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

by Brenna Jacobs

  She stared at him, her insides going as flat as a neglected soda. “You did it again.”

  “Did what again?”

  Assumed a man like Luther couldn’t have a professional interest in me.

  And he was right. She wasn’t even mad at Aidan. Luther’s behavior wasn’t Aidan’s fault. But neither did she feel like standing there listening to his “I told you so.” She would stick with her original plan, free morning of reading in the coffee shop, with everything else shut out, most especially Arianna and Aidan.

  She took a deep breath. “You were right. Luther was using me, but only to get to my mother. And I don’t mean professionally. I really, really can’t think too hard about that. Plus, it’s been an emotionally exhausting couple of days, so I don’t think I can do this,” she gestured between the two of them, “on top of everything else. That’s not your fault. I’m just worn out. This expo has been a reminder that I don’t write anything that anyone wants to read, and I don’t teach anything that anyone wants to discuss. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a breather until I need to come back and meet my mother.”

  And then she walked off, aware that she had left him with his mouth hanging half open.

  She stopped a few yards away and turned. “It really shouldn’t be this hard between us. If this was a metaphor, I’d quit forcing it. It’s probably time we did the same thing. Forget the writing challenge. You don’t have to read my manuscript. Have a safe flight back.”

  This time she walked away without a backward glance. She didn’t want to see the look of agreement in his eyes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  What just happened?

  He stared after Emma, unsure what he should do. His instinct was to run after her, offer to buy her a cup of coffee and listen, but it looked like her instinct was to retreat completely. When he felt that way, the last thing he wanted was someone trying to cheer him up.

  He’d watched her as the room had filled before her mother’s showcase. Emma had been so absorbed in the book she was reading that he didn’t want to interrupt her. Her face had been relaxed, then tight with worry, then soft with wonder. He’d seen that tight expression a lot, the relaxed expression a few times, and once, that look of wonder. Right after they’d kissed. He’d never felt jealousy over a book before, but he did now; not as a writer, but as a man who wanted to earn the full range of Emma’s emotions. What was the book? It had a distinctive cover . . .

  He pulled a ball cap low on his forehead. People would definitely recognize him here, and he didn’t want to be distracted from his new mission. It took almost fifteen minutes before he spotted the cover for the book Emma had buried her nose in. It was called The Real Story of Sleeping Beauty. Huh. Reading the back, deepened his confusion and curiosity. This was definitely not what he would have pegged Emma for reading. It sounded like the kind of book Arianna Lindsor had shamed her right out of reading in her childhood.

  He slipped the copy from the pile with a nod at the employee working the booth then returned to his hotel where he stretched out on his bed to read.

  He didn’t move for four hours straight, when he realized his neck was killing him and he needed to stretch.

  He wasn’t done yet, but he set the book aside, eyeing its cover as he did. Now he understood the expressions that had flashed across Emma’s face this morning as he’d watched her. The author hooked him in the first chapter through a combination of humor, tight pacing, and gorgeous words, and pulled him deep into the story within a matter of pages.

  It had been a long time since he’d read anything that grabbed him so completely even though it was utterly unlike anything he usually read. Maybe even because it was unlike anything he usually read. He grabbed his phone and tweeted a link to his hundred thousand Twitter followers with a succinct, “Buy this. Now. It’s incredible.”

  He ordered up a room service meal and snatched up the book, moving to the sofa to read the rest, pausing only to scarf the hamburger delivered to his door before he finished the story. Then it ended. And he was sorry to close it. Very sorry.

  He leaned back in the chair, resting the book on his chest, and stared at the ceiling. Emma’s words echoed through his head. I don’t write anything that anyone wants to read. That sadness had clung to him as he’d raced through the novel to see what had animated Emma so shortly before he’d caught her in her moment of doubt.

  Except it hadn’t sounded like a moment. Her words had carried the weight of a heavy realization.

  Only Emma was dead wrong. He knew because he’d read her new manuscript already.

  He pushed the fantasy book aside and went looking for his laptop. He hadn’t tackled their challenge yet because he’d wanted to let her words sit, to think about how close she was to nailing this story but also what piece he felt was missing. But after seeing her today, after watching her reading something she’d obviously loved in the moments where she’d been unguarded, he’d figured it out. And now he had something to say about it.

  He worked on his synopsis for the rest of the night, so late that it almost made him miss his early call for the hired car his publisher had sent to take him to the airport the next morning.

  He worked on it on the plane.

  He worked on it at home.

  He worked on it for three days, trying to give Emma the five pages they’d agreed to, but pages that told her everything she needed to know. And there were so many things he wanted to tell her.

  He worked on it like he never had anything before. He ignored his own manuscript. He agonized over words and phrases, searching for exactly the right ones, too swept up in perfecting it to dwell on the irony of becoming the kind of writer he always teased Emma about being. He poured in more logic and more passion than he ever had to any of his closing arguments for court, to any of his own stories.

  To anything. Period.

  Then, when he had everything in place, he hit “Send.”

