Chapter Two
Someone get the man a chill pill.
Jove
I scowl at Brianna Single, the post office’s most dedicated worker, and wonder exactly how illegal it is to vandalize an official mail truck. Then I wonder exactly how much I care about how illegal it is to vandalize an official mail truck.
“I mean, he works in an office building ,” she rambles, waving a forest-green envelope around in the air.
My eyes lock on that envelope.
“It’s despicable! Have you ever heard of such a ridiculous thing?
” she huffs, carelessly tossing the letter into a postal box full of ugly white envelopes addressed to Rouge , one name, because when you’re famous, you get to go by one name – even if you’re actually two people.
And you pick a name that’s barely different from your last name because your lifelong pen pal and best friend gave it to you as a nickname, and why wouldn’t you want to be reminded of her sweetness every time you sit down to work?
As an author, you can pretty much do whatever you want .
Apparently, as a postal worker, Brianna can do whatever she wants too. Including not giving me my mail.
“And then he has the nerve to act like he’s doing well ?” She scoffs. “Can you believe that? Doing well! As if!”
“If you’ve damaged that green letter, I’m going to be unhappy,” I warn her, eyes narrowed at her hand as it shoves the overflowing pile of mail down into the box.
Her hand lifts from its offensive position on my letter, moving to rest on her chest, directly over her heart. “You wound me, sir! I would never disrespect the post in such a manner!”
Uh huh. Sure she wouldn’t. “Can I have my mail?” I ask.
She sniffs. “You’re rather cranky today.”
I’m not any more cranky than any other day.
She’s just mad I insulted her esteemed profession , and she thinks cranky is the worst insult you could give to a person.
She’s like that elf from that Christmas movie.
Not the one with mail… the other one. With the grown man traipsing about New York City like it’s a playground.
I squint at her.
Yeah, she definitely gives frolicking-around-the-big-city-in-a-ridiculous-costume-spreading-“cheer” energy. Talk about ridiculous .
“Are you going to give me the mail or not?” I grunt, eying the not-quite-opaque white box holding more letters than I care to go through and one which I very much would like to be in possession of approximately yesterday.
Mars can have the rest to do with as he likes.
I vote for burning them, personally, but something about reader relations dictates we don’t.
A pity, as I do so love a little arson to end my day.
She huffs, puffing a stray bit of honey-blonde hair out of her face. I’d like to take that strand of honey and pull until she gives me my forest-green letter like she’s supposed to.
“Yes, yes, I just need you to sign. You know, like you have to every time, Mr. Impatient.”
Producing a growl reminiscent of the male lead in my brother’s and my last Rouge novel, I snatch up the plastic pen and scribble what could maybe pass as letters onto the electric pad on the counter. “There,” I grumble. “Now give me my mail.”
She hums, inspecting my signature. You know. Just in case I’m not me.
“I’ve come here three times a week every week since the fourth grade,” I comment, eying the distance between me and my box. I have long arms. I could probably just…
“You can never be too cautious these days,” she chirps. “There are scallywags everywhere!”
Scally…
Is my eye twitching? I think my eye is twitching.
Her truck is not making it through this week.
“Here’s your mail, sir! Come again!” She grins, finally finally finally placing the box on the counter and sliding it toward me. I snatch it before she changes her puny little mind.
“Regrettably, I will,” I say in farewell before thoroughly enjoying the stomp of my boots on the tile as I head for the door. No sweeter sound have I ever heard than the sound of my feet taking me away from Brianna Single’s irritating, mail hostage taking presence.
Approaching my truck, which Mars calls my attempt at cosplaying the poor, I settle the box on the floor in front of the passenger seat and pluck my precious green letter out to enjoy the drive home on my lap.
No dirty, candy-bar-wrapper-littered floors for this one.
I’d put it on a velvet pillow if I had one.
Hmm.
I pull out my phone, tapping out a reminder to buy a velvet pillow – a peach one, if I can find it, Lyra’s favorite color.
It takes roughly 10 minutes to get to my house from the post office, five of which are spent on a pit stop to let the air out of Ted Yeats’ tires.
He knows what he did.
When I walk in the door of the small house I share with my brother, Mars greets me from the couch where he lounges, head half-hanging off the side and leg tossed up over the back cushions as he flips through movie options, green eyes several shades lighter than my own languid with boredom.
“Hey, babe. I ordered pizza for dinner. And I made a carrot cake.”
I hum my approval. I love carrot cake. It goes great with milk. And fresh letters from Lyra.
Speaking of fresh letters from Lyra…
I drop the box of fan mail on the dining room table as I pass it, ready and waiting for Mars to sift through later, then gently pull the adorably green envelope out of the chest pocket of my coat. It’s warm from my body heat and Lyra’s love for me.
