in the room.
He does not acknowledge what he walked in on, nor my quip about gender politics. I notice he has a little gray by his temple. Not a lot. Why is that hot?
It shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be. He’s so committed to not being friendly, at all.
Also to being relentlessly handsome.
“I’ll call an electrician,” I say. “I assume it has to do with the sweltering, awful heat.”
“How long do you think that will be?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ll get you a ... a power strip. I just need to go to the storage shed.”
“I can start the meat if you want,” Albert offers.
Which is why I ultimately like him even though he can be ... well. Himself.
“Thank you, Albert,” I say, then switch my focus back to Nathan. “You can go back to your room or ... or you can come if you want.”
“I’ll come with you; there’s no need for you to deliver it.”
“That’s nice, thanks.” I’m not sure it is nice because he’s so visibly put out.
“Seriously,” I say as he continues to follow me. “You saved Wilma’s necklace. Let me just ... get it for you.”
“I’ll come with you,” he repeats, but his tone isn’t friendly, and he doesn’t acknowledge my reference to his recent heroism.
“It was very nice of you,” I say as we walk out behind the lobby to a shed that stands separate from the walled courtyard of the motel.
“Do you think I’m genuinely so awful I wouldn’t help an old woman screaming in a pool?”
“No, but she wasn’t in danger, and I just think it was extra nice of you—” I give up and decide to try a different tactic. “I’m also a writer, which is just to say I get that it sucks to be interrupted when you’re trying to work. Unless of course you wanted to procrastinate.”
It isn’t landscaped out here. It’s scrubby and rocky and dusty, and I’m always afraid I’m going to see a rattlesnake. I’m hot as hell, and he makes me feel jumpy. I just want to get him his power strip and go back into the AC. Yelling at Albert about penises is infinitely preferable to being sticky and hot and feeling turned on in spite of Nathan, his rudeness, my vow of celibacy, and everything else.
“I don’t procrastinate,” he says.
I laugh. Then realize he’s serious. “Oh,” I say. “Well, that’s ... wild.”
“I came here to work. Why would I procrastinate on the work?”
“I don’t know. You spend three months locked away in a motel room and seem to do nothing but write, and you only put out one book a year.”
His eyebrows lift. “Only?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just ... you can do a fifty-thousand-word book in thirty days if you do sixteen hundred sixty-seven words a day.”
“I’m familiar with the pitch for National Novel Writing Month. Thank you.” He says it like that’s amateur stuff. I can read it in his tone.
I guess I started it because I implied he was slow. But that wasn’t really what I meant. I was just questioning the veracity of his statement that he never procrastinated.
“I write romance, by the way,” I say as I muscle open the door of the shed after wrestling with the padlock.
“Mm,” he says.
“That’s actually what we were arguing about. Albert thinks romance is unrealistic.”
Nathan’s expression remains neutral. “It is.”
I make a scoffing sound. “I . . . You . . .”
“I write military thrillers based on the military, and I wouldn’t call them realistic. People aren’t paying for realism. They want a narrative about heroism and blowing shit up. Within that there are some details that are real, but ... nothing in real life is that simple.”
This is the most he’s ever spoken to me, and he’s irritating me. “But you know when people say that about books you write, they aren’t dismissing your whole genre. When they say it to me, that’s what they’re doing. People don’t value emotion. They don’t value hope, even if they should.”
I chose romance because I needed to believe in happiness still. Even when my whole life fell apart, I needed to believe in it. Not just in happiness, but that happily ever after was possible, even if things had gone horribly, terribly wrong.
I never thought about it until I had my heart broken. After that I realized I had a choice to sit there in hopelessness. I did for a while, but then I decided I couldn’t live that way. Hoping for happily ever after feels brave now.
More and more, I want to be brave.
“If I have a hill I’m willing to die on, that’s the one,” I say. “Falling in love when everything is terrible is as brave an act as blowing shit up. Except it’s something regular, everyday people can choose to do. A radical act of real-life bravery.”
I’m not sure I understand how deeply I believe that until the words come out of my mouth.
“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it,” he says. “But my experience is that when life gives you shit, there’s really nothing much to continue to hope for.”
I snort. “Says the millionaire New York Times bestseller with a TV series.”
I don’t know that he’s a millionaire. I’m comfortable assuming, however.
“Right,” he says. “Because that’s the key to happiness.”
Irritation and heat make me snap. “Then why do it? Why do anything ?”
“I ask myself that a lot.” He says that flat, not self-pitying, and yet I feel like he’s being totally honest.
“I don’t think you do. You obviously care very deeply about what you’re working on or you wouldn’t eschew all forms of procrastination and get pissed because your outlet quit working.”
“I didn’t ask for commentary. I want a power strip. The end.”
My temper peaks.
“Then why the hell do you come here?” I ask, sweat dripping down my back now. “If you hate me and the faulty wiring in the motel and all the guests?”
He moves too close to me, his face maybe three inches from mine. “I just fucking love the heat,” he says, his voice rough.
We stand like that for too long.
My breathing is labored, and I’m way too worked up about this and him.
I turn away from him and vanish into the shed, where I flick on the lights and give thanks to past me for taking the time to organize and label everything, because it would just be the worst if I had to prolong this moment.
I grab hold of a tub labeled power strips and peer inside—there could be spiders, but I don’t see any, so I reach in and grab the needed item. When I turn, he’s right behind me. He’s tall. He’s solid. He smells great. Clean, a hint of aftershave and soap.
If I were writing this moment, I could easily go florid with it.
Hints of spice and soap, of skin and man .
Something about that makes me snap.
“Here,” I say, waving the power strip in the air. “Here is your power strip so you can go back to being a damned ostentatious hermit in the middle of this thriving community. If it were just the heat, you could go stay in an Airbnb in Palm Springs. What do you even get out of this? I have to know. You’ve spent two summers here without so much as a full conversation traded between yourself and the other residents.” Or me. “ This is clearly the kind of place where people hang out, and talk and laugh and do things, and why would you even come here once, let alone two times, if you hate that? You don’t even know my name.” I’m Amelia, I almost shout. “Do you get off on it? Being alone in your room and being dour about the place? You could go somewhere else—why here?”
I’ve gone too far and I know it.
Suddenly he’s so close to me, and I can’t take my eyes off him.
I’m caught in a web spun out of this thing arcing between us. I know what it is. I’ve wondered if I was the only one who felt it from the first moment I met him. Right now I think maybe I’m not.
Because his eyes are on me, and he isn’t looking away. He’s filling my space, my lungs, my sense of sanity.
He’s close in a way no one ever is. In a way I never let them be.
I want to kiss him.
The realization is stark and intense. So clear and undeniable I can’t turn it into a different thought.
My heart is thundering, my whole body on edge.
He says nothing.
He leans in closer.
I can’t breathe.
He reaches out and takes the power strip from my hands.
All the air leaves my body, and I am left with the crushing sense that I was just the victim of my own overactive imagination.
He starts to walk away, but he stops for a moment and turns just halfway. “I didn’t choose it.”
I’m left to wonder what that means.
It’s the last thing he says to me all summer.