4. Sleeping Bougie leaves town
4
SLEEPING BOUGIE LEAVES TOWN
HAZEL
Two hours later, I flopped over onto the living room rug. My eyes were Sahara Desert dry. My spirit was broken. And my back felt like Maurice the donkey from my Spring Gate series had kicked me in the kidneys.
I’d called three law firms, but since it was a Saturday night, no one was answering. So I’d moved on to real estate research and found that two units in my building had sold in the past year for nearly three times my account balance. I’d run through three mortgage calculators before it started to sink in.
Barring a meet-cute with a handsome billionaire tomorrow, there was no way I could stay in this apartment.
I reached up and felt around on the coffee table for my phone. Instead, I ended up knocking several pieces of paper loose. They fluttered down and landed on my face.
“If you’re trying to suffocate me, universe, you’re going to need more paper,” I called out to the forces that were clearly plotting against me.
There was a burst of laughter from the hallway and a chorus of goodbyes as the dinner party broke up.
Would my neighbors feel bad if I suffocated under pounds of paperwork just feet from their low-seven-figure one- and two-bedroom apartments? I debated lying there until morning before remembering my long-standing fear of a paper cut to the eye.
Gingerly, I slid the papers from my face and sat up. It was one of the folders Zoey had left with me.
I flipped the folder open and found copies of news stories and notebook pages. It was my ideas folder that I’d forgotten existed.
Once upon a time, I’d enjoyed brainstorming story ideas with Zoey over wine served in actual glasses.
Once upon a time, I’d laughed and showered regularly. Well, okay, maybe not quite regularly on the shower front. Authors maintained a certain slovenly lifestyle that was conducive to focusing all mental energy on fictional, better-smelling people.
I paged through the first few papers. There were old news stories about organ donors, adoptions, and babies with cochlear implants hearing their parents’ voices for the first time. I found handwritten notes with such gems as heroine hiccups every time she lies and furniture designer builds bed on which to bang heroine.
I drummed my fingers and waited, but there was nothing. Not the slightest creative flicker in my brain. Not even a whiff of What if?
“Annoying,” I announced to the empty apartment.
I dug deeper and pulled out an old news article from a Pennsylvania newspaper.
Small Town Bands Together to Save Home of Elderly Resident
In the quiet, outdoorsy town of Story Lake, Pennsylvania, beats the heart of true community. When resident Dorothea Wilkes found a sewage leak in the basement of her historic home of forty years, she knew she didn’t have the funds to make the required repairs.
Since losing her wife five years ago, Wilkes, 93, a retired engineer, says times have been tough. The upkeep of Heart House, a grand Second Empire home built in the 1860s, was getting progressively more expensive. When she hired a local contractor to take a look at the damage and give her a quote, she warned them her budget was limited.
But Bishop Brothers Construction wasn’t worried about budget. The brothers took one look at Wilkes’s property and decided they would do all the work…at no charge.
“It’s what we do here. End of story,” Campbell Bishop said succinctly in a phone interview before leaving his brothers to answer the rest of the questions.
There was a grainy shot of a grinning Dorothea Wilkes standing proudly on the front porch of her stately home. The Bishops stood below her in the yard. According to the caption, Campbell Bishop was the muscular, possibly gorgeous man who scowled when everyone else was smiling.
I sat up straighter.
Some grumpy, do-gooding small-town hero who got pissed off anytime someone dared thank him for his help. This was classic Hazel Hart. This was pre-Jim Hazel Hart.
Awesome. Now I just needed a heroine, a reason why the two of them couldn’t be together, and an entire story tying it all together. Oh, and one of those happily ever afters I no longer believed in. And to write it all in less than five days.
“Piece of cake.” Hmm, cake. I wondered if the late-night bakery over on 28th Street would have any pineapple upside-down minis.
“Stop thinking about cake and start thinking about housing options,” I ordered myself and returned to the article.
“My neighbors saved my home,” Wilkes declared.
A scene popped into my head. A me-like heroine, strolling down some tooth-achingly sweet main street, waving to people who greeted me by name. Fresh air. Town carnivals. Closet space. People walking their own dogs and going for ice cream after the high school football game.
