Chapter 19
After dinner Ryan and I part ways with Eddie and my mother.
The insecurity I felt seeing them together is gone, replaced with the assurance that Eddie and my mother are simply old friends catching up.
They’re bound together forever for the mutual love of one man, and me, his daughter.
The rest of it I was imagining and it’s not surprising my overactive brain would do this.
I’ve been under an incredible amount of stress lately.
I’m still thinking of Holly and what I should tell her.
I’m sure Ryan’s publisher assumed everyone who knew me would think I’d taken on a pen name to write the book.
But Holly is my closest writing friend, my critique partner, and I would have had to be lying to her all this time.
Even the good things happening now are stressing me out.
It’s as if I can’t simply accept the fullness of my life because it always comes with another complication.
I want to relax and enjoy this but I keep waiting for something else to go wrong.
“Do you mind if we walk a little first?” Ryan says, holding the door to the restaurant open for me.
I’m more than willing to do this, because this stretch along University Avenue is easy walking, even if you couldn’t call Seven Trees a walking city. As we walk, Ryan doesn’t say a word. It’s like he’s left an open space. But when I don’t fill it, he does.
“Want to explain what was going on in there?” He hooks a thumb to the restaurant now behind us.
I’m too embarrassed to admit what for a few moments I thought I saw. I have to be wrong.
“My mother and Eddie?”
“You, rage eating your dessert.”
He didn’t even notice Eddie and my mother being anything more than family, and that encourages me. I’ve been reading far too much into this.
“Rage eating? That’s a new one.” I chuckle. “Thanks to my mother, I’ve had a complicated relationship with food.”
“Yeah? How so?”
“She likes to pretend she doesn’t eat and I’m rather fond of it.
I eat what I like in moderation. But when I’m around my mother, I probably eat more than I would normally.
We have a difficult relationship. After my father died, I felt pretty abandoned.
She took off to have the career she always wanted.
Unfortunately, she is obsessed with body image and I’m not. ”
He nods and I remember that he also has a complex family dynamic.
“What about you? Do you get along with your mother?”
“Other than the fact she’s continually trying to fix me up with the daughter of a friend?”
“Well, you’re a catch. I can’t say I blame her.”
We walk quietly along the tree-lined sidewalks, which are old enough to have cracks in them.
“You look like your mother.” His voice is soft, almost tender.
“I know.”
I grunt my acknowledgment. It’s the story of my life, the physical manifestation of myself so at odds with who I am inside, and who I want to be. In other words, nothing like her.
“Is she visiting? I didn’t see her at the party.”
“She showed up last week but I don’t expect her to stay long.
She tends to flit in and out of my life.
This time, she’s gone through a divorce.
” I chuckle. “You won’t believe this, but tonight I thought I saw Eddie kissing her hand.
But he’s my father’s older brother. They’ve always barely had a tolerance for each other. ”
“Enemies to lovers,” he says without hesitation. “And falling for your brother’s widow, not quite as popular.”
I hold my hand to my heart. “No, not those two, but can I say I’m proud you know these tropes?”
The skies darken and the streetlights flash on as we walk down the sidewalk, past storefronts with outside seating and striped parasols. It’s the weekend in a university town, so we see plenty of young people.
Seven Trees is quaint, comparatively small with San Jose to the south and San Francisco to the north.
It has a youthful vibe while also being the center of tech giants.
There’s the hum of conversations, laughter, and live music coming from the bar across the street.
We keep walking and settle into an easy silence.
Ryan turns down a side street, hands in the pockets of his slacks, occasionally glancing up.
He stops walking just before we enter a crosswalk, and groups of students go around us.
“Have you thought any more about writing a sequel?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Ryan, your readers deserve one.”
“This may sound ungrateful, but I want to be able to write the kind of book that moves people the way Soulmates did. Without writing a sequel. And without writing any more romance.”
It must be why Kate’s remarks about his proposal cut him deeply.
“You’ll do it, if that’s what you want.”
“Careful,” Ryan says, taking my hand.
A bicyclist passes by us, coming out of nowhere, and Ryan pulls me toward him.
It’s just an instant, a moment of his touch, but I’m in the crook of his arm and a little surprised by the way my pulse quickens.
Something tells me it isn’t the danger of a near miss with a cyclist in a hurry to get somewhere that’s raised my heart rate.
It’s Ryan, this close, his delicious smell, noticing that despite the fact he doesn’t technically work with his hands, they’re strong enough to move me out of the line of fire.
He’s holding me, his indigo blue eyes studying me for several long seconds, until I finally push back.
When I catch my breath, and we start to walk again, I ask, “Are you Grayson?”
“What? No, of course not. He’s a character I invented.”
“But we all do this to a point, there’s something of me in each of my characters. I think there’s a lot of you in him. You’re Grayson. He doesn’t get the girl.”
“Some people might decide Grayson worked too hard to get Lula. That maybe a love so unbalanced and one-sided could never result in happily ever after.” He held up air quotes for the last three words, which I did not appreciate.
I mock scowl. “All I want is the end of the story. Please. You can’t just leave a reader hanging.”
“Luci, I am not writing a sequel. Never and that’s final. Everyone, including you, is going to have to accept that.”
“But—”
“Did you ever think the beauty of the book is in the fact it’s not finished? And never will be?”
“No.” I shake my head. “That’s not it.”
