by Lia Riley
“So you’re heading into the city to apartment shop tomorrow?” Jessie asks.
“Yep.” Bran takes my hand, interlaces our fingers. We both accepted our jobs. All we need is a place to live.
Dad gives us a thumbs-up. He took the news about our engagement really well. We don’t have plans to get married yet, but it’ll come. I just want to enjoy this moment. No rush.
“Want to hold him?” I ask Bran.
He shifts his weight. “I don’t know.”
“Go on. He’ll gyrate for your pleasure.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he says as I pass him over.
“Just support his neck and you’ll be all good,” Dad says. “I’m going to start dinner.” He rises to his feet and Jessie stands, too, bumping his hip with hers.
“I’ll help. Or at least uncork the wine.” She giggles as he gives her a quick tickle.
My heart is full seeing him so content.
“Okay. Okay. I got this,” Bran mutters, more to himself than to me.
Wyatt stretches out his two tiny fists, yawns, and drops off to sleep.
“You are a Baby Whisperer.” I’m giggling more from the cuteness overload than anything.
“If your position doesn’t pan out in Silicon Valley, you can always be my manny,” Jessie says over her shoulder before disappearing after Dad into the kitchen.
My phone buzzes. It’s a text from my mom. She sent an out-of-focus picture of the sunset along the coast. We don’t talk much, but sharing the odd photo has been a good start, a gentle way to begin repairing everything that was broken. Bran sits back on the couch, cuddling my baby brother. Persimmon purrs against his leg. He notes my smile. “What?” His voice is soft. His dimples put in an appearance.
I shrug and reach to smooth the unruly hair in the back of his head. Sometimes happiness doesn’t require any words. Sometimes happiness just is.
Behind him on the wall is a framed poster of the Golden Gate Bridge with Alcatraz in the foreground. For far too long my life was an island prison. I peered through steel bars at the world’s bustling vibrancy, believing everyone had the answer except me. I was trapped, screaming, locked in solitary confinement.
And I escaped.
There were sharks in the water but I fended them off, hauled myself to shore, sobbing and gasping. I made the prison. So I have to be the one who dismantles it brick by brick, refashioning my life into something new. Build my own version of a castle in the clouds.
Bran glances over and it’s a spectacular sight, this new smile of his. He used to hold back, like if he grinned too wide, he’d break, or give too much away and needed to conserve himself. Lately, things are different. Now he smiles with his whole self and every time I see it, I know.
My own grin feels permanent. We’re going to make it. Wyatt doesn’t stir when Bran sets him gently in the bouncer on the floor between us.
“You’re pretty amazing with him,” I say, unable to hold back a swoon when Bran tickles my brother’s chubby cheek.
“You’re the amazing one,” he murmurs, and leans in, keeping our gazes connected.
“Am I?” I tilt my face. His breath ignites my skin before our lips brush. We kiss, and kiss again, sweet, soft, but with enough intensity to induce shivers. Our foreheads graze and breaths mix.
“Talia,” he whispers, feeding me my own name like it’s something rare and delicious. “Thank you for saying yes to me.”
“Thank you for asking.” I tease my tongue into his mouth, nothing much, just a flirtatious promise of later. Because we can do this tonight. Tomorrow. All next week. I’m saying yes to it, to everything, every day with Bran.
He peppers kisses up my cheek until I’m utterly helpless yet stronger than I’ve ever been.
Guess it turns out that I am a lot of things.
I’m the girl who will always miss her dead sister. I’m the older sibling to Wyatt, the world’s sweetest baby boy. I’m a daughter of two fallible humans. I’m a person who took her life back from fear. I’ve become a woman, and I love a guy who is finally a man.
I turned my world upside down for love. There were times when the journey was hard, intense, even downright terrifying. But guess what? The road will always leave the dark wood if you stick it out and go the distance. And the moment you step into the light is better than any poor imagining.
But here’s the catch.
You’ll never believe such beauty exists—not really—not unless you have the guts to brave life, go off the map, and find your own way there.