There was scowly Campbell Bishop, doing something manly that involved sawdust and a tool belt to a big house while I watched from the doorway. He turned and used the hem of his T-shirt to mop his forehead, flashing me a front-row view of manly abs.
Big-city girl starts fresh in a small town. Ends up finding inspiration and herself.
My eyes popped open like I’d mainlined two gallons of Wild Cherry Pepsi.
My fingers warmed and flexed like they wanted to type something. Words!
The tool belt rode low over ancient denim as he pulled a hammer free. His scarred work boots sounded solid, determined, on the hardwood planks as he closed the distance. She wasn’t prepared for the proximity of such blatant displays of testosterone.
I dove for my laptop, sending more paperwork showering to the floor. That was one thing about me that had always infuriated Jim. When there were scenes in my head, nothing else mattered.
I forgot all about being almost homeless, jobless, and agentless as words—halle-freaking-lujah words—spilled nonsensically onto the screen in a crude outline of notes and questions.
What’s halfway between dad bod and God bod?
Is there a danger of splinters if they have sex in a construction zone?
Are splinters in erogenous zones funny?
Should she be wearing a sundress for easy access or short shorts for slow burn chemistry?
“Thank you for showing up,” Heroine said, sounding super sexy and confident in my head.
“It’s what we do here,” he said gruffly.
When my fingers stopped moving, I scrolled back tentatively through the document. I sat up straighter. This wasn’t all crap. This was…something.
I glanced down at the article on the floor and drummed my fingers over my lips. If an old news article could have me forming the beginning of a very rough outline, what would real-life inspiration give me? “‘Four bedrooms, four bathrooms, one-of-a-kind library/den, fenced yard, charming and spacious kitchen, two-car garage, spacious laundry room, large closets,’” I read from the listing. “‘On the main street a block from town square.’”
I’d gone down a rabbit hole. A Story Lake real estate rabbit hole, to be precise. Strictly research, I told myself, until I realized that the online listing was for Heart House, the home from the article. I flipped through the listing’s photo gallery for the ninth time.
“Oh my God! I could put a desk in the turret and make the library my office,” I said to the darkness beyond the glow of my screen. It was a million o’clock at night. I couldn’t feel my legs from sitting crisscross applesauce for hours on end. But I was wide-awake…and I could tell you exactly how far Story Lake was from my soon-to-be-ex-apartment in Manhattan. I could also tell you that there were a grocery store and bar within walking distance of the sleepy Second Empire home on the professionally landscaped corner lot.
“‘Property comes with a nontransferable seat on the town council,’” I read under my breath.
I’d never been involved before. My entire life I’d taken on the role of observer, which had been great for my writing career and a lousy slap in the face when my life came to a screeching halt.
Buy It Now.
The big red auction button was flirting with my eyeballs from the bottom of the listing.
I had come up with some real whammies of ideas while writing books before. That time I’d quit typing in the middle of a sentence to go skydiving for research. Then there was the time I’d done a ride along with a small-town cop in New Jersey and ended up bailing out her arrestee because he seemed like a nice guy who just got caught up in a bad situation.
But this . This by far had the potential to be the dumbest. I traced the big red button with my mouse just to see if the universe would send me a clear sign like a power outage or a surprise aneurysm. There were just a few hours left in the auction. Time was ticking down.
Who even sold real estate in an online auction? Who bought real estate sight unseen from an online auction?
And why had I checked the “Buy It Now” bid against the cash balance in my brokerage account four times in the last hour?
I blew out a noisy, lip-flapping breath.
There had been a time in my life when I’d been known for being impulsive. I’d changed majors from business to creative writing after one English assignment in college. I’d convinced Zoey to become a literary agent and signed a contract written on a cocktail napkin one drunken night in our early twenties before I’d ever written a word. I’d moved in with Jim after dating for only two months.
Come to think of it, that was the last rash decision I’d made.
He was older than me, which I assumed also meant wiser. Well educated, charming. He made me want to be the kind of woman he would want. His goals became my goals.
My gaze flicked to the door of his office, and I remembered the last time I’d entered that room. I could still taste the bitterness on my tongue as he’d explained you’ll understand someday as if I were still that twenty-four-year-old kid dazzled by him.
