Elsie
Chapter Twelve
It’s a funny feeling, to finally get the thing you’d spent so long wishing for. Something you thought might never come, probably knew shouldn’t happen, but hoped and prayed for, regardless.
In my case, it was a phone call.
One that by all accounts was better left unmade, sure, but I wanted it. God, I wanted it.
In fact, I’d had to give myself multiple scoldings and a handful of firm lectures in the mirror before I finally stopped obsessively checking my phone and resigned myself to the fact that it was over and Andrew was never calling.
I just had to suck it up, move on and seek my bizarre wish fulfilment fantasies through my writing.
Until the day he did.
And the feeling when I felt when his name flashed across my phone wasn’t one I’d been expecting. It wasn’t relief. Or longing. A floodgate hadn’t opened up, reminding me how much I’d missed him and wanted to make it work.
It was pure rage.
How dare he? I thought.
How dare he call two weeks into the aftermath of the shitstorm he turned my life into?
How dare he let me spend all that time camped out in the landscape of my wildly self-pitying thoughts? And most of all, how dare he call me after all this time and everything he’d done, expecting that I’d pick up?
And what was worst of all, I wanted to—if only for morbid curiosity’s sake—which was the only reason I didn’t. Not even to tell him off.
Clearly I wasn’t in the right state of mind for that phone call if I actually wanted to talk to the guy who’d hit me with the missile that was, ‘I’m not sure if I love you.’
Yeah, screw him.
Without giving myself the opportunity to wait until he called again and I inevitably caved on my decision to ignore him, which I knew would only fuel his massive ego, I turned my phone off and tossed it into the other room for safekeeping.
I hadn’t written Ellie to be the type of girl to put up with her ex’s shit, and neither was I!
In a torrent of emotion, I opened up my manuscript and edited the hell out of it, removing every redeemable quality I’d exaggerated into his fictional counterpart, back when I thought, maybe he was right about me. Maybe it had all been my fault after all.
Passage after flowery passage, I’d described him as some type of tortured poet, accrediting his motives to some type of Byronic hero type of characterization rather than the pretentious asshole he was.
I’d given him far too much screen time in Ellie’s thoughts and in her heart.
In one swift round of edits, I reduced him to a footnote, back into the background—a briefly mentioned blip in her past where he belonged.
He wasn’t her story. He was merely the catalyst.
By comparison, he made Will’s character seem almost redeemable, which I was fine with. Over the course of the first few chapters, I’d suNow, an almost reluctant friendship was forming between him and Ellie, which actually was working a lot better than I thought it might.
But I still hadn’t figured out his character yet, probably because I hadn’t fully figured out Will yet.
Characters aren’t always simply created, as much as they’re found. It was as if they existed in some other dimension, just waiting for the right writer to discover them.
That’s how it worked for me, at least.
Sometimes they screamed out to me, telling me when I was writing them wrong.
And yeah, technically I could override them.
Force my fingers to type words I knew my characters would never get behind, but it would just create a hole that I’d have to rewrite myself out of later, so I’d learned to trust the process.
Trust my characters to tell me their story.
Just as I was deliberating what type of dry remark I could write Hugh saying to an Ellie that was very much pushing his buttons, a knock at the door jolted me from my work.
“Damn it,” I muttered, clenching my eyes shut, trying to remember the genius line that had been in my brain just half a second ago.
Ellie had made a cutting comment about his perpetually broody demeanor.
And Hugh had responded—
The knock sounded again.
“Damn it!” I yelled again, slamming my laptop shut as the words were lost to me forever.
“I’m coming!” I said, sliding across the floor in my socked feet in my haste to get to the door.
Apparently, whatever I was needed for was absolutely urgent, based on the force of the knock.
With a huff, I threw the door open, finding none other than my brooding muse himself standing on the other side.
“Will.” My eyes widened. “Hi.”
“Are you okay?” were the first words out of his mouth, his eyes scanning me up and down skeptically.
“Did you come all this way to ask me that?” I questioned, hyper-aware that my hair was coming out of its clip and one of my sweatpants legs was riding halfway up my calf.
“All this way, meaning the three-minute drive from the café to here?”
I rolled my eyes.
“And no. I came to see if you had installed the carbon monoxide detector like you told me you would.”
“Oh,” I said, shifting. “That. Right. Yeah, I got it handled.”
“You did?” he asked skeptically.
