6. Six
Shit. Pretty fucking annoying? The words jingle a vague bell—did I say that? Aloud? To her? The stress of not writing has turned me into someone I don’t even like, and, for some reason, my new neighbor gets the brunt of it.
I take my rejected whiskey inside and wander to my office. A highlight reel of the night in question replays in my head.
The call from my agent about my publisher’s threats to drop me and take their advance back…
All day staring at a blinking cursor and blank page…
My friends showing up for a baseball game we got too drunk to watch…
And a bike ride—five drunk idiots doing laps around our street like we’re twelve. Chris put credit cards in the tire spokes like baseball cards. Bryan rode Mom’s old pink bike with the tassels on the handlebars, basket and all. It would’ve been funny if they hadn’t spent the time complaining about their wives and chauffeuring their kids to games and practices all the time.
“Wish I had your life, Jack,” Bryan said.
No, he doesn’t.
I remember her loud-ass VW puttering up the road. My face lands in my hands as my words echo. Pretty fucking annoying… bet you still bed her… hell no… Damn it.
My tabby, Harper Lee, saunters up with what sounds like a chiding meow. I wonder if cats can read minds—I’ve always felt she can. Her golden eyes narrow in what looks like disappointment. I deserve it. I plop in my reading chair beside the open window and hear a thwack outside. A voice comes next.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, peachy,” Rowan answers sharply, suggesting she isn’t. Table legs scrape against concrete. They sit at her embarrassingly small, pizza-sized metal table with matching ass-numbing chairs. They’re close enough for me to hear the wine being poured.
In hindsight—not the best idea, adding on to my house so close to hers. But Ben and Margot rarely used that dinky porch, and I never considered that they wouldn’t be there. With only a few feet and a shrub separating her porch from my office and being higher up, I see everything, even through the window over her kitchen sink.
I’ll have to put up a fence, tall and solid.
I reach to close the window but stop when Rowan says, “This isn’t about Dean, is it?”
And my ass is glued to the seat. Rowan’s shitstorm love life has inspired me before. I can’t afford to miss a second opportunity.
“—Please, Mira. It’s been a bad day already.”
“It’s not about Dean. I need your help with something.”
“Sure, anything.”
“No, hear me out first. You’re allowed to say no. This isn’t something you should agree to because you’re being asked. Understood?”
“Fine. Just tell me what it is already.”
“Now that you have the house and an extra bedroom, I wondered if you’d be open to fostering a teenager—”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
They laugh knowingly, like it’s an understanding between them, before Mira asks, “Maybe I should give you all the details first?”
“Sure, but I’ll do it.”
I watch through the corner of the window where they can’t see me, even though this conversation has veered into a category that I don’t care about. If not for the irony, I’d already be on the phone with my fence guy. She couldn’t give a straight answer to her boyfriend’s proposal but couldn’t give her yes fast enough to a stranger living in her house. This woman is strange.
“Her name is Sara Sweet. She and her father, Eddie, live on the other side of The Pines, inherited from his mother. He’s a landscaper. Good guy but doesn’t make the best choices. He was caught with stolen property stashed in his garage. Sara says he was duped into storing it by a no-good relative, which is probably true, but he wouldn’t come clean. So, he’s about to do ninety days, and there’s no guardian for Sara.”
“So, she needs a temporary placement.”
“Yes, but one in this school district, which is impossible to find. She’s starting her sophomore year at Coastal. I don’t want to force her to switch schools.”
“Well, now she won’t have to. I’ll get a bed, dresser, and desk for my spare room—I have a little money set aside. We’ll ride to and from school together. It’ll be great!”
“It’ll be hard, Rowan. She won’t want to be here. She’s pissed at her dad, and she’s got a very bad attitude.”
“I’ve handled bad attitudes before—”
“Yes, but not under your roof. It’s different.”
Rowan huffs with irritation. “It almost sounds like you want to talk me out of it.”
“No. I only want you to have realistic expectations. This won’t be a three-month slumber party. Sharing your space with an angry teenager will be challenging.”
“Yes, and I’m up for it. Trust me.”
A beat passes before Mira sighs. “I do. I knew you’d say yes. Thanks for being willing to try it. Do you want to talk to Dean before starting the process?”
Their pleasant back and forth stops abruptly.
Rowan recovers with a weak, “No, it’s fine. I’ll let him know.”
“You are talking to Dean still, right?”
Another hesitation makes the air feel hollow around them. “He asked for space. I’m respecting his wishes… I broke his heart, Mira. I didn’t mean to, but I did.”
“So, now he gets to break your heart every day. Is that it?”
I nearly trip over Harper Lee to grab a notebook from my desk—that’s a damn good line.
“When was the last time you heard from him?”
“The day he left.”
“No texts? No calls?”
Rowan shakes her head. So do I. Whatever esteem I had for the woman devouring her meal after being rejected by sight fizzles. She isn’t confident or strongly indifferent. She’s a fucking pushover.
Mira says, “You deserve better, and you don’t have to put up with it.”
“I love him. I don’t have a choice.”
“He’s not showing you any love. And you always have a choice. I know you think that Dean seems nothing like the assholes of your past—”
“Seems?”
“Yes, seems. You don’t know him, Rowan, and men have turned on you before. I don’t need to remind you—”
“No, you don’t,” she snaps. Her fingers flutter with her napkin, nervously folding it into triangles. “I really don’t want a history lesson, okay?”
Oh, please, give us a history lesson, I think, pen at the ready.
“Fine, I’ll just say this—The men of your past… You didn’t deserve them, Rowan. You survived them. Don’t settle for Dean because you think he’s as good as you’ll get.”