Why did I continue hanging on to those memories? To this space? It had always been his. My clothes had lived in an armoire in the bedroom and on a rolling rack behind the dining room table because his were in the closet. My books had been stacked behind the dresser and under the bed because they didn’t go with his collection of leather-bound tomes and the minimalist literary covers of his clients’ titles.
The familiar mixture of anger and panic simmered in my chest. But I pushed it down. There was no place for it to go these days. The only one here to take responsibility was me.
I glared at the screen, at the auction clock as it ticked down.
People made mistakes all the time. They changed their minds about marriages and real estate transactions, and nothing horrible happened to them. I could go, write the best book of my career, and then move back to the city…or Paris or Amsterdam or the beach. Wherever inspiration took me. I just had to make that first leap.
That big red button glowed brighter as my mouse moved closer.
Maybe it was the wine on top of the vodka sodas. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was the fact that it was three o’clock in the morning and I was euphorically exhausted.
Whatever the hell my “character motivation” was, I’d gone and done it. I’d one-clicked a freaking house in a tiny Pennsylvania town that I’d never even visited. But it felt good . It felt right .
I needed someone to tell. It had been a long-ass time since I’d had good news to share with someone. Now that I had good news, I didn’t have anyone to share it with. Zoey was probably sleeping off her liquor. My mother was…never an option. The friends I’d had while married had all migrated away, either turned off by my extended pity party or they’d been Jim’s friends first and therefore loyalty dictated they stay with him.
“This is why I should have a cat,” I announced. Cats didn’t care if you woke them in the middle of the night to talk to them.
Pursing my lips, I drummed my fingers on the keyboard. Hmm. There was always the option of strangers on the internet. That was what they were there for, right? Uncomfortable oversharing with people who would probably judge you mercilessly in the comments. I navigated to my author page on Facebook and logged in.
“Ugh.”
Zoey was right. It was a ghost town. I’d abandoned it and the readers who followed it when things had gotten too hard.
Well, I’d already done one crazy thing today. Why not make it two?
I scrolled over to the button, and before I could ruminate over whether it was a good idea or a terrible one, I started a Live video.
“Oh, wow. I guess I should have looked in a mirror first,” I said, finger combing my hair when I spotted myself on-screen. It looked as if a family of birds had attempted to erect a bird condo building in my hair. My eye makeup was smeary, and the middle-of-the-night lighting was beyond unflattering.
“So I bet you’re wondering where I’ve been and maybe also why I’m going live at three o’clock in the morning.”
I glanced at the viewer count in the upper right-hand corner. It was sitting solidly at zero.
“Or maybe you’re not wondering because you’re not there because you’re asleep like a sensible adult who isn’t in the middle of an existential crisis would be right now.”
The zero changed to a three.
“I know some authors don’t think that they owe readers anything. But honestly, I feel I owe you everything. And that starts with an explanation. So for anyone out there seeing this, my name is Hazel Hart, and I used to be a romance novelist…”
“I don’t care if the building is on fire. I’m hungover and unemployed. Let the flames take me,” Zoey said on a groan through the crack in her door Monday morning.
“No fire,” I promised. “Is this the hangover from Saturday night, or did you keep drinking all weekend?”
She screwed up her face. “What day is it?”
“Monday.”
“Then I just kept drinking.”
“Cool. I’m gonna need you to pack a bag,” I said, handing her a coffee as I forced my way into her apartment. Unlike mine, it was light and bright and mostly debris-free. “On second thought, why don’t you let me pack it for you? You’re a horrible packer. Remember that time in St. Charles when you thought you were packing jeans, but it was really just three denim miniskirts stuck together?”
Zoey stood there, still staring into the hallway. An eye mask was tangled in her curls. She wore a satin nightshirt and one sock.
“I’m over here, Sleeping Bougie,” I called as I headed for her bedroom.
She groaned. “What is even happening?”
“You’re fired, right?”
“Gee, thanks for the memo,” she said, pulling the stopper from her coffee.
I threw her suitcase on the bed and unzipped it. “I need to write a book, right?”
“How many Cherry Pepsis have you had this morning?”
“Three.” I opened her dresser drawers and found a wild tornado of denim. “Are these your stand-up or sit-down jeans?”
