Always & Forever: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (ABCs of Love Collection, Books 1 - 4)

by Brenna Jacobs

  “I know Emerson. I meant the other guy.”

  “Ah. Luther Van Dijk. He’s delivering the keynote tomorrow.”

  Aidan knew Van Dijk’s name mainly because too many of his writer friends had an unnatural fear of him, convinced that he would make or break their careers in a single review. And unfortunately, in some cases, they were right. Aidan didn’t have to worry about him. Van Dijk didn’t read genre fiction, just the kind of arty or nihilistic stuff that regular people hated and brainiacs loved. The only thing Aidan currently liked less than those books was the way Luther was leaning toward Emma, his hand resting on her arm. And the only thing Aidan liked less than that was the clawing, competitive feeling it gave him. That was a bogus macho response, one he’d seen land too many men in hot water for letting the feeling overwhelm them.

  “So, buy you that drink?” Gary prompted him.

  “Actually, I think I’ll take a raincheck. Just realized there’s some research I probably need to do.”

  Gary made a shooing motion with his hands. “I’m never going to argue with our top earning writer when he says he wants to work.”

  Aidan slipped out, feeling conflicted that Emma hadn’t noticed him. Was he thankful because he would have felt stupid that she’d know he’d seen her out with another man? Or irritated because she hadn’t sensed him even though he had suddenly developed a sixth sense for when she was in a room?

  All he knew when he closed the door to his hotel room a little too hard a few minutes later was that he didn’t like the way he felt. So what was he going to do about it?

  Chapter Eleven

  Emma showed up for Luther’s keynote in plenty of time to get a good seat near the front. She’d spent about an hour with him at the bar last night while he went through three fingers of Scotch and she nursed a glass of wine. She had hoped to talk to him about how he approached teaching, both to glean some tips for her own writing, but also approaches she could try in her classes. Even more importantly, she’d hoped to make enough of an impression on him that he’d ask to see her work. And then . . . fix it.

  She had failed on the first count. Their conversation had mostly been about her mother and her mother’s literary friends, people she knew well from listening in when they’d come to pay homage to her mother over the years. He’d pressed her for details of the visitors, and Emma had trotted out the most impressive names she could remember seeing in their Massachusetts home. It was a party trick she hated, but since that was the card she’d played to get his attention, she could hardly blame him for following up.

  On the second count, making an impression, she hoped she’d fared better. He seemed to find her stories interesting, and though he’d gotten more buzzed as the night went on, she hoped he’d enjoyed their conversation enough to talk to her again, this time about literature and teaching. And fixing her novel. At the very least, she’d be able to take note of his keynote delivery and maybe pick up some pointers for her own university lectures.

  She glanced around the patio for him, but he hadn’t yet arrived. She pulled out a notebook and pen so she would be ready when he did. It wasn’t “cool” to take notes at stuff like this, but she didn’t care. She wanted to retain as much as possible.

  Maggie took the seat beside her and shook her head at the notebook. “He’s not even a writer,” she said. “If George Saunders or someone was talking, I’d be taking notes too. But a critic? You’re so keyed up, you look like you’re about to fall off your seat. Just listen and any good stuff will stick.”

  “He has a masterful insight into the way a reader’s mind works, so yes, I’m going to take notes, just like I’m always nagging my students to do.”

  But Luther wasn’t the reason Emma crackled with enough nervous energy to power the hotel’s electrical grid. It was the memory of the evening before she’d gone to meet Luther. The Aidan part of the night. The Aidan by the lake beneath a half-sleepy moon part of the night.

  The very good kiss part of the night.

  It was astonishing how quickly the world had shrunk down to the single point of heat that was her and Aidan, and the soft slide of his lips. The second his watch had buzzed, she’d felt . . . disappointment. But then, right after, almost a greater sense of relief. They’d been connected for only a few seconds, and yet she’d never managed to disappear from herself so completely, to have every thought disappear, to be so intensely inside the experience instead of inside her own head.

