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

by Brenna Jacobs

  “Hmmm, yes. How’s the expo going so far?” he asked. “Reeking of manic desperation from people trying to see and be seen?”

  She smiled. “Speaking of turns of phrase, that’s a good one. Maybe you should take up writing fiction too.”

  “No, my gift is to take it apart, not put it together. Is your schedule packed this evening? I have to go keep office hours at the moment, but I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on this. I get tired of boring academics. You’re a far funnier and more interesting academic.”

  Was this a lead-in to suggest a date? It was borderline flirtatious, but if he was going to flirt with her, complimenting her mind was the way to do it. And if it was a date that Luther was suggesting, it didn’t mean Aidan was right, that Luther’s interest in her was unseemly. It didn’t matter either way. She had a bulletproof excuse not to find out. “I’m supposed to have dinner with my mother.”

  “That’s even more perfect,” he said. “I’d love for you both to be my guests at Aquavit. It’s my favorite restaurant. Childhood and all that.”

  Emma did know it, but only by reputation. It had multiple Michelin stars for its Scandinavian-inspired food, and it was a generous offer. She suspected her mother wouldn’t mind a slight adjustment to their plans.

  As if he was afraid she would decline, Luther rested his hand on her arm. “Please say yes. I’m starved for an intellectual match. I’ll be put out if you make me eat alone.”

  She had intended to say yes anyway, but his light joke served to remind her that there was a power dynamic at play here, and Luther had the greater power. She didn’t want to risk offending him if he was going to hold it against her and refuse to consult on her manuscript. “That would be lovely,” she told Luther. But it felt less lovely than it would have without the pressure he’d applied.

  “Excellent,” Luther replied, and after they set a time and he made her promise she and her mother would come, he excused himself.

  It wasn’t exactly the kind of attention women who were truly harassed complained of, but it brought Aidan’s warning to mind anyway. Was this the opening gambit in a seduction plan of Luther’s? It couldn’t be, not if he was inviting her mother. She brushed Aidan’s caution away. His law career had made him cynical.

  Emma called her mother as she walked back to the subway station, unsurprised when Arianna said yes to the change in dinner plans.

  “Luther Van Dijk and Aquavit? Why would I mind, sweetheart?” Her laugh had trilled across the line in response to Emma’s request. Of course her mother wouldn’t turn down five-star dining with the high profile critic. Emma just wished that she could be sure there wasn’t almost some relief mixed into it for her mother that she wouldn’t be forced to maintain a slightly strained conversation one-on-one with Emma for one whole meal.

  She had meant to return to the Javits Center and peruse the new releases, or to work on her lectures for the following week in her hotel room. Instead, she Googled the most famous bookstore in New York, The Strand, and spent the afternoon there instead. She roamed the stacks and found herself settling in with the picture books for nearly three hours, flipping through pages and reading dozens of stories from the hilarious to the heartwarming.

  When the same sales associate walked past her for the fourth time looking increasingly perturbed, Emma picked the book that had charmed her most and carried it to the register. It was the story of a little pink pig who wanted to be a ballerina, and she wasn’t entirely sure she could explain why she bought it. She’d never wanted to be a dancer, but there was something about the way the little pig yearned for it so fiercely that Emma recognized, and she would honor that yearning with a place on her shelf. Just somewhere her mother wouldn’t see it, not that she’d ever come to visit her on Whidbey.

  She walked several city blocks, soaking in the energy and color of the people and store windows around her. She’d loved New York more with every visit, but it didn’t call to her the way it seemed to call to other writers who viewed it almost as an outward manifestation of their soul.

  The problem, she decided, was that in New York everything came at you at once: all the senses stimulated at the same time, all the thoughts competing with each other. There was no end to the many directions it could send her thoughts at once, but Emma preferred the quiet of her Pacific Northwest island, the way she could take as much time on any single thought or feeling as she wanted without the next stimulation setting off a new round of thoughts and feelings.