“Ugh. Stand-up,” she said as she sank down on the mattress next to the suitcase.
I threw them back in the drawer and pulled out another pair, then raided her underwear drawer.
“Why are you packing for me?”
I headed for the closet and flung open the door.
Good old Manhattan storage. The tiny closet was overflowing with designer duds. Zoey didn’t even need clothes hangers since everything was just crammed in on top of everything else. I grabbed a few shirts and—knowing my fancy friend—added a business suit and two dresses that were probably way too sexy for small-town life.
“Whenever one of my heroines gets her ass kicked metaphorically by the universe, I give her a fresh start,” I explained, shaking a T-shirt and a cashmere scarf out of a pair of vegan-leather knee-high boots.
“Uh-huh.” Zoey was clearly not listening as she guzzled her latte.
“So we’re giving ourselves a fresh start.”
She stopped guzzling and squinted at me over her to-go cup. “A lot hinges on your next sentence. Are we getting a fresh start on a tropical beach in the Caribbean?”
“There will be water,” I said, tossing a few tanks and workout pants on top of the growing mound.
“You know I love to see unhinged, off-to-the-races Hazel. It’s been a long time.” She waved a hand at me. “But I can’t just take a vacation right now. I need to land a new job, and I need to do it with an agency that’s going to let me bring you on board. And absolutely no offense intended, but the only one in this equation bringing even more deadweight than me is you.”
“Offense taken. But also, I wrote.”
Zoey sat up straighter and yanked the eye mask out of her hair. “Like actual words?”
“Like actual words in a somewhat legible outline for a scene with a big-city heroine whose life just imploded, leaving her with no place else to go, and a small-town blue-collar hero who can’t help but help her.”
Zoey was up on her knees, crawling closer. “Tell me they’re complete opposites and that he works with his hands and that she can’t stop thinking about getting those callused palms on her.”
“He wears a tool belt and fixes things, including an elderly neighbor’s house when she couldn’t afford it.”
“Does he have a brother?” she asked hopefully.
I slammed the lid shut on Zoey’s suitcase. “Two.”
Zoey closed her eyes and wiggle-danced on the mattress. “That means three more Spring Gate books!”
“It means three Story Lake books,” I corrected.
Zoey’s eyes opened, then narrowed. “Wait. Hang on. You’re supposed to be writing the next Spring Gate book.”
I paused my packing. “I can’t, Zo. I can’t keep going in a series that was stolen from me. I need to do something new, somewhere new. And before you try to talk me out of it, I already pulled the trigger and there’s no backing out. Which is why I’m dragging you along. I need you to keep me going. Four hundred words is a start, but it’s no book.”
“Four hundred words is great, Haze! We’ll worry about the rest later.”
“Great. So you’re on board. We’re moving to Story Lake, and you can help me spy on the Bishop brothers.”
Zoey choked on her coffee. “I’m what now?”
Thanks to the hangover and my friend’s general inability to function in the morning, it took less convincing than I’d anticipated, so we were on the sidewalk with a showered Zoey and her legion of bags in an hour.
“I’m just reminding you that you can’t base a character on a real-life person and then not get sued,” she said as we juggled and kicked luggage to the curb.
“That article was the first thing to inspire me in close to two years. It feels right.”
“You’ve never lived anywhere but New York. I know Hallmark Christmas movies make the big-city, small-town transformation look easy, but have you thought about how hangry you’ll get when it’s Saturday night and there’s no delivery cake?”
“I need a change. Besides, I’ve already committed.”
Zoey peered over her sunglasses at me with bloodshot eyes. “When you say already committed…”
“I bought a house in Story Lake at four a.m. from an online auction. So this has to work. You know I always do my best writing when the stakes are high.”
She moaned. “I think I want to throw up again.”
“No vomiting in the rental,” I said, guiding her to the blue convertible that was parked at a forty-five degree angle to the curb. I’d given up on parallel parking after the fourth attempt.
“No offense, but do you even know how to drive?”
“I have a driver’s license,” I said, pressing the button on the key fob.
“Yeah? Well, I took a class in biology. That doesn’t mean I know how to perform an appendectomy.”