19. “IT JUST TAKES SOME TIME, LITTLE GIRL, YOU’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RIDE, EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING WILL BE JUST FINE”
“IT JUST TAKES SOME TIME, LITTLE GIRL, YOU’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE RIDE, EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING WILL BE JUST FINE”
The cursor leapt across the page, words spilling onto the white screen in sure, unapologetic strokes. Jocelyn’s fingers flexed every few minutes, shaking off the tightness in her joints which hadn’t rested in three days.
She wasn’t simply writing. She was creating art, carving a story of flesh and blood in a relentless assault against the keys.
Her kimono hung open around her shoulders, silk worn gossamer-thin from years of wear.
Somewhere in the tangle of her hair, a pencil remained wedged at a sharp angle, a relic from this morning or yesterday morning or some unmeasured stretch of time when the light through the windows had shifted from blue to pink then back to grey.
She had no clue what day it was. Didn’t care.
Submerged in her characters’ world, lost in a sea of agony and beauty, she had no plan to look up until the book was finally done.
Driven by caffeine and spite, the temptation of food had faded, and she hadn’t eaten a square meal in days.
Only when her body insisted she needed sustenance did Jocelyn drift to the kitchen to quickly gobble something down over the sink like a bridge troll.
Then she returned to her work and continued writing.
Her only loyalty was to her momentum and her readers. She promised them a masterpiece, and she was going to deliver.
Closing out the dialogue she’d just written, she hit save with a practiced hand and grabbed her mug, sipping then wincing at the grit of bitter grounds and sediment catching against her tongue.
Her coffee had gone cold, but that didn’t matter.
She drank it anyway, letting the familiar, clarifying ritual ground her as she pushed on.
The breadth of time since she’d entered the outside world had become a country unto itself. She’d been gone long enough not to care.
This was who she was now. She had no desire to return to real life again. She lived here now, in her fictional world, with her fictional characters whom she controlled with omniscient power. It was the only sure way to ever feel love and ensure the safety of her heart.
Reality was cold and bitter, and she’d much rather stay here, in her own little bubble where she was a pen goddess who decided which characters suffered and which thrived.
She broke the page and started a new chapter, energized enough to go all night.
Currently, Thora, her young Viking bride, stood at the edge of the ravine, looking back at the only man she’d ever trusted.
Jocelyn’s fingers danced across the keyboard, painting a dark flood of retribution on the page.
The words, her vengeance, rolled like lava spilling downhill, inevitable and destructive, and so forebodingly perfect.
It was poetry.
She forged the moment where everything fractured, where love collided with doubt, and Thora discovered her father’s betrayal. Her protagonist’s devastation spread across the page with visceral potency. Now, Thora had to choose between forced marriage to Leander and staying loyal to her own blood.
A reckoning was coming.
For weeks, Jocelyn struggled to put her gooey characters into conflict. Now, her hesitation was gone. She didn’t shy from treachery. She craved the war. She wanted vengeance. She needed justice—raw, ruthless, and brutal justice.
The challenge had honestly been not killing Leander.
Romance readers had an unspoken rule that heroes shouldn’t die.
Happy endings were sort of guaranteed. But man, Jocelyn really wanted to kill the love interest and move Thora into a beautiful castle off the coast of a female colony where nothing with a dick ever bothered her again.
But she wouldn’t. She’d keep her promise to the reader and figure out a way to redeem the dumbass hero in the end.
If only reality were that easy.
Leander had been a selfish hero and he deserved to suffer. But he didn’t deserve a Viking funeral, so there would be no pyre burnings today—even if the temptation remained.
It would have been easy. Cathartic. But in the end, beneath all her hurt and anger, Jocelyn wanted to see that Thora got the hero she deserved.
She, sadly, was still a romantic. Despite all the disappointment and all her trust issues, some part of her still craved the happy ending others magically found.
She’d gone years not even thinking about her personal love life, but Soren changed that. And now she had all these tedious feelings that mostly fucking hurt and she didn’t know how to make herself stop feeling them.
So she wrote. She wrote until her fingers ached, then stretched and wrote some more. She wrote until she couldn’t keep her head up or her eyes open and then, when she woke up with her face stuck to the keyboard and pages of
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She deleted the gibberish and picked up right where she left off writing.