  He hoped it was enough because he had given it everything he had.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Emma’s phone lit up with her mother’s number for the eighth time. Or maybe the twelfth.

  She didn’t know, and right now, she didn’t care. She would care again. Eventually. But she hit ignore as she had with all the calls she’d gotten since yesterday, when she hadn’t gone back to her mother’s showcase. Her mother would be calling to demand an explanation and an apology. Emma had texted her yesterday afternoon to congratulate her on a great crowd and to let her know she was flying out early. She texted her again when she landed at SeaTac to let her mother know she’d arrived safely. Other than that, Emma had refused to engage.

  She lived in a village called Clinton, and she wandered from her house to Brighton Beach Road and made her way onto the beach. The breeze blowing off the water felt good on the unusually warm June day. It reflected the state of her mind: calm, cool. Clear.

  So clear.

  She’d been feeling that way since the previous morning when she’d stepped back into the Javits Center to return to her mother’s showcase after her book signing. Emma had stopped short in the main entrance, watching the surging crowds, picking out where they gathered. Most especially she paid attention to where the book bloggers and YouTubers gathered. They were the ones who were there for the pure love of story, not the publishing professionals trying to guess what would be the next big thing. If the executives wanted to know, they only needed to follow the YouTubers.

  Instead of heading back to join her mother, she meandered through the crowds, noticing who made up the clusters at each booth, eavesdropping and making mental notes about turns of phrase she liked, conflicts that interested her.

  It wasn’t long before a clear pattern emerged: the large crowds gathered around the books that offered escape, while the books with award stickers drew the anemic clusters of editors and critics.

  What struck her most was the difference in the energy between the two groups. She didn’t believe in auras or anything like t
hat, but if she did, the crowds of fans would have had a bright, happy orange glow, and the critical darlings would have had a lifeless gray.

  As she watched the same thing play out again and again, she realized that she didn’t want what her mother had: a legion of admirers who admired her “truth-telling” so long as real life was dressed up and manipulated the way only Arianna Lindsor could.

  There was a poem one of her college professors used to quote from Emily Dickinson about telling the truth but telling it slant. Her mother told a slant and called it the truth. But fiction could be true in its feelings, in its themes, in its relatability.

  And the books that people related to were the ones they crowded around here, books that guaranteed a happy ending so long as the reader was ready to stick it out through all the obstacles the characters faced to earn that ending.

  Earned endings.

  That was it. That was what she had loved about reading when she was younger. For so long now, her reading had been all about who created the most morally ambiguous, emotionally complex characters and dilemmas. They were rarely stories about people getting the good things they deserved, only the bad ones.

  She missed it when good guys and girls could win. She clutched the copy of the Sleeping Beauty novel against her chest for a brief second. She was already so in love with this character in an uncomplicated way that she didn’t remember feeling since . . . well. It had been years. She was desperate to find out how the heroine would get out of her latest disaster, how she would triumph. Because she would triumph, and Emma couldn’t wait to watch her do it.

  She passed another small knot of publishers—you could always tell them by their business suits—and their subdued gestures and lower voices. So professional. So thoughtful.

  So boring.

  She stepped outside of the flow of traffic, nearly against a wall, and surveyed as much of the exhibition hall as she could see. All of it was suddenly so clear to her. She felt like one of Maggie’s characters out in nature with their sudden epiphanies about life and its meaning: she wrote gray fiction for gray people, and she didn’t want to anymore.

  Once the realization had struck her, she couldn’t stay still. She’d hurried from the Javits Center to her hotel, letting the truth break over her. She didn’t want to be part of the cold, cannibalistic literary world. She wanted to write for the people who loved and celebrated stories.

  She wanted to write for the reader she would have been if her mother hadn’t shamed her out of loving genre fiction. She wanted to write for the reader she had rediscovered in herself when she’d disappeared into the pages of the fantasy book she’d dared to open that morning.

  She didn’t want to be a fantasy writer. But she now had a fantasy of being the writer who readers clamored over because they loved a character she’d created as much as she did.

  Inside her hotel room, an anxiousness took over. The thought of returning to the expo made her insides feel like her allergic reaction to peanuts.

  She wanted to leave. Leave the hotel, leave New York, and most especially leave her mother and her inevitable disapproval behind.

  Her suitcase was on her bed and filling fast, almost like her hands were thinking for her, telling her what her brain and heart really wanted: an escape.

  A seagull wheeled by and called, his rough song bringing her back to the present as she blinked out over the water. Last time she’d stood out by the Sound, Aidan had almost kissed her.

  Aidan.

  Aidan was the last thing she wanted to think about. Or really the only thing she wanted to think about it, but she’d made a mess of that, and she had no idea what to do about it.

  Maybe . . .

  She needed to go home and write. She needed to write about writing, figure out what her story had been trying to tell her it needed all this time.

  And then she needed to figure out what her heart had been trying to tell her about Aidan. She suspected she knew the answer, but as the quote on her high school AP Composition classroom wall said, “Why We Write: How will you know what you think until you see what you say?”

