I wipe my palms on my tattered sweatpants and flick a fallen piece of tortilla chip off my thigh. I’m wearing a crisp white button-down blouse and three varying length gold necklaces. My computer screen only shows my top half, so I still have on my pajama bottoms. As Camryn would say, I’m fancy lady on the top, couch potato on the bottom.
The longer I stare at Jill’s blunt-cut asymmetrical bob, the more my self-doubt grows from a liquid into a block of concrete.
Jill continues to page through the spiral bound stack, stopping somewhere near the end. She folds her hands on top of the open pages and finally looks at me.
“I love it,” she says simply.
All the breath I’d been holding whooshes out of me. My shoulders lower from where they’ve been stuck at my earlobes and return to the place where they should be.
“You really know how to terrify a girl,” I joke, adjusting the gold ‘A’ charm on one of my necklaces. “I thought you were about to tell me you hated it.”
“Not at all. I loved the way you involved the therapist. I’m a big fan of normalizing therapy.” Jill’s hair shifts around her face as she speaks, and she brushes it back with her hands. “It’s a solid book, so far. Engaging. I read it all the way through in one sitting. I needed to know what was going to happen next.” She holds up a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, there are some spots where I see room for improvement. I’m not sure about the ending.”
My brows furrow. “The ending?”
Jill clears her throat. “Yeah. I see the ending coming a mile away.”
An uncertain smile bends my lips. “Can you tell me what it is? Because even I don’t know the ending yet.”
Jill grins. I think she likes me, but it’s hard to know. She’s not an easy read. Her happiness with me could just as easily be amusement. Her long pauses are probably just her giving herself space to contemplate what she was thinking the day she took a chance on a debut author. I’m positive if she weren’t Dani’s aunt, she wouldn’t have given me the time of day.
“Right now,” Jill says, looking directly at me. I swear I feel it in my soul. “It looks like she’s going to skip off into the sunset with the new guy. Do you really think it should be that easy forher? Where’s the conflict? You don’t want it venturing into All Dogs Go To Heaven territory.”
I haven’t seen that movie since I was a kid, but I understand the reference and what she’s really saying. “It’s a romance,” I remind her cautiously. “If I don’t supply a happily ever after, I’ll get burned at the stake.” There’s also the small part that I haven’t figured out the ending yet. But no matter, because Jill seems game to argue the hypothetical.
Jill’s head metronomes. “It’s also women’s fiction. So you don’t necessarily have to have an HEA.”
In normal life, not everybody gets a happily ever after. I know that all too well. But in fictional life? I’d love to send my characters off into cotton candy clouds and bliss personified.
“What would a different ending look like?” I’m curious.
Jill ticks off ideas on her hands. “Nobody gets the girl. She saves herself. She rides off into the sunset on her own white horse.”
I like that idea. Love it, actually. But I’m not sure if I love it in theory because it soundsboss bitchandgirl powerand all that, or if it’s really the path I want my character to take. There’s also the matter that I haven’t been completely truthful with Jill. She doesn’t know how closely this book follows my journey.
I push that thought away and focus on the here and now. If I dig my heels in about the ending, I might take away my chance to tell it at all. I lift my hands in surrender. “Let’s leave it open-ended for now while I work through the second half of the story.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Jill says. She looks down at her watch. “I have to jump. Another meeting starts in ten and my bladder is about to explode.”
We hang up after I promise to keep chugging along on the second half of my book.
The problem is, I’m not sure what to write.
Because I’m currently living it. How do you write an ending to a story based on your life experience when you haven’t reached it yet?
Maybe Jill is right. Maybe the ending is me riding off on a white horse by myself. It wouldn’t be a bad ending. There’s just this part of me, tiny but mighty, a holdover from all my years pining for the life I envisioned for myself, that’s having a hard time jumping on that white horse. Maybe it’s because I had that life, the one I dreamed about. Maybe it’s because itwasall it was cracked up to be. Before it was marred by pain, resentment, and the just plain ugly, it was glorious. Or, maybe it’s because I saw Gabriel again.
The happily ever after has claws. Imagine that.
CHAPTER 4
GABRIEL
For the pasteighteen hours I’ve been absent-minded in the truest sense of the word. I’ve made dinner and watched it burn as I relived the widening of Avery’s eyes when she saw me. I forgot I was supposed to watch Joel’s dog this weekend while he and his wife are away. He dropped her off with me this morning, and I pretended not to be surprised at their arrival.
Joel hasn’t asked me about Avery yet, but I know it’s coming. Given the way I acted when I saw her, how could he not be curious? When I walked back into work after Avery drove off, all Joel did was hand me two towels, and leave me alone. I went to the bathroom and dried off. I had packed clothes to go to the gym after work, so I changed into them. I didn’t make it to the gym, though. I was too shocked to do much of anything.
In an effort to work off a little of this extra energy, I’m attempting to take Dixie for a run. It’s not going well.