  By the time she made her way back to the hotel, she’d left herself little time to dress in a simple black cocktail dress before she knocked on her mother’s door across the hall. Arianna had her own apartment in the city, but she’d made the publisher spring for her hotel room so she could avoid the hassle of crossing town to get to the expo center. Maybe other mothers and daughters would have shared a room, but Arianna had insisted on paying for a separate room for Emma on the grounds that she needed space to decompress, and even her daughter exacted a mental tax. “No offense, sweetheart,” she’d added. “It’s everyone, not just you.”

  Arianna opened her door to reveal she’d chosen a tasteful navy sheath dress. She looked perfectly elegant but seeing her made Emma wish she were back in Maggie’s coral sundress for some reason, a dress totally ill-suited to dinner at Aquavit.

  “Are you nervous for your showcase tomorrow?” Emma asked as they slipped into a taxi. She knew the answer; Arianna never shunned the spotlight. But she also knew it would keep her mother talking with little need for her input, and it did. Arianna wound up with, “I’ll be so interested to hear what Luther thinks of the essay collection,” as they climbed out in front of the restaurant.

  “He’s read it?” Emma asked. Even she hadn’t seen it yet.

  “No, but I’m sure I can convince him it’s just the type of thing he should review.”

  Of course. It wasn’t just a five-star meal that Arianna had come for. She so often gave the impression of being the queen bee that Emma forgot she might be interested in such pedestrian things as “professional networking.”

  They gave their names to the maitre d’ who immediately escorted them to the table where Luther waited. It wasn’t in one of the “power positions” in the dining room, but then again, a table at Aquavit at all was the sign of clout. He held out Arianna’s chair as the waiter did the same for Emma, and when they were all seated with thick linen napkins settled in their laps and their wine choices made, Luther turned his full attention to Arianna.

  “Forgive me for saying so, but you are striking,” he said. “Photographs don’t do you justice.”

  “You’re kind to say so,” Arianna replied, and while the words were gracious, Emma heard the underlying satisfaction in her mother’s voice. She would never admit to how much time and money she spent on beauty treatments, but her beauty mattered to her. Emma couldn’t have cared less how much time her mother invested in holding onto her youth; it was Arianna pretending that it was effortless that bothered her. It was more evidence of the tendency Aidan had criticized in her mother’s writing: the need to massage the details, offering her beauty to the world without acknowledging the price.

  From that opening exchange, Emma might as well have been invisible for the rest of the night. And further, watching Luther with her mother made Aidan’s accusations look more absurd by the minute because it couldn’t have been more obvious that Luther wasn’t interested in seducing Emma.

  He was intent on seducing her mother.

  Emma slipped into her silent observer mode, the space she went when she was filing away a situation for future writing so she could return to it and examine it again from every angle. Almost right away, Luther found little ways to touch her mother’s hand, or work in compliments about her work or her earrings or her knowledge of Europe. At first, Emma thought her mother was only playing along so that she could suggest Luther review her book, but Luther brought it up right away.

  “I was delighted when your publisher sen
t me an ARC of Singing Down Sorrow,” he said. An ARC was an advanced reader copy, sent out to critics well in advance of publication so that there was time for them to read and publish reviews when it was released. “I look forward to reviewing it for New York Book Review.”

  The flirting should have tapered off at that point, but Arianna was soon finding reasons to touch Luther’s sleeve or to laugh at things that barely deserved smiles. Maybe she was trying to ensure that the review was good? But no. Halfway through the main course, Luther offered Arianna a bite of his cod, and as her mother accepted it and his fork slid from her lips, Emma was ready to wave her white napkin in the air in surrender.

  Except she couldn’t look away. The scene unfolding before her was both repugnant and compelling, but that “try a bite” move left no doubt in her mind. She excused herself from the table with a polite smile, and in the quiet of the elegant restroom, she dampened a paper towel nicer than her bath towels and pressed it against her throat and the back of her neck, trying to process the scene she’d left behind.