I get two steps toward my bedroom before Mars speaks, stopping me dead next to his hamster, Ginger’s, enclosure. “Before you lose yourself to stickers, midline markers, and wax seals, it’s meeting day.”
I frown. It is very distinctly not meeting day. “It’s Friday,” I tell my clearly amnesiad brother. “Meeting day is four days from now.”
Ginger squeaks ominously beside me as her father rolls off the couch, slinking upright with a quickness that puts me on edge. What, pray tell, is my little brother doing?
I eye him warily as he approaches, jabbering nonsense, “Don’t you just love when days cosplay as other days?
Sure, it looks like a Friday, but there’s Tuesday energy here.
It crawled up on us… since someone has been mysteriously absent for the past two Tuesdays.
” A spark of dastardly something sparks in his eyes as he reaches me, lifting long-fingered hands to squish my pouting face.
“Have a seat, Jovey. It won’t be too painful. ”
Yeah, says him. He’s not the one who can’t write.
My shoulders slump, and I stick my tongue out to lick his fingers.
He, unfortunately, does not remove them from my face, instead choosing to wiggle me back and forth with them like he’s practicing for being someone’s great-aunt.
I huff, then raise one quick hand to flutter my fingers against his side. He yelps, jumping away from me with much the same speed as he approached and startling Ginger into her substrate to hide.
Heh .
I smirk. “What were you saying?”
Green eyes glare, then soften. “Seriously, what’s going on? Is this new project not working?”
I sigh, fiddling with Lyra’s letter in my hands and avoiding eye contact. Perhaps if I watch the clouds float away in the sky outside the window of our modest home, my problems will float away with them.
Shocking no one, this does not work.
“Jupiter?” Mars asks, and my jaw clenches.
He’s just so caring . Loving. Wonderful.
He picks up all my slack, of which there is much, and then more, taking on the emotional burden that is me.
I might be the oldest, but Mars has always been the one taking care of me.
Picking up after me. Fixing my mistakes and filling in the holes of inadequacy I leave behind, in life and in our work.
After our mom died, Dad became a shell of a man, barely able to feed himself, let alone us. I wasn’t much better. Mars though? He took care of us, even through his hurt and his grief. He was barely six, feeding us PB&Js and making sure Dad got off to work on time so we’d have money for more.
Then when we got older, it was Mars who suggested we start writing so that we didn’t have to watch Dad suffer through eight hour work days when all he really wanted was to spend his days visiting mom at the graveyard.
We couldn’t get a job in town for… surely no reason at all, but we could write, and we could do it well.
Even as teenagers we were capable of producing books that were hitting bestseller status within weeks of launch.
We did research, figured out what tropes to hit and how to hit them, ho w to market, and lucked out early with an amazing cover artist. Frank, bless her, made covers for us that pulled heavy for our marketing early on when we couldn’t afford to run ads or do much more than post about the books and hope they sold.
We love Frank.
Being Rouge – award-winning author and mysterious celebrity figure in the world of book publishing – wouldn’t have been possible without her. And it definitely wouldn’t have been possible without Mars, the ultimate mastermind behind this operation.
I might write the first drafts, but he’s the one who puts all of the heart and soul into them.
He handles our developmental editing – the bit where you fix consistency and make the story a cohesive thing.
I just throw words onto pages and hope to make something salvageable for him to do his magic, adding spicy scenes and romance and character backstories that I am simply not capable of creating on my own.
Wasn’t capable of creating on my own, I should say. I’m overcoming that roadblock. Sort of. If overcoming means staring at my blank document willing something frilly to pour forth from my fingertips.
It’s a work in progress. The goal: to lessen the load on Mars when he gets this inevitable train wreck. Train wreck being a step up from the plane crashes I normally pass on to him.
Do I really want to tell Mars about this plan, though?
No. I do not.
I know my brother. He’ll tell me it’s fine, not to worry, and that he can continue to do what he’s always done, which is basically everything.
I write poorly done first drafts. Mars does everything else, or delegates what we can pay someone else to do better.
I haven’t logged on to our social media accounts… ever. I have logged on to them never.
The least I could do is give him a more polished draft.
The problem?
We write romance – spicy dark romance, to be exact – and I haven’t the first clue about the subject. Dark I can do. Darkness seeps from my pores, finding its way onto the page with such ease it’s like breathing. It’s the love and goo and kissing that aren’t so easy.
I frown, meeting Mars’ gaze beneath his thick, furrowed brows.
My brother, a specialist of all things romance and intimacy.
Maybe… maybe he can tell me how he does it. I’ve been struggling for weeks trying to figure it out on my own when I have an expert right in front of me .
I’m not stupid. I’m just an idiot.
“Mars…” I hesitate. “Can you teach me how to fall in love?”