Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Driftwood Coffee was quiet, the lull between the early rush and the lunch crowd.
Jen ordered at the counter and scanned the room while she waited. Corner tables, a couple with a stroller near the door, two women deep in conversation over what looked like the day's plans. The table by the window was open.
Coffee in hand, she claimed the window table and opened her laptop before she could talk herself out of it.
The document labeled "DON'T DELETE" was right where she'd left it, cursor blinking after the last sentence she'd written.
More pages now than when she'd started. She'd been adding to it in stolen hours, early mornings, late nights when the house was quiet.
It was ridiculous. It was nothing like what she was supposed to be writing. Her editor was waiting for the next Clementine Fields. The series that had built her career, paid off her mortgage, given her the life she'd carefully constructed over fifteen years of deadlines.
She scrolled through the fantasy pages instead.
The prose was looser here, less careful. She'd stopped thinking about word counts and chapter breaks and whether the red herrings were planted early enough. She'd written. And for three days, that had been enough.
A shadow passed the window, and then he was there—pushing through the door, bag over one shoulder, already scanning for an open table.
Same guy from last time. Same spaceship paperback, same restless energy. He ordered at the counter, waited for his coffee, then claimed the corner table and set up: laptop open, book beside his cup.
Then he looked up and caught her looking.
She looked away first. Pulled up the cozy mystery file, seventy-five percent done and stalled for months, and pretended to read the last paragraph.
Clementine set her teacup down with more force than necessary. "Mr. Ashworth, I don't care how many alibis you claim to have. Someone moved that grandfather clock, and I intend to find out why."
She'd written that sentence months ago—the start of the final act—and hadn't been able to find the next one since.
She stared at the screen. The fantasy romance waited in the other tab, alive and demanding in ways the mystery hadn't been in a long time.
"Outlet situation in the corner is terrible," a voice said.
Her eyes lifted from the screen. He was standing beside her table, laptop tucked under one arm, coffee in the other hand. Up close, she saw details she'd missed before. The silver ring on his thumb, the faded venue name on his T-shirt now close enough to almost read. A date from years ago.
"There's one under the window," she said, gesturing. "You have to move the chair."
"Ah." He crouched down, found it, and straightened with a satisfied nod. "Crisis averted." He didn't move to leave. "I noticed you're here again."
The outlet had been a pretense. She didn't mind.
"I noticed you noticing."
He laughed, surprised out of himself. "Fair enough." He set his coffee on the table and extended his hand. "Clint."
"Jen."
He accepted that with a nod, which she appreciated. "Mind if I join you? Seems a shame to waste a working outlet."
She was here to work. She had a mystery to write, an editor to appease, a career to maintain.
"Go ahead," she said, and moved her bag off the chair across from her.
They worked in parallel for the first hour.
Not silence, really. There was the ambient noise of the coffee shop, the whir of the espresso machine, someone's phone buzzing every few minutes.
But they didn't talk. Clint had one earbud in, the other dangling loose.
He worked the way he had last time. Bursts of typing, phone checks, the paperback for resets.
She matched his rhythm, typing when he typed, pausing when he paused.
Once, she glanced up to rest her eyes and found him watching her over the top of his laptop. He looked back at his screen without saying anything, but she'd caught it.
At some point, she noticed two full pages on the screen. Not the mystery. The fantasy. The world with two moons had pulled her back in, and she'd stopped fighting it.
"Can I ask you something?"
Her attention lifted. Clint had pushed his laptop aside, focused entirely on her.
"Depends on the question."
"What are you working on? You've got that look."
"What look?"
"The one where you're somewhere else entirely. Like whatever's on that screen has you completely absorbed." He smiled, sheepish. "I only ask because I haven't had that look in about six months, and I'm trying to figure out how to get it back."
She could have said "just work stuff" and left it there. But the question felt honest, the admission embedded inside it, and she told him the truth.
"I'm supposed to be writing a cozy mystery.
It's what I do. What I've always done." She gestured at the screen, then dropped her hand.
"But for the last few months, this other thing has been happening instead.