  Luther wanted her mother. She couldn’t think much past that or it would have made her vaguely ill. What she mainly felt now was stupid. Aidan had been right: Luther was using her, but not to get her into bed. Rather, he’d been trying to get to her mother.

  It made sense. She ran a calculation in her head, and if she guessed his age right, he was only ten years younger than Arianna. And her mother had the kind of mystique that had made plenty of other men take notice in the past. Her elegant beauty and cutting wit were exactly the kind of thing Emma would expect a man like Luther to fall for.

  How foolish she had been to think that he’d ever been interested in her theories on intersectional feminism and modern literature. She’d had one thing to offer, and he was well on his way to getting it: Arianna Lindsor.

  For the rest of the dinner, she only spoke when directly spoken to, and that was most often by the waiter. When he came to offer dessert, Emma declined before her mother or Luther could answer.

  “I hope you won’t think it’s rude of me to excuse myself, but I don’t think a dessert would sit well with me right now. Would you be offended if I begged off to go nurse this headache?” she asked Luther.

  “Deeply offended, but I’ll forgive anything if your mother will stay and enjoy it with me?” He kept his eyes on Arianna.

  “Of course. Emerson won’t mind going back without me, will you?”

  “Not in the least.” And that was the absolute truth.

  When she slipped into her hotel room a half hour later, she leaned back against the door and replayed the lowlights of her evening. When had she turned so stupid that she would sit without comment while the man who used her to get to her mother proceeded to put the moves on Arianna? For an entire evening?

  She went to bed mad and woke up just as angry. She brushed her teeth as if they’d personally offended her, spit like it was landing on Luther’s name, and dressed with the jerky movements of someone who wished she were punching her clothes instead of putting them on.

  She didn’t tap on her mother’s door before heading out to the Javits Center. She wasn’t mad at Arianna. Her mother hadn’t done anything wrong. This was one hundred percent Luther’s doing, but that was exactly who her mother would want to talk about, and Emma wasn’t in the mood.

  She’d already begun wandering the expo floor when her mother texted. Where are you?

  Came to get a front row seat for your big moment, she answered. She was far earlier than she needed to be for that. Arianna Lindsor was that rare combination of critical darling and a commercial success, but she wouldn’t draw the kinds of crowds Aidan did.

  But she didn’t want to think about Aidan or Arianna. She didn’t want to think about anything at all. She wanted to drown out all the thinking entirely until she had to sit and smile through her mother’s showcase, and the only thing she could use to drown out her thoughts was other words, more compelling words, words that made a story that would push everything else out. And not her own story. Her own story had never succeeded in doing that.

  She glanced at each of the booths she passed, examining their offerings for something she could read while she waited for her mother’s event. The booth signings in the morning were for new authors or authors with a lower profile; publishing people liked to stay up late drinking into the night, so the splashier releases were saved for late morning and beyond, when the crowd inside would swell. She stopped and looked at any booths without an author present, not wanting the awkward moment that came from reading their cover and then declining a free copy if it didn’t suit her mood.

  One booth in particular drew her, displaying several covers with a literary sensibility. She picked up each one, reading the back blurbs and then returning them to their pile in quick succession until one snagged her attention so thoroughly it might as well have been accompanied by the sound of a needle scratching a record. “What if it’s all real?” asked the caption on the back. She frowned. What if what was all real? A quick look at the cover didn’t tell her much. There was a painting of a tree, slightly stylized, against a deep blue background. The title was The True Story of Sleeping Beauty. Was this fantasy? But that’s not what the word “real” implied, and it didn’t have the usual fantasy elements on the cover. She turned it over to finish reading the description. “When Aurora DeSilva contracts a mysterious virus, she falls deep into a coma. But while she appears lifeless to the world outside, the world inside her mind becomes more real, more terrifying, and also more beautiful than any of her waking moments. She plunges deeper into it to discover the secrets of this strange world inside her. But the neurologist who is tending to her realizes that the virus isn’t random, and the life of the beautiful woman lying in the hospital bed is at risk of a far worse fate than death.”