  It sounded crazy to non-writers, but if she approached a blank page with total honesty, what poured out was often the truth. She would never publish her personal truth for public consumption the way her mother did, but it tumbled from her fingers when she let it.

  She flexed them and rolled her shoulders before picking up her pace to a march toward home. She had work to do.

  First she would tackle her story, write her own synopsis for it if she imagined a world in which it could tie up neatly with a bow. Because suddenly, she really wanted it to. She wanted to believe in forgiveness and redemption and grace and happy endings.

  Then she would start a new document and tell herself the truth about Aidan.

  She’d done him so wrong. She’d taken all her insecurities out on him again and again, and he’d been patient every time. Maybe, as she worked through “why,” she’d also discover the “how.” How to fix it. How to do better.

  Five pages, she told herself as she sat in front of the laptop and flexed her fingers again. These weren’t pages that needed metaphors and perfect verbs. These were five pages that just needed the plot points to reveal what Victoria wanted and needed. Without having to slave over each word, just trying to find the shape of the story, she should be able to complete all five pages in an afternoon.

  She set her hands on the keyboard and started. “Victoria is . . .”

  She blinked at the screen. After a few minutes, she set her hands back in her lap when she realized no more words would come. Up to this point, the character of Victoria had spent a lot of time reacting to what happened around her. Emma didn’t like Victoria, she realized. Victoria didn’t make things happen. But why not? What held her back?

  A lie.

  Her fingers twitched. Victoria believed a lie about herself. She believed that she had no control over her life. Why did she believe that? Emma tapped the keyboard. Because . . . Oh! Victoria believed she had no control over her life because her father had died when she was young even though she had tried to be the perfect child as a bargain with God to save her father’s life. But he had died anyway, and that meant that no amount of effort, not even wishing with her whole soul and behaving perfectly, could affect the way things would unfold anyway. So why bother? Find a good enough job, a good enough man, take whatever life handed her and just make do.

  Oh, Victoria.

  Emma patted the laptop as if it were Victoria’s head, and then her fingers flew. The only thing that would fix Victoria was a desire so strong that it overcame her fundamental belief that she had no control over her life. What did Victoria want? Oooh . . . She wanted to save her grandmother’s home, the one she’d wandered through so many writing days ago, sniffing black currants. Well, the black currants would have to go because no one knew what black currants smelled like, but Victoria suddenly wanted to do everything in her power to make sure that the house itself stayed.

  The synopsis wasn’t the work of an afternoon. It took two full days, even without a single fancy metaphor. As Emma worked on the bones of the plot, she’d write Victoria into a corner and realize she needed to back out and find another direction for the story. Over and over Emma ran into story walls, and over and over she found ways through them or over them or around them.

  Two hours past dinner time on the second day, countless hours into the writing, she typed the final period and sat back to stare at the screen.

  She’d done it.

  She’d found the story. And Victoria had quit believing the lie about herself. She’d made things happen, and when Emma eventually wrote the story she’d outlined in the synopsis, Victoria would end up living in her grandmother’s old farmhouse, restoring it with patience and love, all with the help of a good man beside her, the man who had seen through her defenses to who she really was and loved her anyway.

  And maybe that fictional man of Victoria’s would look quite a bit like Aidan
.

  Aidan.

  It was his writing challenge that had sparked her breakthrough. She should at least let him know. She opened her email to tell him, but his name was already in her inbox as if she’d conjured him simply by thinking. The subject line read, “Your synopsis.”

  Wait, what? Had she somehow emailed it to him without realizing it? She was so confused. She clicked open his message.

  Hi, Emma.

  I’m sorry things went wrong. Again. I think you’re right that it shouldn’t be so hard between us. I feel like I see a version of us together where it isn’t like this, where it’s easy and good. But I don’t know how to get there. I don’t know how we always end up so off track. I’m sorry.

  There it is again. Those words. But I’ve meant them every time I said them, and I mean them now. I’m sorry.

  I’m sorry for making you think that I don’t believe a critic like Van Dijk would be interested in your work. I just don’t think he’s the one who can fix your story. You can. You’re so close. Is it possible you don’t see it clearly because you’ve written more of yourself into it than you think? I don’t want to presume anything here, but Victoria reminds me of you: she lost her father early in life, and with it she lost her sense of control.

  Something like a gasp escaped Emma. Victoria wasn’t her.

  Was she?

  But of course she was. It was so obvious that Emma felt a flush of embarrassment for not realizing how much of herself she’d been putting on the page.

  She returned to the email.

  The thing is, you didn’t give Victoria the best parts of yourself. The only thing that has seemed beyond your control in real life is this story. But everything else . . . Emma. You’re amazing. You’ve moved across the country away from your mother, found yourself a job that makes you happy, gotten an agent and book deal with one of the most prestigious agencies in the business, and forged connections with people in an effort to improve your work. Not to get you a better deal. Not to get you publicity. But to make the work better.