  But she was very much in her head now. And she’d run a dozen different scenarios about how it might play out when she saw Aidan today. Now she kept an eye out for him, not wanting to be caught unawares, while she ran the opening line she’d chosen through her mind again.

  Hi.

  It sounded simple, but she’d thought of all the other possibilities before settling on it.

  Long time, no see. Clichéd. Clichés were only for writers with impoverished imaginations.

  I had a great time last night. Boring. And unworthy of someone who dealt in words. But also maybe it was unintentionally flirtatious? And did she want to be flirtatious? She didn’t know.

  The debate in her head had gone on so long that she got sick of herself and settled on “Hi.” It was succinct, spare. It made the point. All marks of a good writer.

  She scanned the patio again, craning her head to see if Aidan had slipped into the back without her noticing.

  A deep, warm voice said, “Hi,” from her other side, and she squeaked and twisted to find him settling into the empty seat beside her. He wore a shirt the same green as the trees rimming the lake, and he hadn’t shaved yet. She’d thought he was attractive when he was clean cut, but the five o’clock shadow made her mouth go dry. She swallowed hard. When she felt a soft nudge from Maggie, she realized she hadn’t answered him yet. What had she meant to say? Oh. Yeah.

  “Hi.” That shouldn’t have been so hard to remember given how many times she’d rehearsed it. But now what? She couldn’t think of a thing.

  He glanced at her notebook and pen. “Excited for this keynote?”

  “Yes. I’m a big fan of his podcast. I’m hoping to pick up some ideas for teaching.”

  He only nodded, but a look of distaste had flashed over his face before he composed it again.

  “You don’t like him?” she asked.

  “I don’t know him.”

  In the few times they’d spent together, she had noticed how carefully he watched situations and people, the way he assessed them. She bet it had to do with his lawyer days, when he’d learned to read witnesses and juries. “I think you have an opinion of him anyway.”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t met him. I’ll keep it to myself. Get any writing done this morning?”

  She let him switch the subject, and they chatted with Maggie about how much work they’d been able to do during the retreat so far. A couple of minutes later, Gary Reznick walked in with Luther right behind him, and the agency president welcomed everyone and introduced Luther.

  Emma listened to his credentials again with renewed awe. She’d known he was a heavyweight in the literary world, but she grew even more impressed by the sheer number of genius writers and editors who had praised him as “incisive,” “searingly truthful,” and from the particularly hard to please editor of the Paris Review, “an unmatched genius in uncovering truths writers didn’t even know they were telling, both the excruciating and the sublime.”

  She shot a look at Aidan after that one, but while he wore a polite listening expression, he didn’t seem bowled over. Well, he would see. Then Luther himself rose to take the podium, and for the next forty minutes, she scribbled like mad, trying to capture every bit of his wisdom. And there was so much of it. He talked about the shape of stories, their necessity to human condition, and their moral imperative to tell unflinching truths. She thought she heard a soft snort from Aidan at this, but she didn’t want to stop jotting even to take a quick glance.

  When Luther concluded, Aidan clapped, but it was the s
ame kind of clap Emma gave when she went to parties in friends’ homes and their children insisted on performing an impromptu skit or dance routine.

  It didn’t matter. Luther had shown the same brilliance that marked his podcast, and she brimmed with ideas for retooling her literature lectures.

  When the applause died down, Aidan got to his feet. “Can I treat you to some free cheese?” He nodded toward the midafternoon buffet.

  Before she could answer, Luther walked up. “Emerson! So glad you could attend.”

  Aidan took a step back. “I just remembered an email I owe my agent. I better take care of that. If I don’t see you later, it was good talking to you.”

  “You too,” Emma said, watching after him for a second as he left, walking right past his agent he was supposedly going to email.

  She would have loved to ask Maggie what she thought that was all about, but Luther touched her arm and smiled down at her. “Did you enjoy my talk?”