He groans. “Why don’t you write it then, since you want it so much?”
“Maybe I will.” The words come out of me in a huff.
I don’t actually want to write this book.
Now that the Desdemona window is closed, it might be time to sell my own book.
Ryan’s generosity should allow me a couple of months in which I can focus on nothing but my writing so I can revise it into perfection and start the querying process all over again.
“The problem is the book was a fluke. There’s no way to replicate that kind of success,” Ryan says. “Too much luck involved.”
“But romance books are still bestsellers,” I say. “I admit I’m biased.”
“When did you fall in love with romance books?”
“I suppose that’s my longest relationship, so, thanks for asking.” I step up my stride to meet his. “We’ve been together close to two decades. I was probably twelve when I snuck the first paperback from my Tia Carmelita’s stash. And, you’ll be proud to know, it was a historical.”
“I’m impressed.”
I nod. “Whitney, My Love by Judith McNaught. It’s a classic. I graduated to my monthly Harlequins, Nora Roberts, and the amazing Susan Elizabeth Phillips. Really, anything I could get my hands on because at twelve, I was not supposed to be reading ‘those books.’”
“Nothing quite like banning a book for making it soar.”
“But I came by love of romance honestly. My mother and father were the best examples of true love. Whenever I give my mother the benefit of the doubt, I try to understand how difficult it must have been to lose the love of her life.”
“Tell me about your father.”
“Well, he was Hispanic, and everything you might imagine that sometimes goes along with all that. A little bit of a macho man, kind of old-school. He was left-handed and played on a left-handed acoustic guitar. And he also told me stories, very long ones in which I was a princess saving the world with a toad named Joe.”
Ryan chuckled. “Sounds like you inherited something from him even if not his looks.”
“He was a born storyteller.”
“Do you also think it’s overwhelming? Intimidating to know your parents had the perfect relationship?” he says. “That they were the center of each other’s world?”
Until he mentioned it, I wasn’t aware that could ever be the case.
“Not really. In my books, I try to give them the happy ending they should have had.” I pause, then ask, “Were you serious about me writing the sequel?”
“Were you serious about helping me put a little romance into my spy novel?” He quirks a brow.
“I hardly think I need to tell you how to do that, but yes. If you want me to, of course I will.”
“We’ll start Monday. You’ll read what I’ve written so far. And we’ll go from there.”
“Yay!” I do a little hop skip in the middle of the street to make Ryan give me the smile he rarely bestows. And yes, I get it.
When I get home, my mother and Eddie are in the living room with Abuelita streaming a telenovela.
I was raised on the drama of these, and yet I don’t understand the continued fascination.
I’ve outgrown them. There’s plenty of melodramatics and characters who’ve been thirty for twenty-five years.
Kids, meanwhile, who go from age ten to twenty in a year or two.
At the moment, there’s an amnesia story going on, which has all three of them on the edge of their seats. What a cozy scene.
“Any mail for me today?” I ask.
“Shhh!” Abuelita says.
“Excuse me,” I mutter under by breath, finding the basket where they usually stack my mail.
“I knew it!” my mother exclaims.
“No, no,” Abuelita says. “That can’t be her husband. He’s lying, that’s what I think.”
“Mami, why would the man lie about that?” Eddie says.
“Mijo, because she’s beautiful and he wants her to be his wife!” Abuelita says, like d-uh.
“Exactly,” my mother says.
Eddie is silent, clearly outnumbered.
I’m looking through my boring mail filled with nothing but bills when Mami joins me by the kitchen. “Anything exciting?”
“Nope.”
Mami leans in close. “I want to ask you for a favor. Go with me to a singles event,” she says.
“What? No way!”
“Why not? I can see how lonely you are and finding someone new is the best way to get over an ex.”
“I am not lonely and I don’t need anyone. You’re talking about yourself. Why don’t you sign up for Tinder or one of those later in life silver-haired dating apps?”
She gives me her pouty look. “They’re not safe. Besides, I prefer the old-fashioned way. Face to face.”
She has a point and I for one will never swipe right.
All those apps go about love in the wrong way.
Trust me, I’m a romance writer, I know these things.
I’m delighted, too, to be wrong about my mother and Eddie.
There’s nothing there and I should have known.
A man getting together with his brother’s widow is just too weird.
The thought fills me with relief and I suppose if Mami finds someone new, that will further cement the fact Eddie would never be an option, even in a weird alternate reality.
I consider the idea because I should encourage her.
“What kind of singles event?”
“Abuelita’s parish is putting it on, so you know it will be safe. Lots of Catholic singles mingling, looking for love. What could be better?”
I think I’d rather put my honey-covered hand into an ant hill but nevertheless, it sounds like at least not too much funny business will be going on.
Still, I’m a bit shocked by the implications.
My mother is looking for a nice single man in my town.
I’m not sure how this will shake out. She’s never going to settle for a long-distance relationship.
“I guess you’re staying. How much longer?”
“As long as Eddie and Abuelita will have me. This is home, and you’re here.” She pushes a lock of my hair back, but it’s a gentle move, with no comments on the length for once. “There’s no place I’d rather be.”
She’s trying, and it’s incredibly annoying. I have too much on my plate to indulge her. I have research to do, Ryan’s proposal to critique, a sequel to write. An apartment to find.
“Fine. I’ll go with you. But I won’t be staying long. I absolutely am not looking for love! And that’s final.”