Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Sometimes I needed a change of scenery when writing.
My book was halfway done, and I knew exactly where it was going.
That was a good feeling, the best actually, and I was making progress on my secret book as well.
That one wasn’t as far along, but I was having so much fun writing it that I put in extra hours almost every single day.
Today I decided I wanted to write outside—I had a specific scene I was working on and needed inspiration—so I found a table near the Franklin Creek Pool and settled.
It wasn’t very busy during the afternoons, when the kids were at school, but I purposely positioned myself as far away from the hubbub as possible.
I could still hear ambient noise, but I tuned it out and focused.
I was so lost in what I was doing that two hours went by without me registering it.
The only reason I looked away from my screen at all was because a shadow suddenly loomed over me.
“Fancy meeting you here,” a female voice drawled.
I jerked up my chin, my heart turning over like a rusty engine on an old car, and sucked in a breath.
Bree stood there grinning, a hobo bag slung over her shoulder.
She’d pulled back her hair into twin braids and had a colorful scarf over the top.
She looked younger than I knew she was, and her smile did funny things to my insides.
“Hey,” I said breathlessly.
She grinned. “Hey. Are you…?” She pointed toward my computer.
“Sometimes I like to write in nature that is not my yard,” I admitted.
“Do you come here often?”
If I hadn’t known her better, I would have thought she was trying to pick me up. “I do, but only during the week when the kids are at school. When they’re out of school and on the weekends, it’s way too loud.”
She nodded. “I saw this place when I was driving by on my cart about a week ago and planned to do the same thing. It looked peaceful.”
I smiled.
She smiled.
“If this is your place, though,” she said, shifting from one foot to the other, “you probably don’t want me hanging around.”
I reacted like an idiot. “No.” I tried to stand. Why, I had no idea. My foot caught around the leg of my chair, and I lurched forward.
She tried to catch me—her reflexes weren’t as fast as either of us would have liked—but I was too heavy. We both ended up sprawled on the ground.
“Oh, geez.” I rolled quickly when I realized I was on top of her but somehow didn’t fall off. “Are you okay?”
She looked as if I’d knocked the wind out of her. Her cheeks were pink, her blue eyes bursting with amusement and confusion. She blew out a laugh when I didn’t get off her and continued staring into the ridiculous blues of her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I repeated. Feeling like an idiot was normal for me—I could shrug that off—but I was legitimately worried I’d hurt her.
“I’m fine,” she assured me. “It wasn’t a catastrophic fall.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded.
I was still on top of her—I recognized that in a vague corner of my brain.
It didn’t occur to me to get off of her, for some reason.
I would lament that later. Instead, I kept staring into her eyes and wondering whether, if I kissed her again, it would feel the same as it had more than a week before.
The energy between us was charged. It was as if we were both waiting for someone to throw a match on accelerant.
She was the one who finally grunted and shifted. “I don’t want to be rude or anything, but things are starting to hurt.”
Anxiety shot through me. “Should I call 911?”
“I think just getting off me so I’m not pressed into the pavement will work.”
“Oh.” Then it hit me what she’d said. “Oh!” I scrambled to get off her. In my haste, my fingers brushed against her torso. Okay, it was her breast, not her torso. That had me choking as I jerked my hand back. My movements were so hasty I toppled backward, away from her.
She burst out laughing when I hit the ground, though I hit hard enough I momentarily saw stars. I rested there, catching my breath, and only looked over when I heard her on the pavement.
She’d abandoned her bag and crawled over to me. The back of her shirt was dirty from being on the ground, but otherwise, she looked none the worse for wear. Her eyes glittered with delight. Her cheeks were flushed with pleasure.
Geez, she was really beautiful. How had I not noticed that when we’d first met? All I could think about back then was how evil she was. She’d ruined my life. I wanted to blame her for everything that had gone wrong.
It hadn’t been her fault. Everything that had gone amiss that day was on me. All I’d had to do was laugh it off. I’d been too nervous for that, too worked up about making sure people saw me as an important figure on that panel. I’d done everything wrong.