  This wasn’t her kind of book at all. And yet, she suddenly wanted to read it. A woman wearing a lanyard emblazoned with the publisher’s name walked around the front of the booth and regarded her with surprise.

  “May I help you?”

  “Are these fair game?”

  “Help yourself. I edited that one. It’s remarkable.”

  “Thank you.” Emma turned to leave, and the editor called after her, “If you like it, tell a friend. That book deserves more love than it’s getting.”

  Emma hurried to a seat for her mother’s event, choosing a spot on the third row near the end even though she was the first person there. She opened the book and dove in, riveted from the first page. The author’s ideas were complex, her language rich, but her pacing as fast as Aidan’s. By chapter four, Emma looked up to discover that the seats around her had begun to fill. She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes. Her mother would appear right on time and not a second before. She set an alarm on her watch to go off in thirteen minutes, enough time to put the book away before her mother saw her with it and demanded to know what she was reading. Not that she owed her mother any explanations. But her mother wouldn’t let up until she knew what Emma’s nose was buried in, and she’d have an opinion about it even if Emma refused to take the bait.

  By the time her alarm warned her to put the book away, all the seats had filled with a few people even standing against the back wall. That would please Arianna, who entered from a side door and settled into her seat on the dais exactly at eleven o’clock.

  “Welcome,” said the man who was with her. He introduced himself as a professor of literature at Columbia and then read the long list of her mother’s successes while she smiled graciously. She performed well for the audience, using his softball questions as a launch pad for sparkling anecdotes and a few carefully jerked tears. He asked her to read a bit from one of the essays in the collection, and she chose an excerpt about aging women and their relationship with desire.

  Emma didn’t love having to sit still for that and glanced around for Luther, sure that her mother would only have chosen that reading if he were there. She spotted him on the fifth row. How grand.

/>   When the showcase concluded forty-five minutes later, the audience applauded enthusiastically and a line immediately formed as a small crew of harried-looking interns rolled in a cart of books for her mother to sign.

  Emma used it as an opportunity to slip away. So long as she was back before the line ended completely, Arianna wouldn’t miss her. She’d run across the street to the cafe and read for another hour in peace and relative quiet. She scooped up her purse and turned, smacking right into a hard chest.

  She knew who it was without looking, but she stepped back to peer up at him anyway as he steadied her arms.

  “Aidan.”

  “Hi. Is it stupid that I thought I’d have run into you before this? Not literally.” He jerked his head in the direction of the main expo floor. “It’s packed again.”

  She didn’t want to feel flattered that he’d been keeping an eye out for her. The knowledge spread out from her chest and fizzed along her nerve endings anyway. She smiled at him, a real one, even though she’d meant to be perfectly polite but not warm the next time she saw him. “What are you doing here? I thought your event was over yesterday.”

  “It was. I came to see you.”

  She glanced through the double doors to the churning crowd outside, and the fizzing turned to buzzing. “You came down here just to see me?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t seem to know what to say after that. Finally, he nodded toward her mother. “She was impressive.” She didn’t mean to betray anything with her face, least of all her mother, but his gaze sharpened. “Something wrong?”

  “No.” Just then her mother smiled up at a handsome older man who handed her a book, and it reminded Emma of their long, awkward dinner. She turned to Aidan and admitted, “You were right, you know.”

  “Oh, good. Um, about what?”

  “Luther. He had a seduction plan—”

  “I knew it,” he interrupted. If she’d thought his gaze was sharp before, it was piercing now. “I’ve been doing some investigating. He’s bad news, picking up much younger women, promising them he can further their careers, and then dropping them once he sleeps with them.”