Chapter 20
Chapter
Twenty
“If you do not have the courage to be yourself, what will you be?”
— THE SILVER ELVES, LIVING THE PERSONAL MYTH: MAKING THE MAGIC OF FAERIE REAL IN ONE’S OWN LIFE
T he woodchuck grinned at me.
Its cute little head poked right up out of its burrow, and it was smiling into the camera. Okay, so smiling was an exaggeration, but it sure looked like a very happy mammal.
Possibly this was because, in the photograph, Maverick was five feet away, holding out a fistful of wildflowers. Unlike the woodchuck, Maverick was not looking at the camera. He was literally giving it his back. As his back was big, broad, and wrapped in flannel, my heart gave a happy leap of its own, heat dancing through me.
He was the handsomest, hottest man of them all. At least in my eyes. Which was, really, all that mattered.
I told myself it was fine to miss him. Lying on my sun lounger, soaking in the perfect Los Angeles sunshine like a heat-loving skink, I wished he was here. Or that I was there with him in Tennessee. He was out there being a badass biologist and stomping around the woods, luring cute little woodchucks, while I was hanging poolside with cucumber slices in my Evian water.
Maverick: This is the only picture of myself I have on my phone.
Sonnet: Are you the only human alive who doesn’t take selfies?
Maverick: Nope.
Sonnet: Are you sure? I think it’s a rule of smartphone ownership. They give you a phone, you agree to take selfies and send them to your girlfriend.
Maverick: FYI, no one gives you a phone. There’s this thing called money. And capitalism. If you want a picture, you can take one of me this week.
Sonnet: How do you feel about tasteful boudoir photographs?
Maverick: Is this your way of telling me you want to see me naked?
Sonnet: Is this where I pretend to be a lady?
Maverick: Only if that’s what you want to be.
Sonnet: I totally want to see you naked.
“Why are you smiling like that?” Elena asked from right beside me. “And you should say thank you for all the sunshine I brought you today.”
I startled, almost falling off the lounger. She’d snuck up on me while I was admiring Maverick’s woodchuck, and she was reading my phone screen over my shoulder. I immediately reverted to five years old, squealed, and clutched my phone to my chest.
“This is private!”
“Why? Who is it?”
“Because I said so!” Some sisterly dynamics never change. I would need to change my phone passcode when she wasn’t looking.
The look she gave me was patronizing and one-hundred-percent big sister. “You have no privacy.”
Elena was referring to the incident when a particularly enterprising person had flown a drone past my window while I’d been trying on bathing suits for a hypothetical vacation that I’d never gotten to take. Various online sites had spent months debating whether a “woman of my size” had any business wearing a string bikini in public and what it would take for me to achieve a bikini body.
News flash: I had a body, and I had a bikini. Ergo, I had a bikini body.
“Just because other people have hacked into my stuff doesn’t make it okay for you to look.” I clutched my phone tighter to my chest. Elena was a master at tickle fights.
“You’re a household name,” Elena said primly. “You therefore cannot expect to have the same level of privacy as the people you meet at the grocery store. People want to know more about you. They think they already know you and that you all are friends.”
I waited for her to round into her conclusion. We’d had this conversation approximately a billion times (only a slight exaggeration), but this was the first time she’d kicked it off by spying on my phone.
“And in order to continue at this level of success,” she said, indeed bringing it home, “you have to feed the beast. And the beast demands a diet of Instagram posts. Pictures. What’s in my bag. GRWM. People want to know all the things.”
“Fine. But you still don’t get to look at my phone. I expect better from you.”
To give Elena credit, she looked mildly ashamed. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have looked. I apologize. Now, who are you texting?”
I decided I could work with this. Also, I was going to change my passcode just as soon as I went to the bathroom.
Too happy to consider Elena’s reaction to my news, I announced, “I’m seeing someone!”
“In Tennessee?” Elena’s voice held a healthy dose of skepticism.
“There are awesome people in Tennessee.”
“Sure.” She sounded unconvinced. Should I go to bat for the fine people in our sixteenth state? “Wait. Is it Luke? He’s in Tennessee. Are you guys back together?”
“No. Absolutely not. That’s the hardest hard no ever.”
“Thom? That would be a great narrative for the London premiere. It could work.”
“NO. He’s not an actor.”
“Is it Bob?”
“Who?” Did I even know any Bobs who weren’t of the battery-operated boyfriend variety?