  “So much,” she said.

  “Appreciated your remarks, Luther,” Maggie said. “I need to get back to my manuscript, if you two will excuse me.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Anything in particular that resonated with you?” he asked Emma as Maggie also walked away.

  “I’d love to talk to you more about your insights on post-structuralism.”

  “Sure, sure. Over dinner?”

  She’d thought she and Aidan would get dinner since it was the last night before the retreat ended, but his goodbye had sounded . . . weirdly final? “That sounds great,” she told Luther.

  And it was. It was a far different kind of dinner than she’d had with Aidan. Luther talked, and she soaked it all in, making mental notes and wishing that it wasn’t the height of gaucheness for her to write it all down at the table. Every statement he made was a gem, and she shaped and reshaped her next semester’s lectures as he spoke.

  By the time she went to bed, her head was buzzing with all kinds of new ideas and a full list of new novels and critics she needed to read. But beneath the excitement, there was a faint sour note too, because there hadn’t been a trace of Aidan the whole evening. No effort to connect a final time before they left, no suggestion for seeing each other again when they returned to Whidbey Island.

  When she packed her bag the next morning, she yanked the zipper closed extra hard and decided that she didn’t really care about Aidan’s silence. That kiss had been nothing, really.

  Nothing short of magical.

  She plopped on the bed with a sigh. The thing was, they spent at least half of their conversations either fighting or apologizing to each other. No amount of kissing would fix that.

  Although she’d kind of wanted the chance to find out.

  She hopped up from the bed. “Whatever,” she said aloud to the room. “What. Ev. Er.” She poked her head through the door. “Maggie?”

  “Ready.”

  When they got on the road back to Maggie’s house, they spent the four-hour drive gossiping about the industry insider stuff Maggie had coaxed out of Valeria. But only after Emma convinced Maggie there was less than nothing to say about Aidan.

  She might have believed it herself if it weren’t for the number of times he kept coming to mind during the following week. She’d turned in her grades and begun reworking her syllabus before the new semester started the following week. She bookmarked dozens of links to reviews by the tiny handful of other critics Luther respected.

  She could see why he did. They were brilliant men, but the more she read of their intelligent analyses of books, the less she wanted to dive back into her own novel. Here and there, it had sentences, ideas, images, that made her proud. But there was a huge gap between what she had written so far and the kind of genius these critics rightly expected from the books that would win their praise and the praise of people like them.

  Like her mother.

  Almost as if thinking of her had summoned her, Arianna Lindsor called.

  “How was your retreat, sweetheart?” Arianna asked after giving Emma a long rundown of all the events she’d been to over the last week. Two lectures, a signing, a panel, and of course, her own classes. She taught two graduate seminars at Columbia. Because of course she taught at Columbia; it was the most renowned MFA program for writers in the country.

  In truth, the one at the University of Iowa turned out far more award-winning authors, but Arianna Lindsor wasn’t going to live in Iowa. Not for love or money.

  So Emma heard the list of Arianna’s literary adventures over several minutes before her mother finally wound down and asked, “And how was your retreat?”

  “It was great.”

  “Did you get any further with your book?”

  Her mother always asked her this question, and Emma hated it every time. “Not in terms of pages. But I had some conversations and heard some speeches that were thought-provoking. I think I’ll be able to find some of the layers in this story now.” She knew no such thing, of course, but she wasn’t about to admit that to her mother.

  “Hmmm. I’m surprised but happy for you. I thought this would be full of those genre writers. I think I’ve decided that the more garish the cover is, the more contrived the story will be, and the higher it will climb on the bestseller lists. I hope you’re not going to convert to any of that tacky, canned plotting advice that litters the internet. I swear I have to beat it out of at least one student every term.”

  “Actually, the one that really sunk in for me was from Luther Van Dijk.”

  There was a pause. “I had no idea he would be there. Now, his ideas carry some weight.”