The End
About the Author
Lia Riley writes New Adult romance. After studying at the University of Montana–Missoula, she scoured the world armed only with a backpack, overconfidence, and a terrible sense of direction. She counts shooting vodka with a Ukrainian mechanic in Antarctica, sipping yerba maté with gauchos in Chile, and swilling Fourex with station hands in outback Australia among her accomplishments.
A British literature fanatic at heart, Lia considers Mr. Darcy and Edward Rochester her fictional boyfriends. Her very patient husband doesn’t mind. Much. When not torturing heroes (because, c’mon, who doesn’t love a good tortured hero?), Lia herds unruly chickens, camps, beachcombs, daydreams about as-yet-unwritten books, wades through a mile-high TBR pile, and schemes yet another trip. She and her family live mostly in Northern California.
LOVE IS UNCHARTED TERRITORY
See the next page for an excerpt from the first book in the OFF THE MAP trilogy
UPSIDE DOWN
Chapter One
Talia
I breathe on my bedroom window and smear a spy hole in the condensation. Not much going on this morning. A lone crow dips over California bungalow roofs while in the distance Monterey Bay is shrouded in mist. I’m a Santa Cruz girl to the bone, love that fog like it’s a childhood blanket.
The downstairs phone rings and Dad turns off NPR. He’s a sucker for Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! Once I get on the plane this afternoon, the only noise in the house will be that frigging radio. Guilt grabs me with two cold fists, right in the gut. I should be plopped beside him on the couch, trying to kid around, but I’m not even sure he wants my company.
My sister, Pippa, would know what to do. She was the expert in easy affection. She’d blow through the kitchen on a Friday night, swig a sip of Dad’s beer, sling an arm around his neck, and torture him with wet cheek kisses. I’ve never been a hugger. My role was easy, the joke-cracking sidekick. But there’s no work for a sidekick without a hero. These days, if I wander into a room, Dad’s gaze automatically slides to the empty space beside me. Somehow, despite everything, I’m the ghost child. I don’t want to haunt him, so I keep to my room.
My room.
Not ours. No one’s slept in the other bed in a year and a half. My sister’s one-eyed sock monkey, Seymour, reclines in the middle of her calico pillowcase, wearing an evil expression. I know your secrets, he seems to say. What you keep hidden. I give the monkey the finger and instantly feel worse.
Seymour and I go way back. To those days after Pippa died and my room was a safe place to shatter. He saw me research phantom medical symptoms until four in the morning, curl beneath my bed wrapped in the comforter so Dad never heard me weep, watched as I knelt in the dormer window seat and counted cars, closing my eyes if I ever spotted a red one because red was bad.
It meant blood.
Death.
Seymour the Sock Monkey knows me for who I am.
The leftover daughter.
“Sorry, Pippa,” I mutter. Like my sister gives two shits about my relationship with her fucking stuffed animal. If she can see me from wherever she is, and that’s highly suspect, I’ve given her far greater cause for displeasure.
Seymour’s frayed mouth seems to sneer. We’re in agreement on that point.
There’s a knock on the bedroom door. “Hang on a sec!” I slip on my T-shirt and tighten the bath towel around my waist. My computer is open on the desk. WebMD calls my name,
softly seductive, like Maleficent to Princess Aurora. In this case, I’m not offered a spinning wheel spindle but reassurance that I’m not going to die. Dr. Halloway urged me to block access to any health-related sites, but in the shower, the freckle on my right foot looked bigger. Bob Marley died from a melanoma on his toe, so I’m not 100 percent mentally unhinged—more like 85 percent on a bad day.
Despite my best efforts, I can’t stop obsessing over what-ifs. What if I have early-stage skin cancer? What if this headache is a tumor? My mind is a bowl of water that I compulsively stir. I want my brain to be still and serene, but for the love of Sweet Baby Jesus, I can’t quit agitating it.
There’s another knock. More insistent.
“Seriously, I’m changing.”
“Your mother’s called to say good-bye,” Dad says through the door. His voice is tense, pleading, like he holds something unpleasant, an old man’s jockstrap, rather than the phone.
I turn the knob and stick my hand out to grab the receiver. “Thanks.” I take my time putting it to my ear, humming the soundtrack to Jaws under my breath. “Hey, Mom.”