“Bob,” she said impatiently. “The junior executive producer for Wolf Girl . He was at yesterday’s casting event.”
“Wow. That would be fast. And no.” I’d spent every second at that event sneaking peeks at my phone to see if my sexy professor had messaged me. Which he had. Often. I’d made so many trips to the bathroom to text him back from the privacy of a stall that I suspected there would be internet rumors that I was pregnant or doing drugs. “My guy’s not in the industry at all. He’s a college professor.”
“Who is?”
“My man. He’s a biologist who teaches at the local community college in Moonlight Valley.” I scrolled through my text messages until I found the picture of him and his woodchuck and showed it to my sister.
She looked at it for a long moment and started laughing. It was super cute, but I was confused. I double-checked to make sure it wasn’t one of those live photos or that I hadn’t overlooked some misbehavior on the part of either mammal. Nope. It was all aboveboard. It was just the woodchuck and Maverick’s world’s-best, flannel-covered shoulders.
“You’re too much, Sonnet.” Elena flopped down on the lounge chair next to me. Never mind that she was wearing a dry-clean only pantsuit. A black pantsuit. In eighty-degree weather. She whispered something under her breath and a cooling mist sprang up around her chair.
“I don’t understand what’s so funny.” Usually, I loved laughter. It was literally the sound of money in the bank for me. Today, however, I was disliking it.
Elena cackled. I waited not so patiently.
“Explain it to me,” I said.
My sister blinked at me, pausing, as if she thought I was halfway through the joke and there was a punchline coming. When I said nothing, she stopped laughing. “Oh my god, are you serious?” She grabbed the phone and swiped from the woodchuck photo to the kissing photo. “This has to be a joke. What is this?”
“That would be two people who have feelings for each other expressing those feelings. It’s called kissing. You should try it.”
“He is glued to you. Who took this?”
“I did.”
“Does he have a copy? Does anyone?”
“I took it with his phone, and he air-dropped it to me.”
She stared at me blankly, as if my use of technology to promote my love life did not compute. She made a little hissing sound like a shook-up can of Coke about to explode. When she did speak, her voice was flatter than day-old soda, however. “The professor has this exact same picture on his phone? Are you trying to sabotage your career? Are you so desperate for that vacation you want that you’ll sabotage yourself?”
I gulped my cucumber water, stalling for time. Were my feelings for Maverick a convenient out from my career? Was I exhausted and searching for excuses?
“Sonnet?”
I mean, I was definitely tired. And desperate for a break. And yeah, I had an issue with how Elena had brought it up, as if I hadn’t earned a vacation or didn’t know how to ask for one. Wasn’t it my life, my career, my choice?
Yes, yes it was.
“It’s not sabotage,” I said firmly. “And my having a personal relationship that makes me happy is not some secret time-off strategy. If I decide to take a vacation, I’ll use Expedia. Maverick is one of the good guys, not a problem we have to proactively deal with.”
Maverick had nothing to do with my TV career. Did he? Could I be using him, even subconsciously, to force an escape from the celebrity life I hated so much? If I was, that was the silver lining on the cape of Maverick’s awesomeness.
And so what? If being in a relationship with a man I cared deeply about motivated me to make life changes that I also cared deeply about? That hurt no one. That was good .
“When he sells that picture to TMZ along with an erotic novel-worthy description of your torrid Tennessee love affair, don’t ask me to clean it up.”
I shoved my phone under the lounger cushion.
Angry heat prickled my face.
I truly didn’t understand her being upset, but it made me feel embarrassed and confused. Sick to my stomach. Our relationship wasn’t like that. Defend his honor. Maverick would stick up for you—you stick up for him. We are partners .
“What is WRONG with you?” I burst out.
“What is WRONG WITH ME?!! You just announced that you’re dating some random biologist. From Tennessee! How do you think your fans and the studio are going to react to that?”
“I don’t care what they think. It’s not their business.”
“It is their business. They sign your paycheck.”
Since the success of my first book, I’d lived my new celebrity life with one rule: do not care.
Do not read the reviews.
Never read the comments.
It was paralyzing, the number of opinions out there about what I should or shouldn’t do. What was important was that I wrote the best books and acted to the best of my ability. I did a good job, and then I went home.
