CHAPTER ELEVEN FALLON #2
The seating is in a corner. The stools are bumped up next to each other.
And there will be eyes on us. Jaz’s eyes.
Not that she has anything to be concerned about.
Sawyer is... well, he’s not really a friend; he’s just an acquaintance.
Do I think he smells good right now? Of course.
And do I think he looks charmingly handsome with a backward hat and a light shade of scruff on his jaw?
I’d be dense not to. But I have a boyfriend who I.
.. uh, who I care for very much. So, there’s nothing to worry about.
There’s nothing wrong with eating a meal side by side.
“I hope you don’t mind eating near me,” I say. “Seems like there are only two seats left.”
“Company could be worse,” he says as we walk around crowded tables and over to the empty stools. Jaz spots me as we take a seat, then lets out a loud sigh as she walks over.
“Gather up some bail money—someone’s getting stabbed tonight.” I wouldn’t expect Jaz to say anything else. And don’t worry; she won’t actually stab anyone. She sets down a coaster and then looks over at Sawyer. “What’s Julia doing here?”
“We walked over together,” I say with a pointed look, trying to make sure she knows it means nothing. Absolutely nothing.
But she’s in a mood today—the busy bar has clearly frayed her nerves.
“You walked over together?” she asks, brows raised. “What is this? A friendship now? First the floor, now you’re eating together?”
“We’re not eating together,” Sawyer says. “Just parallel to each other. And I wouldn’t dream of starting a friendship with Fallon. Not after the way I treated her on our blind date. I’m quite aware that I’m lucky she’s even talking to me. This is merely a coincidence. No bond has been formed.”
See, entirely platonic.
“Uh-huh,” Jaz says, looking between us. “Answer me this—on your walk over, did you make each other laugh?”
Guilt swarms me, which is ridiculous. Sure, we had a conversation, and yeah, I laughed. A mere chuckle, nothing knee-slappingly funny that would make me buckle over.
“Aha!” Jaz points at me. “You did laugh.”
“He said something funny.” I shrug.
Jaz crosses her arms on top of the bar and leans forward. “It’s Julia, for fuck’s sake, Fallon. What could he have said that was possibly funny enough to laugh at?”
I glance at Sawyer and then back at my friend. “We were talking about the mayor elections and how you’d adopt an animal just for a chance to get into the mayor’s mansion.”
“Facts,” Jaz says.
“And he guessed that you were a cat person. It made me laugh.”
“Cheap laugh,” Jaz declares, pushing off the bar.
“It’s obvious I’m a cat person. I want to work for an animal’s love; I don’t want it handed to me the minute I walk through the door.
I want to spend an hour looking in every crevice of the house for my animal, only for it to hiss at me. That’s the kind of animal I want.”
“Sounds magical,” Sawyer deadpans.
Jaz holds up her hand. “Your commentary is not needed. Just tell me what you want so I can move on.”
“Waffle and some water,” he says.
“Water?” she says, raising her brow. “When did you turn into a square?”
“When I had to be carried to a cabin by two women.”
Jaz smirks. “Aw, my favorite memory of you, Julia.” She turns to me. “Same as usual?”
“Yes, but no beer. Cranberry juice, please. I’m exhausted, and a beer is not what I need.”
“Beer was created for exhausted people. That’s what the term ‘sitting down with an ice-cold beer’ is for.” She looks between us. “You don’t come to a bar to not order alcoholic beverages.”
“No, I came for the waffle,” I say.
“Same,” Sawyer adds.
“Okay, freaks.” Jaz turns around and heads to the back of the bar to put in our order.
“Does she ever hold back?”
I shake my head. “Never.”
“Well,” he says, after a moment, his gaze pointed forward. “I guess I’ll leave you be.”
He stares down at his hands, and I can’t help but chuckle. “You’re seriously going to sit next to me and not talk? You don’t think that’ll be more awkward?”
“Just trying to give you your space is all,” he responds. “I know you don’t want to be friends, so, you know, I’m preventing that from happening.”
And now I feel like a jerk. When I said I didn’t want to be friends, it was because seeing him again put me in a weird place.
I really wasn’t mad about the whole blind date thing—I guess more embarrassed than anything.
No one likes to be forgettable, so being around him brought back sour feelings from that night.
But now that he’s staying in Canoodle longer, and since I’ve gotten to know him a little more, the thought of talking doesn’t seem so bad.