Fantasy romance. A woman at the edge of a forest that shouldn't exist, magic she doesn't understand yet.
" She heard herself and winced. "It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud. "
"It doesn't sound ridiculous." Clint leaned forward, elbows on the table. "It sounds like the thing that actually wants to exist."
"That's not how publishing works."
"No. But it's how making things works." He picked up his coffee, found it empty, set it back down.
"I play guitar in a band. We've been together almost twelve years.
We tour most of the year, put out a record every couple of years.
Nothing you'd hear on the radio, but we've built something real.
Enough of a following that this is all I do.
" No false modesty in it. "We're doing a summer residency at the Hard Rock in Atlantic City this year. Thursdays through August."
That explained the calluses on his fingertips.
"That sounds amazing."
"It is. It was." He ran a hand through his hair. "But lately I've been writing stuff that doesn't fit what we do. Different sound, different feel. The guys aren't sure about it." He shrugged. "So I started slipping one or two into the sets anyway. To see what happens."
"So what do you do?"
"Come here. Stare at the screen. Read someone else's book and feel jealous of how easily it seems to have come to them." He gestured at the paperback. "Same as everyone else."
"That's bleak."
"Little bit." But he was smiling. "What's the fantasy about? If you don't mind me asking."
She explained it. The hero who appeared from the tree line like he'd been waiting for her.
The slow burn between them as he taught her to see the magic.
The secrets he was keeping, and the ones she didn't know she had.
Clint asked questions, good ones, the kind that made her think harder about things she'd written instinctively.
He didn't laugh. He didn't tell her it sounded like every other fantasy romance on the market.
Somewhere in the middle of explaining, she realized he wasn't just listening. His eyes were on her face, following the way her hands moved when she talked. She lost her train of thought for a second then found it again.
By the time she finished, something in Jen had loosened. Not because he'd given her answers, but because he'd listened like what she was making mattered, even the messy, unfinished, not-supposed-to-exist version of it.
"You already know what you want to do," Clint said. "You're just afraid of what happens if you actually do it."
"It's not that simple."
"It's exactly that simple." He held her gaze. "It's just not easy."
She was about to respond when a voice cut through the coffee shop noise.
"Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh."
A woman had stopped beside their table. Midfifties, vacation tan, oversized sunglasses pushed up into blond hair. She was staring at Jen with the intensity of someone who had just recognized a celebrity.
"You're Amber Carr, aren't you? I knew it. I said to my husband, I said, that woman at the coffee shop looks just like Amber Carr, and he said I was being ridiculous, but I'm never wrong about these things."
Her face warmed. Surprise, a flush of pride she hadn't expected. She'd been nobody for an hour. Now she was Amber Carr again.
"I've read every single Clementine Fields mystery," the woman continued, not waiting for confirmation.
"Every single one. I started with A Bitter Brew in Brambleton and I've been hooked ever since.
My book club did Murder at the May Ball last spring, and half of us thought the gardener did it, but I knew it was the professor's wife.
Something about the way she kept bringing up the orchids. "
Across the table, Clint was listening to all of this. Jen kept her eyes on the woman.
"Thank you," Jen said. "That really means a lot. The orchid detail, I worked so hard on that clue, hoping someone would catch it. You have a good eye."
"And the new one, when is the new one coming out? We've been waiting ages. Clementine and Detective Stovers, are they finally going to get together? My friend Linda says there's too much romantic tension to keep them apart much longer, and I have to agree."
"I'm still working on it," Jen said, managing a real smile. "But I promise it'll be worth the wait. And thank you. Readers like you are the reason I get to keep doing this."
"Well, don't keep us waiting too long." The woman reached into her purse and pulled out a receipt and a pen. "Could I get an autograph? For my friend Linda. She's going to die when she finds out I met you."
Jen signed the receipt. Smiled for the photo the woman insisted on taking. She told the woman how much it meant to meet readers like her, how book clubs were her favorite audiences, and promised Linda would get her answers soon.
When the woman left at last—still talking, waving the signed receipt like a trophy—the ease between them had shifted.