“Alooooha.” Wow, a perfect extension on the long o followed by a short, sharp ha. She’s been practicing.
I mime a silent gag. “What’s up?”
“Your cell went to voice mail.” She doesn’t like calling the landline. “You know I prefer not to talk to him.”
I push up my glasses and roll my eyes. “Such an inconvenience.” By him she means my dad, Scott Stolfi, the man she was married to for twenty-two years. She can’t even say, “May I speak to Talia,” without turning it into a thing. He was her high school sweetheart. They had one of those classic love stories, rich girl meets working-class boy. Now, a two-second conversation with the guy yanks her chain.
“You don’t understand.”
“And you say we never agree on anything.” I bend and struggle with the zip to my overstuffed suitcase.
I bet two coconuts that Mom’s sprawled by the infinity pool on the cliffside deck overlooking the Pacific. She’s been holed up on my grandparents’ estate on Kauai’s north shore since she bailed last year. After they took Pippa off life support, Mom locked herself in the guest room for two days while Dad tackled an endless series of home repairs. When she finally emerged, he was mending the backyard fence. “You can’t fix everything!” she’d screamed. Next thing we knew, she’d bought a one-way ticket to Hawaii. In lieu of a cheesy postcard, she sent Dad divorce papers from the law offices of William C. Kaleolani, Esq.
“Australia is just so far away. You’ve always talked about doing the Peace Corps one day, but to know you’re all grown up…” Her gusty sigh is dramatic. This phone call is her pretending to care, a big show, part of the game she still plays called “Being a Mom.” In all fairness, I shouldn’t snark, because guess who’s bankrolling my trip down under? As much as I hate to ask her for anything, I need this escape.
Mom comes from old Carmel money earned when my great-great-grandfather decimated two-thousand-year-old redwood groves. Environmental pillage made him filthy rich, but the money lost its stink over time, transformed into sustainable energy start-ups and progressive philanthropic causes.
I doubt the stumps rotting in the forest care.
“Has Logan’s cookbook arrived?” Mom dials up the rainbow cheer. She’s got to be grinding out that forced smile, the one that makes her teeth look like they’re breaking. “His tour starts next week, LA and San Francisco. You could have joined us at the Esalen Institute.”
The idea of soaking naked in a hippie retreat spa with Logan, Mom’s hump buddy/Hawaiian spirit animal, is the stuff of nightmares. To date, I’ve successfully avoided an encounter with the Wunderchimp. In her photographs, he sports a mean chest ’Fro. He’s a personal macrobiotic chef to the stars and wannabe guru. His book, Eating from Within, recently released and she mailed me a personal signed copy like I give a one-eyed donkey.
I jam the phone between my ear and shoulder to shimmy into my skinny jeans. “About the breatharian section? Like, was he serious about gulping air for sustenance?”
“The detoxifying effects are incredible.”
Whatever. I’ll wager my own enlightenment that she’s dying for one of Dad’s famous cheeseburgers.
“I’ve lost five pounds since we got involved.” There is a faint noise on the other end of the line, suspiciously like a wine bottle uncorking.
Hawaii is three hours behind.
Please don’t let her be drinking before noon.
“Hey, um, are you—”
“Sunny put a new photo of you on Facebook.” Mom’s a ninja at deflection as well as a social media junkie. She posts daily emo statuses about self-discovery alongside whimsical shots of waterfalls, out-of-focus sunsets, and dolphins. “Are those new shorts? I swear your thighs come straight from your father’s side.” She makes it sound like my genes sport cankles and triple chins, but she’s got a point. I did sprout from Dad’s southern Italian roots: Mediterranean curves, brown eyes, and olive skin.
I slip on my shoes, turn sideways in the mirror, and pooch my stomach. “Had a physical last week with Dr. Halloway. Still well within normal range.”
“Aren’t they stretching those numbers to make big girls feel better?”
Mom is a size 2. To her, everyone is a big girl.
Pippa was Mom’s doppelganger. They shared hummingbird-boned bodies and perpetually surprised blue eyes. I shove away the quick-fire anguish, slam my lids shut, and count to ten. The number nine feels wrong, so I do it once more for good measure.
“Talia? I need a little advice.” Mom hushes to a “just us girls” level.