Sure, she wasn’t perfect. She could have apologized. Instead, she made jokes to lighten the mood. I should have taken my cues from her back then. Things might not have spiraled if I hadn’t gotten lost in my head.
How different would things have been if I hadn’t freaked out?
“Are you okay?” she asked as she loomed over me.
I nodded, fighting the urge to lift my finger and touch her cheek. I knew from the kiss outside Vic’s that her skin was ridiculously soft. But it wasn’t my place to touch her. We weren’t dating. Were we even friends? At best, I could say we were friendly.
“I’m fine,” I assured her.
She held out her hand. “Can you sit up? Did you hit your head?”
I took her hand but only because I wanted to touch her and feel that tingle. She pulled me to a sitting position and studied my features.
“You didn’t hit your head, did you?” she asked softly.
“No.”
We were close. Not as close as the night we kissed, but she was right there, and I was having trouble not imagining a life where this happened and she would kiss it and make it better.
In that version of my life, we could joke about it forever—something we still might do but not in the same way—and it would always result in breathy kisses and maybe ice cream in bed.
It was weird, but when I looked at her, I imagined doing mundane things together—going to the market, sharing a cart to this exact place so we could sit at separate tables and write.
It would be a joint activity but one where we could both still be productive.
My heart hurt at the idea of us packing up our iPads and heading out for ice cream on the way home. A home we shared.
I had to shake my head to dislodge the onslaught of images threatening to have me flopping back down again. “We should be on the comedy circuit,” I said.
Her eyes were as soft as her mouth as she regarded me, and for a split second, I wondered if she thought about the same things I did when we were together.
Heck, I’d started thinking about these things even when we were apart.
When I wasn’t writing, she was the only thing I could think about. It was odd yet somehow wonderful.
I just wished I knew how she felt about the situation.
Nothing she’d said suggested she looked at me differently from the way she had when we’d first crossed paths again weeks before.
She was friendly enough. We’d had amazing conversations.
She only flirted inadvertently and stopped when she realized what she was doing.
I very much doubted she was dreaming about going to the grocery store with me so we could get the ingredients for a twilight barbecue.
I was making all of this up in my mind. I needed to stop.
“I am really sorry,” I said, meaning every word. “I’ve never been all that coordinated.”
“You don’t say?” she drawled, grinning. “And here I thought you had a choice between being a professional tennis player and an author.”
That made me laugh. Then I thought about it. “Tennis player?”
She nodded. “I have a weird thing about tennis. I find it fascinating as a sport.”
“Why?”
“Because the players are completely on their own. Well, unless they’re playing doubles, which I don’t watch. I do watch Grand Slam finals all the time, for both men and women.”
“Because the players are on their own?” I was desperately trying to understand how her mind worked.
She nodded. “To get to their level, you need to be good. You have to do it all on your own, though. There’s no teammate to take up the slack.
If you have a crap day, you lose. If your opponent has a crap day, you win.
If both you and your opponent have a good day, it’s a glorious slugfest where the narrowest margins determine the winner.
It’s just … it’s kind of like gladiators. ”
I cracked a smile. “Gladiators with tennis racquets?”
She shrugged. “I was a huge fan of watching Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic play when I was a teenager. The three greatest male players, and they were all on the courts at the same time. They had wildly different ways of playing, and it made me want to adjust how I approached life.” She continued before I could respond.
“I know that sounds corny. I acknowledge that. It’s just that when I was a kid, I had big dreams. I always said I couldn’t accomplish those dreams because the number of authors who actually make it, who can claim this as a full-time job, is tiny. I saw it as a competition.”
“But watching tennis somehow changed that for you?” I was intrigued and wanted, more than anything, to understand how she’d shaped her mindset around tennis.
“There were three great male tennis players all dominating at the same time,” she explained. “One of them being great and winning Wimbledon didn’t mean another one of them couldn’t be great and win the US Open.”
Then it clicked for me. “It rearranged your scarcity mindset.” I understood that better than she realized.