“Well, we don’t have to become friends, but we can hold a conversation.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I can be pretty friendly. I don’t want to sway you toward friendship.” The charm in his voice eases the tension in my shoulders.
“I have a strong hold on my emotions. Trust me, you’re not cracking the shell of friendship,” I tease.
“That confident?” he asks.
“That confident.”
He turns in his stool and faces me. “Okay, then let’s have a conversation.”
“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
He shrugs. “Anything.”
I give it some thought, and to be honest, I am curious about one thing...
“How’s the fallout from the wedding?”
He winces. “Man, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” I say quickly.
“Nah, it’s fine. It’s better to talk about it than to bottle it all up, I guess. And my brother can only hear so much of my bemoaning.”
“Ooooh, bemoaning, it has to be good.”
“Let’s just say, things have not been going well.
The media is eating up Annalisa and Simon’s sob stories, to the point that I saw they were offered a spot on a TV show to throw a whole new wedding, one that isn’t disrupted by their best man.
I think it’s called Wedding Redo or something like that.
Movieflix, who I’m under contract with, pretty much thinks I’m Judas at this point.
They’re holding me to my contract of giving them another movie script, but they refuse to let me pitch any genres other than romance. ”
“And I’m assuming romance is the last thing on your mind at the moment.”
“Very true. But they aren’t letting up, so I’ve been trying to come up with some ideas. I’m falling short, though, and the ideas I do come up with all end up with a murder twist, so that’s not great.”
“Jaz would love it.”
He chuckles. “I’m sure she would.” He lets out a deep sigh. “It’ll come to me at some point. Ideas always do, especially when I least expect them, and they’re usually environment driven.”
“What does that mean?” I lean forward, my curiosity getting the better of me.
“Meaning I get my best ideas from observing the people around me. My big movie break actually came from a small town in Maine called Port Snow. I was visiting my aunt in Pottsmouth.”
“Pottsmouth? That’s a name of a town?”
“Yes, very unfortunate, and she was telling me about this gift shop, the Lobster Landing, that has the best fudge on the East Coast. She told me I had to try some, so we took a short drive over to Port Snow and spent the day there.” He smiles at the memory.
“We sat by the harbor and had crab-cake sandwiches from a food truck called Jake’s Cakes, picked up some famous mustard from the local deli, and then we ate way too much fudge from the Lobster Landing while we both sported a lobster claw oven mitt.
It was a great day. But when I was there, I saw Lovemark was filming a small-town romance at a big white manor that was tucked away, practically hidden in the trees surrounding the town.
I was fascinated and started researching when I got home.
I found out that Port Snow is really popular for small-town movie locations—and then an article popped up, and I came across the Knightly family. ”
“Who are they?”
“They own the Lobster Landing. But there was this rumor spread around town that the four Knightly brothers thought they were cursed while down in New Orleans on a boys’ trip.”
“What kind of curse?”
“A love curse.”
“For real?” I snort.
“Well, they believed it was a love curse. Not sure how real it was, but just from going there and learning about the town, I developed a story based off the brothers and sold it to Lovemark. It was my first big movie deal.”
“Ah, I see what you mean by environment. Was that your first movie?”
He shakes his head. “I wish it was.”
“You say that as if your first movie wasn’t so great.”
“It wasn’t.” He pulls on the back of his neck. “My first one was about finding love on Mars. An astronaut fell in love with a martian.”
“Stop.” I feel my eyes widen. “That’s not true, is it?”
“Unfortunately, it is. I don’t know how it sold or how it was greenlighted, but it’s probably the most embarrassing piece of film ever made, and I resent that it’s on my IMDb page.
At one point, a few years ago, a bunch of college kids found it and blasted it on social media, and it became a drinking game. ”
“A drinking game? How was it played?”
“Uh, every time the martian panted over the astronaut, they had to drink.”
I chuckle. “Was there a lot of panting?”
“The martian put a dog in heat to shame.”
“Oh God,” I say just as Jaz drops off our drinks, but she doesn’t stick around because someone else is calling her. “I can proudly say I will probably never watch that movie.”
“I prefer it’s never seen again.”
“What happened after that?”
“I wrote a few scripts that were picked up but were never greenlighted, and then I struck it big with Lovemark. After the Port Snow script, I went into some other lighthearted romances, Christmas stories that are incredibly predictable but always fun to watch. And after that, I wrote a script based off a DIY wedding show. The maid of honor and the best man duke it out for their siblings and end up falling in love. Sold it to Movieflix, and they signed a five-movie deal with me.”