But Elena did care. She read all those comments, and she took them to heart. She wanted to give people the version of Sonnet Ruiz that they asked for. And more often than I cared to admit, her caring made me reevaluate my career choices. I took on more projects because she wanted me to do so. I did or didn’t do things—like take a vacation—because of the script she’d written for me. About who Sonnet Ruiz should be. I hadn’t wanted to let her down, so I’d done what she needed.
But that had to stop. It wasn’t just me being affected by her choices for my life anymore—it was Maverick.
“They don’t know me, Elena. My life isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure book where they flip the pages. I get to make my own choices.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she ground out.
Sunlight bounced off the pool. My hair and makeup team would be here soon to glam me up for our last event before I headed back to Tennessee.
“They call me names, Elena. I’m fat, lazy, and undisciplined—because I’m not skinny. I’m successful at exactly the size I am—in fact, my success is size-independent—and they hate that. They hate that I’m a woman who writes outsized, funny scripts and makes big bucks doing so. I color outside their black-and-white lines, and I don’t follow their rules about how I should look or act. I’m a big, fat success, and I don’t care how they define either fat or success .”
Elena shot upright. She spoke over me. “You think not caring is the secret to your success? Think again. You succeed because I care . Because I push you. I am the reason you’re taken seriously in this industry. You would be nothing without me.”
I felt sick. Was this what she’d been thinking for years and years and YEARS? We weren’t sisters and partners against the world? Two fat women succeeding on their own terms because fuck the people who say that fat is bad? This was all her doing and I was—what? An accessory? Was I a cute little plastic Barbie shoe?
Elena slumped backward. She smacked a hand over her face. “I’m sorry. It’s my day for apologizing, apparently. That didn’t come out right.”
You bet your sweet ass it didn’t.
Also: I disagreed.
“Pretty much every day I’ve come face-to-face with people who think I should be embarrassed. About my size, the way I look, how loudly I laugh, what I write about. How dare I not want to look the way they think I should look? I choose not to care about their opinions. Some of the crap is easy ignore, but sometimes it’s hurtful or belittling. Sometimes, it’s downright mean, and it’s always ignorant. I’ve spent my career refusing to be ashamed of who I am, so why on earth would I be ashamed about Maverick?”
“His name is Maverick?” Her tone held a worried edge.
“Like the truck,” I confirmed. “His brothers are also named after trucks. They trap animals for a living.”
That was a slight exaggeration, but she deserved to imagine a bunch of fur-trapping, redneck Southerners messing up her grand plans for “our” career.
“Couldn’t you at least have dated an Ivy League professor? You had to hook up with some guy from Tennessee? Does he come with a yard full of rusted-out cars and broken-down tractors?”
“He has a gorgeous home, a loving family, and a huge brain. He also has ethics. And we’re not hooking up. We’re falling for each other, and I’m more than halfway in love with him.”
“Does he know about your magic? About the glamour?”
He sure did. I nodded.
“And you think he can keep that secret? That he won’t ‘accidentally’ let it drop to the media or a good friend of his?”
“He won’t. He wouldn’t.”
He actually couldn’t , if I was being fair, because he was a werewolf. If he outed me, he risked outing his pack and all the other wolves living in Moonlight Valley, and Maverick would never force his choices on others.
It was that don’t hurt people rule of his combined with his big, open, loving heart. He protected those he cared about and if the wolves ever did decide to do the big reveal, he’d make sure there was a unanimous vote and a safety plan. The wolves were safe.
I was safe.
Elena shook her head impatiently. “But?—”
I was not going to defend my choice. I didn’t have to defend my choice. I’d made it, and now Elena could choose to accept Maverick—or not.
I was still hoping that she would.
“We’re a couple,” I said firmly. “We’re together.”
Elena stared at me, her expression one of reluctant acceptance and conniving planning. She was spinning us, spinning our story, putting a Hollywood twist on our romance. I understood she wanted what she thought was best for me. But she was focused on my career, my bank account, my success.
There was no room in her planner for my heart.
“Alright. I guess we can discuss this later.” My sister checked the time on her phone, then blew out a breath. “You have an event.”
I met her gaze. We faced off. Two elephant seals rammed each other. Water splashed. The breeding site was at stake.
She looked away first. “You need to go get ready. Fight with me later.”
“Fine. I’m going.” I stood up, but I had one point I needed to make before I stomped into the house. “But there will be no ‘discussing’ anything if you can’t be happy for the two of us.”