It was easy to shut the world out. Once her notifications were silenced, she sank into blissful, uninterrupted peace. Jocelyn’s fictional world had become an impenetrable fortress around her, protecting her peace and her fragile heart.
She had blocked Soren’s number again, the moment after she forwarded the picture of him and Olivia.
Then she blocked the email address Olivia used to send it, perfectly aware it wasn’t her real email and was just some throwaway account designed for whatever kind of other cunt-games she played in her free time.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Olivia might be a cruel, calculating bitch, but she meant nothing to Jocelyn, nor did she owe her anything.
Soren was the one who broke his promise to her. He vowed not to hurt her. Actually begged her to trust him. And then he abandoned her and betrayed her anyway, setting fire to everything they’d built.
So she channeled all her fury and heartache into her book. The pain and anguish poured out of her like water, her tears bleeding onto the keys and the prose some of the brutally best words she’d ever written.
Thank God for her work. It kept her breathing. It kept her laser-focused on the things she could control rather than the uncontrollable that scared her.
Sure, some might say leaning this hard into any obsession could form a dangerous imbalance and might carry real consequences down the line. But until one of those consequences got up and actually knocked her to her ass, she decided not to worry about it.
Beyond the clicking of the keys, Jocelyn vaguely registered Cordelia’s ticking toenails across the wood floor.
“One second,” she said, trying to get her thought down before it flew out of her head.
Cordelia whimpered, the piercing, incessantly high-pitched whistle of a chihuahua that should really be used by the CIA for interrogations, because after only about one minute of that screeching cry, a person lost all patience and would do anything to make it stop.
“All right already!” Jocelyn shoved back from the computer with a tense inhale, as if she just broke through the surface after spending days underwater.
Her body instantly registered the fight against gravity as her locked muscles painfully unfolded after days of intensely hunching over a keyboard, and she groaned, rolling her neck.
Cordelia pranced happily, whining faster as she excitedly anticipated Jocelyn’s return to reality.
“Give me a second.” She stretched and— “What the hell do you have?”
She reached down to Cordelia’s mouth and immediately pulled her hand away when she touched slobber and bone.
“What did you get into? Did you murder something?”
Cordelia raced to the front of the house in a whoosh of jangling clicks, her nails clacking away as the bell on her collar rattled violently.
Was someone at the door? The camera alert hadn’t made a sound. Or maybe it did, but she was so engrossed in writing she missed it.
Crossing the foyer, Jocelyn briefly jolted at her reflection. Banshee was an understatement.
Cordelia scratched at the front door, yipping and clamoring to get to the other side.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
Cordelia knew they only used the front door when they left the house. The dog used the back door whenever she needed to make a tinky-poo-poo, so it was strange that she was scratching to get out front.
“Do you have to go out?”
The dog ignored her and continued scratching at the front door, as if she expected to go on a walk.
It could be dawn or dusk. Finding her bearings, Jocelyn checked the time on her phone. It was late afternoon, and the sky would be dark soon.
“We’re not going anywhere, Deelie.” She peeked out the peephole, wondering why she was so worked up. “No one’s out there.”
Cordelia continued to paw at the wood, frantic and insistent that she open the door before she stripped the paint and dug right through the wood Shawshank-style.
“Alright, hold on.” Jocelyn pulled her leash off the hook.
Cordelia’s excitement multiplied to the point she could barely hold herself still enough to get into her harness.
“You should be embarrassed, going out in your pajamas at this time of day.”
It didn’t escape Jocelyn that she was also in her robe with nothing underneath and a rat’s nest of hair that hadn’t been brushed in days.
“We’re not leaving the yard.”
The second she hooked the leash to the harness, Cordelia nearly pulled Jocelyn’s arm out of the socket.
“Hey, take it easy.”
She flicked the lock and Cordelia darted onto the porch.
The sudden baritone bark scared the crap out of Jocelyn. She staggered back as giant paws landed on her shoulders.
“King, what…” She searched the yard, her heart kicking into overdrive. “How did you get here?”
The gentle giant only licked her face and panted as Cordelia danced around him, as if her long-lost lover had just returned from war. There was no way he made it here alone.