  “He asked about you.”

  “Really? Tell me about your conversation.”

  Emma complied, knowing what her mother really wanted was to hear the parts concerning her.

  It was a relief when she found a place to end the call and get back to her curriculum redesign. She was so consumed by it that she barely even noticed that Aidan hadn’t reached out. But she wished she didn’t notice at all.

  By Friday morning, she had a challenging new outline to present to her incoming classes the following week. She waited for a sense of accomplishment to wash over her, but instead she had a feeling that reminded her of the time her grandmother had given Emma her one and only chocolate Easter bunny—Arianna Lindsor didn’t believe in commercial holidays—and Emma had bitten into it expecting a rich, chocolate treat and been startled that it was hollow inside.

  She looked at the new syllabus on her laptop screen. Every piece of it was there, every day clearly outlined, every reading assignment in the right place. She should feel warm and satisfied, not empty.

  Maybe she simply needed to dive back into fiction. She curled up in the armchair in her tiny living room to read the Swedish crime novel Luther had recommended. But for two hours, she had to fight to keep her attention on it. Something about it wasn’t landing right with her. Maybe it was because she knew that while the killer would be uncovered in the end, the justice would be hollow, not as satisfying as . . .

  Well, never mind whose thriller had given her a thrilling payoff.

  She sat straight up in the chair and tossed the book aside.

  She knew it wasn’t the less-than-satisfying book that was causing her restlessness, the sense of something missing. The problem was her writing. Or the lack of it, really.

  The only thing that was worse than drafting pages that were below standard was not drafting at all. She didn’t feel right when she didn’t write at least a few times a week. Write to feel right. It was something one of her mentors at Wellesley had said.

  Right.

  Write to feel right.

  Even if her words were somehow all wrong as they had been more and more lately, nothing but writing anyway would fix the rattling feeling inside her.

  She packed up her laptop before she could think about it too much more, about how her writing would fall far short of the mark that the critics she’d just packed her syllabus with would demand for
truly great literature. She slipped the Swedish novel into her laptop bag too. Maybe she’d read it during her brain breaks or when she got stuck on an image in her own work. It would be good multi-tasking to try to figure out what Luther had loved about this one since he’d be discussing it in his next podcast.

  She drove to her coffee shop and set up at her favorite table. Already she felt better for being out of her house, and she ordered the Happy Afternoon tea Hailey had recommended to her last time.

  She pulled up her manuscript, drank half her tea, blinked at the last page she’d written three times, and had cursed it twice beneath her breath when the door to the coffee shop opened.

  This wasn’t unusual. At least three other customers had come in already. But something in the air felt different, a charge to the molecules that told her who she would see standing there when she looked up.

  Aidan.

  He had a backpack slung over a shoulder and his eyes trained on her, like he’d simply been waiting for her to spot him. When she met his gaze, he smiled and crossed to her. “Hi. How have you been?”

  “Good,” she said, trying to figure out why he was here. She had the distinct feeling it was because of her.

  “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been in here every morning since Monday, hoping to see you.”

  Emma would need to find words for the feeling this sent through her chest, but at the moment she had none. It was a fluttery sensation that was both warm like a blanket, and electric, like a static shock. “That surprises me.”

  “Not as much as it surprises me. May I?” He placed his hand on the chair opposite her and pulled it out when she gave him a slight nod. “It’s usually better to sit for confessions.”

  Confessions?

  What in the world?

  Chapter Twelve

  Emma looked at him like he’d offered her a bomb, not a confession. He hurried to explain himself. “I’m sorry I was a jerk at the end of the weekend. I don’t know how to explain this, but . . .” He almost said she brought out a jealous side of him that he didn’t know he had, but immediately stopped himself. His emotions and reactions were not her responsibility. At all. “I was caught off guard by how well we connected. I took some space to think it through, but I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. I was in a mood I didn’t understand until I figured out that . . .” He stopped again, not sure what to say here.