“Yup. It’s in my kitchen.”
“Can I see?” he asked, calling my bluff.
“See what?” I stalled for time.
“The carbon monoxide detector that you installed.”
“Is it really that fascinating for you?”
“Only on slow days.”
I sighed, knowing he wasn’t going to give in, and turned on my heel—leaving the door ajar so he could slip inside if it was really that crucial for him.
I rushed back to the kitchen, hearing his boots against the creaky wooden floors as he followed me into the kitchen.
“It’s cold in here.” He frowned.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Keeps the mind sharp.”
Even though I quite despised being a human popsicle, I found his disapproval of every aspect of my life to be quite aggravating. So, I certainly wasn’t about to give him more ammunition for a problem he assumed I wasn’t taking care of—i.e., the heating issue of the house that wouldn’t retain any.
I sat back down at the table, opening my laptop once more and glaring at the screen.
I hoped that Will being in my space, making his quippy comments, would give me the fuel to get back into my character’s tone of voice.
“Why are you frowning?”
“I’m trying to figure out dialogue for my character,” I told him. “It’s very frustrating because nothing I come up with sounds like something he’d say.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, all the comments I think are funny wouldn’t be comments he’d think are funny, so it just sounds unnatural when I make him say anything. Get it?”
“Not at all.”
“Well, you’re not a writer, so—”
And then suddenly he was behind me, squinting at the screen, and I was slamming my laptop shut faster than Usain Bolt could even dream of.
“Are you writing about me?” he asked, sounding more amused than I thought he had the ability to sound.
“No.”
“I saw my name.”
“Your last name.” I scoffed, cheeks heating.
“And I saw your name.”
“Must’ve misread.”
I finally turned my head to face him, noticing a smug curve to his lips.
Kill me now.
“I’ll have you know that—” I started, about to unleash a stream of excuses that, while he may have inspired a character, I certainly wasn’t writing about him.
And even though he may share some similarities with Hugh, it meant absolutely nothing, because writers draw from real life all the time, and since he wasn’t one, he really wouldn’t understand—
“What is that?” he said, his entire face turning to stone once more.
I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed to hear that he’d returned to his usual abrasive self.
I turned to the direction his gaze was focused on, a spot on the kitchen table cluttered with papers, coffee mugs and—oh yeah, the carbon monoxide detector, still perfectly safe in its packaging.
“Oh.” I coughed. “I was going to get to that.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you were,” he deadpanned.
“I was!”
“Okay. Then where are the batteries?” He raised his brows.
“What?”
“You said you’re getting to it, right?”
I nodded.
“So, where are the batteries you bought to put in it?”
I let out a huff. “Don’t they come with it?”
He let out a weary exhale.
“Let me see that,” I muttered, stretching my body across the table to grab it.
I turned it over in my hands, scanning the words on the back until I landed on that dreaded phrase: batteries not included.
Scoffing, I slammed it back down onto the table.
“Well, that’s just stupid!” I exclaimed. “They make you pay thirty bucks for the thing and don’t even include the component that makes it functional?”
Will shook his head, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out a case of AA batteries and a pocket knife before slicing open the package.
“I assume you don’t have a screwdriver either?” he asked.
Damn, I didn’t even think of that.
“I’m sure there’s one around here somewhere,” I said sheepishly.
He held direct eye contact with me as he reached back into his pocket and pulled out a screwdriver.
Okay, now he was getting ridiculous.
“Do you always come this prepared?” I asked, watching his hands work.
He ignored me, popping the batteries in the back before screwing it closed again.
“Or make house calls for that matter?”
He pressed a button and the entire kitchen was filled with the incessant beeping of the machine screeching out.
“That’s loud.” I made a face.
“That keeps you alive.”
“That, and you, apparently.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Thank you,” I hurried to add, because really, I was grateful he was going out of his way to do all this for me.
But I did feel a little frustrated knowing that it was just another thing on his plate he had to do and was probably adding to his ever-growing resentment toward me.
“Well, if that’s all…” I said, hoping to get him out before he found some other way to be overly useful.
“How was your trip to the hardware store?” he said, arms crossed as he leaned back against the kitchen counter.
“My what—?” I scrunched my face up. “My trip to the hardware store?”
“Yeah, how’d it go?”
“Um, fine?” I offered. “As far as ‘trips to the hardware store’ go, I’d say it at least made the top three.”