Chapter 25
My phone pinged with a text.
Gabe: That kiss was one for the books. Maybe one of yours. ??
My heart. It might possibly explode from happiness. I lay there staring at his message.
Bubbles danced, and I knew he was saying something else.
Gabe: Am I moving too fast for you?
Sir, I’m thirty-eight. There’s only slow.
Me: I need fast. I can be overly cautious.
Gabe: Good to know.
The second day of the conference was just as good as the first. I met with an agent who didn’t feel like a fit, but it was good to have a conversation about my work with someone who was interested.
Dinner was a banquet where Gabe delivered the keynote. I’d never heard him speak, other than at his author talk when I largely
ignored what he was saying because I was so shocked that he had written Seasons. I was embarrassed about that now. What was it about me that made it impossible to just sit and celebrate him on that night?
I pushed the thought out of my head and listened to his bio and then the beginning of his speech. He started light, but then
I saw a shift in his posture and facial expressions that signaled he was about to get to the meat of his message. The profound
was coming.
Gabe paused at the podium, gaze sweeping the room, and said, “Every writer I know is trying to grow something—hope, healing,
truth, joy, sometimes even just a decent sentence. But nothing grows without tended soil. The heart is the garden before the
words ever become the harvest. If the soil is dry, the story will be too.”
A hush fell over the ballroom. He went on, voice steady but full of something deeper than craft talk. “In my community, the
Gullah Geechee people, we don’t just eat what we grow. We honor it. We talk to the ground, we water it with intention, we plant for the next generation. Writing is
no different. You can’t keep harvesting from the same tired row without ever putting anything back in. Sooner or later, the
field goes quiet.”
The words hit me like he’d walked to the stage, opened my heart, and read my unwritten pages right there.
He finished, and clearly the speech had been a rousing success.
The signing was a public event. His line wrapped down the hall and steps.
I tried to count but couldn’t keep up. There had to be more than three hundred people waiting for him.
I was one of them. I was still caught up in his words.
They’d hit me like a million pebbles in the soil.
I’d been trying to force a story out of scorched earth.
My heart wasn’t a garden. It was overworked soil, cracked and begging for rain.
And for the first time in weeks—maybe years—I felt the faintest tremor of something I’d thought I’d lost. Permission. Permission to stop producing and start tending. That thought would not leave me. I couldn’t even sleep. Gabe’s words had
me tossing and turning all night.
The ride home was a downgrade because we were on a regular commercial flight. Gabe tried to give me his first-class seat.
When I refused, he swapped with my more-than-willing seatmate so he could sit next to me.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I said. Secretly, I was glad he did, because I couldn’t take his seat. I wasn’t wired like that.
Gabe had notes to fine-tune for an upcoming symposium on Southern literature, and of course I needed to get work done, so
we both opened our laptops. I opened my phone and went back through the pictures Joy sent. It was easy to see the similarity
in our features—noses, eyes, jawlines. I sat with my thoughts about that. I had a relative, possibly more that I didn’t know
about, but what did family mean? This question kept coming to me on waves of wondering. Was it purely about DNA and blood
ties? Or was it about knowing and connecting with each other? She was my people. We shared DNA, and yet we were still strangers.
I was left conflicted, questioning the true essence of family. What was I supposed to do with my questions?
“What’s going on?” Gabe asked.
I’d told him about the DNA match to Joy and how we were trying to figure out how we were connected. I hadn’t included the
Edisto part yet. For some reason, it felt a little too private to share, which was unfair because he was an open book.
Gabe peeked at my screen and then raised his eyes to my face. “Someone’s writing.”
“Writing a new truth born from some tended soil.” I turned and looked at him.
He smiled. “I love when people pay attention.”
I laughed, reached for his hand, and squeezed before returning my fingers to my keyboard.
Opening my laptop, I began writing about a man—a hero who was emotionally intelligent, kind, empathetic, handsome, and smart.
It was Gabe. He was unfolding on the page. He’d been water and fertilizer to me this weekend in every way I needed him to
be.
It wasn’t long before the flight was over. We deplaned, and Gabe took me to the cabin. He had events in Greenville and Columbia
on Monday and Tuesday evening, and then he was flying out of Columbia headed to New York on Wednesday, where he’d be until
Sunday morning before flying to the West Coast on the following Tuesday. I was already missing him. My visual writer’s mind
imagined life with him. The two of us writing side by side or in different rooms, depending on where we were in the process
and how intense or not-so-intense it made us. We’d read our pages to each other. Plot together and travel to each other’s
events when we could, certainly local ones.
Gabe would be the kind of man who would make coffee in the morning and leave it on the nightstand when I slept later than
him. I would be the kind of woman who did the same. We’d cook together, and once a week we’d go to whatever food rave he had
tickets for. When we could, we’d lie on the sofa, tangled in a knot of limbs, and read books together.
I stole a peek at his profile and clocked the details. He was chiseled in a male-model kind of way, but so opposite of what
that represented on the inside. I was falling in love.
I might already be there.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.
My female pheromones were probably tugging at him. “I’m so glad I came with you. I didn’t realize how much I needed something like this.”
He nodded. His eyes were on me. Seriously, like he was waiting to say something but happy for me at the same time.
I felt obliged to keep talking because my pheromones had a hold on him. “You do stuff like this all the time. It’s probably
just another work weekend for you.”
“Not really,” he said.
“No?”
“The average work weekend hasn’t included . . . you.” Light entered his eyes, and I wanted to kiss him. He stepped closer,
pulled me to his rock-hard chest, and locked his eyes with mine. “I wanted two things this weekend.”
“What?”
“I wanted you to feel inspired, which you do. I could see that from the way you hit those keys on the plane.”
“And . . .” I pushed for something more interesting than writing.
“And I wanted to confirm that this chemistry that I’ve been feeling between us is real.”
I looked down at the cross hanging around his neck and back up into his eyes. “And what have you surmised about it?”
“I’m pretty good at knowing when a woman has affection for me and is attracted to me, but I don’t want to presume I’m right
just because I’ve been kissing you and you haven’t slapped my face. You tell me.”
I wasn’t looking at his mouth, but somehow it was all I could see. “You’re not wrong.”
“About one or both?”
“You know I’m feelin’ you. Don’t play.”
He laughed, and his chest vibrated against mine. Smile lines creased around his eyes. “I’ll take that as attraction verified.”
I resisted the urge to kiss his chin. “You wake up the butterflies in my belly.”
“Such a writer line,” he cooed. He cocked his head to the left and squinted like he was trying to see me more clearly. “Now
that both have been verified, I feel better about . . .” His words trailed off.
I couldn’t take my eyes off his mouth. “About what?”
“This,” he replied, covering my lips with his. I melted right there on the porch, in his arms, against his chest, under the
weight of my feelings and fears. I was his.