I capture Mira’s words verbatim, and they repeat in my head. She survived them. She survived them. She survived them. The rusty wheels of my creativity sluggishly start to turn.
Their silence compounds the tension, making it thick like humidity. Mira’s quick to laugh it off. “Tell me you got him for breaking your no-romance rules with the proposal, at least. We worked hard on those.”
My writer senses tingle again. If done right, romance is sweet and sexy, the thing that separates one person from all the rest. Who doesn’t want to feel that beautiful attention? That adoration? That love?
Rowan’s nerves scatter in a chuckle. “That was… quite the night.”
“After Trent, we needed it. Your no-romance rules were useful at the time. No more wine and roses.”
“No PDA or fancy dinners,” Rowan tacks on, like they’re playing a game.
“No flowers or gifts. Always splitting costs.”
“No damsel-in-distress moments.”
“No big romantic gestures.” Mira laughs.
“Proposals are the exception.”
“Maybe, but you made dating way too easy on him.”
“No, the rules helped. Despite what you think, I feel like I really know Dean.”
I nearly laugh. She’s delusional. Yeah, she really knows the guy who’s ghosting her?
Mira’s smile vanishes into a sigh. “Here’s the problem with Dean—You’re not desperate for him, Rowan.” Her words come quickly as if uncaged. “He’s not desperate for you, either. It’s like you’re both only halfway in. And if it’s only halfway, why do it at all?”
I can’t write fast enough, but still, I peek through the window to see Rowan’s reaction—the slight fall of her shoulders, the confused, maybe hurt pinch between her brow, and her typically bright blue eyes turning a shade paler.
“Don’t hold on when you should let go,” Mira says more softly.
“Letting go means giving up, and maybe it’s hard for you to understand, but I can’t do that. That’s the only proposal I’ll ever get, and dating is… torture for me. I can’t go through it again. It’s Dean or nothing.”
“How perfectly unromantic,” Mira says playfully.
Rowan stays stoic. “No one wants to be alone. I’m desperate for something more.”
Her words resonate in ways I don’t like. I love my solitude… when I’m writing. Otherwise, the empty space around me is a vise squeezing my chest. My perpetual blank page has strangely revealed other blanks like my life’s a warped Mad Lib waiting for words I, once again, can’t deliver.
Mira breaks the long silence. “Desperate for something more? You should try the hottie next door.”
Spit catches in my throat, making me cough.
“What was that?” I hear Rowan ask.
I pin myself to the wall, feeling like a dumbass.
A non-busted dumbass, I realize once they return to their conversation. Rowan redirects them to Sara and the process ahead of them, and my mind goes elsewhere.
A young girl running down city streets at night, fumbling over her feet as she glances over her shoulder. Scared. Trying to survive. And desperate for something more, for the one person who makes her feel safe—if only she could find him.
I can’t reach my laptop fast enough.
I enact my ritual—ass in my desk chair, pencil tucked behind my ear, notebook and laptop open, and music blaring. I hit play on the remote, letting Method Man’s “Bring the Pain” surround me.
It’s an old-school choice, but Devin and I used to do a ridiculous rap dance to it before baseball games. It’s the song I play whenever I start writing a new book.
Holy shit, that’s what I’m doing! Starting a new book!
I bend and crack my fingers. Then, I’m tapping out a scene that will fit into a plot I don’t know yet with a character I’ve only just met. An outcast. A survivor.
I don’t know her full story yet, but I’m in the scene with her—a ghost witnessing and documenting her messed-up life. That’s how it works. I smell the stench of stale Chinese food and piss in the alleys and hear the buzz of neon lights and distant traffic. I feel her trembling fingers as she holds tight to her school bag—the only thing she had time to grab. Her body is cold from sweat and the night air. She has no idea where she’s going—only away. He can’t hurt her if he can’t find her.
Hours pass before I come up for air, and only because I hear scraping outside my study. A glance at the bottom of my screen reveals a miracle—3,327 words. I stand, stretch, and peek out the side window.
Rowan drags a large branch between our houses, its extended limb tickling the sides of her house. I snort-laugh, eyeing a leaf plastered to her back thigh.
I groan. “Should be wearing gloves, newbie.”
With trouble, she finally deposits the branch streetside between our houses, her tone arms flexing with the effort. She’s created an impressive pile, and it’s slightly endearing to see the poised, perfectly put-together woman sweaty and dirty over yard work. Endearing and sexy. Her damp tank clings to the curves of her chest, leaving little to my imagination, especially when she bends to adjust the pile and her full breasts dangle against her bra.
Dick-thoughts aside, she listened to me.
She returns to her backyard and retrieves another fallen branch—bigger than the previous one. She grits her teeth as she pulls it through the gap, like a stupidly cute puppy playing tug-of-war. Outside my corner window, she loses her grip and falls on her ass. She pops up quickly, glancing around to make sure no one saw. I duck from view, laughing.
Maybe I should help her. Or, at least, stop watching her. But it’s too amusing. Hell, watching that leaf on her back thigh is enough to keep me entertained.
But I don’t have time.
Craving a drink, I consider my shit-gift. I knew she wouldn’t want whiskey, but I didn’t want to welcome her despite Rose and Vernon’s insistence.
But after 3,327 words, I can’t exactly hate her either.
When she vanishes into her backyard again, I grab an expensive chardonnay from my wine rack, scribble out a sticky note—More your style, princess?—and leave it at her front door.
Conscience cleared.
Then, with the relief and joy of someone being rescued from a long-ass stay on a deserted island, I go back to writing.