“What?” She’s going to bash me and then get all buddy-buddy? Who replaced my real mother with this selfish hag?
“Male advice.”
“Um, wait, you’re joking, right?” This is above my pay grade.
“I just read online how pineapple juice improves semen flavor. Any tips for how to raise the subject with Logan?”
I open my mouth in a silent scream.
“He claims he doesn’t enjoy the fruit. But what about me? My needs? He tastes like—”
“Enough.” I flop beside my bed, grab a skullcap, shove it on, and yank the brim tight over my eyes in a futile attempt to hide. “You have got to be—”
“I come from a land down under, where women glow and men plunder.” Sunny bursts into my room in a whirlwind of sandalwood essential oil and peasant skirts. Beth follows behind wearing the same hand-painted silk sheath gracing the cover of the latest Anthropologie catalogue.
“Hey, I gotta jam. Beth and Sunny arrived to say good-bye.” My mom, I mouth, pretending to stab the receiver.
They roll their eyes.
“A hui hou, Ladybug. Australia waits. Discover your bliss.” When Mom gets philosophical, her voice takes on a theatrically British accent for no reason.
“Bye, Mom.” I toss the phone on my dresser and fake a seizure.
“Sounds like Mrs. S was in fine form.” Sunny tugs off my cap.
Beth’s jaw slackens. “OMG, Talia, what did you do to your hair?” She runs her fingers through her own dark flat-ironed locks as if trying to reassure herself of their continued flawlessness.
I skim my hand over the top of my head. “Box dye. Sunflower blond. You hate it, don’t you?”
“You’ll be easy to find in the dark.” Sunny waggles her eyebrows in pervy innuendo. Nothing fazes this girl. I could tattoo a third eye on my forehead and she’d chat about opening root chakras. That’s why I love her.
Beth halfway sits before realizing my bed’s buried beneath an avalanche of travel guides, bikinis, underwear, power adaptors, and multicolored Australian currency. She never touches Pippa’s bed. They were best friends. Beth had been riding shotgun in her Prius when the tweaker ran a stop sign and plowed through the driver’s side door. She never talks about that day. Neither of us do. We’ve been too deeply hurt.
For a long time after the acci
dent we remained optimistic. Pippa’s brain showed limited signs of activity, but eventually, hope devoured the heart of my family until nothing remained but ashes and bone. Dad finds solace in warm beer and cold pizza and my mom in baby men. Me? I’m still digging out of the wreckage.
“Earth to Talia.” Sunny presses a matcha green tea latte into my hand with a wink. “We picked up your favorite swamp water.”
“Hey, thanks.” I fake a sip, not having the heart to reveal I cut off caffeine and the accompanying hamster-wheel jitters. It’s part of the Talia reboot. Talia 1.0 is outdated and it’s time for a new model. Talia 2.0 isn’t an anxious freak and is more than Pippa’s tragic sister. She didn’t lose her virginity to Tanner, her dead sister’s long-term boyfriend after the BBQ held to commemorate the one-year anniversary of her passing, and she doesn’t count precisely ninety-nine Cheerios into her bowl at breakfast to feel “right.” And she certainly isn’t going to focus on the fact that she’s not graduating in six months—a secret that no one, not her parents or even her best friends, knows.
Old Talia may have royally screwed her GPA. New Talia is focused strictly on the future. A shiny tomorrow. A new-car-smelling do-over.
These girls are everything to me, but they don’t have a clue how far I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole. I’m already one big sad story. Do I really want to be like Hey, how about my freaky compulsions?
Pretending to be a normal, functioning member of society is exhausting stuff.
“You’re wearing that on the plane?” Beth inventories my jeans, purple Chuck Taylors, and Pippa’s favorite tee.
“What?” I glance at the red-stenciled words crossing my chest—HOLDEN CAULFIELD IS MY HOMEBOY.
“There’s no way you’re getting upgraded,” Beth says.
“It’s a full flight. Besides, I needed to…” A shrug is my best explanation. The night before Pippa was removed from life support, I pinky-swore my beautiful, brain-dead sister that I’d live enough life for two. This shirt helps remind me of my promise.