Scribbling Women & the Real-Life Romance Heroes Who Love Them

by Hope Tarr

  It was the single-worst pickup line I’d ever heard. And all he got in trade for it was a smile. I didn’t say a word, but I memorized those eyes. I tried to place the color in nature. Forget-me-nots? A blue morpho butterfly? A summer horizon? A few years later, as I stood on a Caribbean beach watching the sea change under a December sky, I finally found their match. I’ve seen those eyes laughing, and very, very occasionally, I’ve seen them fill with tears. I’ve seen them on camera, when the light catches them so strikingly they seem almost iridescent. And still, just as on that first day, they have the power to move me to distraction.

  After that first brush with serendipity, we kept running into each other on campus. And every time, he stuck his foot firmly in his mouth, wedging it there immovably. He saw me wearing a dress one day—a big departure from my usual jeans and high-tops—and looked me over, smiling. “You look great. What’s the occasion?” he asked. I held my answer for the length of a heartbeat. “I’m going to a funeral.”

  A less stalwart soul might have given up after that. But he was Galahad, armor polished, firmly mounted, quest undertaken. Nothing deterred him. Neither disappointment nor discomfort discouraged him. He charged on, into the fire, time after time. Was I the dragon or the grail? Opponent or prize? Was he looking to vanquish me or carry me off in triumph? I don’t think I ever really knew, and the not knowing was part of the intoxication. And intoxicated I was, drunk off the thought of him. A glimpse of him across campus would hold me for days, days that I counted in skipped heartbeats.

  Some weeks after the funeral conversation, he had managed to get my number. I never knew how. He gathered his courage and called me up at half past six on a weekend, an Arthurian knight with call waiting. As soon as I answered, he asked, his tone smooth as molten caramel, “What’s a girl like you doing home on a Saturday night?” I almost didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. But I must have been the dragon after all. A grail would never have been cruel enough to say with finality, “I’m getting dressed to go out.” He withdrew graciously, ceding the field. A strategic retreat while he considered his next tactic.

  The following week was the university luau, a party I was dreading. I had moped and mooned, certain I had overplayed my hand. I dreaded the idea of forced Polynesian fun, and worst of all, I knew the boy with the beautiful blue eyes wouldn’t be there. He hated organized frivolity. But my mother, speaking wisdom, insisted I go. “You’ll have fun,” she promised. “You never know what’s going to happen.” So in defiance of my wretched mood, I tied on a grass skirt and went, hopes fluttering near the ground like small, wingless things. As soon as I walked in, I saw him—unexpectedly, wonderfully there where I least anticipated finding him. He had come with his best friend, and the moment he spotted me, his eyes dilated in pleasure. I went to him. I spent the evening dancing with the boy with the beautiful blue eyes and his best friend. I discovered many months later that they argued over who would ask me out, tallying up old scores to see who had earned the advantage. The blue eyes won.

  When the time finally came and he asked me out, by my calculations I owed him at least one date for all the humiliation he’d suffered, all the thorns he’d overcome, pricking his pride in small, unfatal wounds. Would I have said yes as easily if he hadn’t managed to pitch wide of the plate with every pickup line he’d thrown my way? Probably not. It was the faltering that hinted at gentleness under the coolly arrogant façade. He swaggered when he walked, but his eyes told an entirely different tale. Those eyes talked about hopes unrealized, dreams unshared. He longed for something. I closed my eyes and imagined he smelled of crushed four-leaf clovers and broken wishbones, cold candles on a birthday cake, a rabbit’s foot rubbed bare. A river of deep, dark sweetness ran like molasses under his skin and seeped out of him, wafting behind him as he walked. I watched other girls as they sniffed after him, chasing it, hungering for the sugary promise. But he never looked around. He walked with those remarkable eyes fixed straight ahead, seeing right through them as if they weren’t even there. They were insubstantial as ghosts to him, and the only thing that was real was the promise of what he had always been looking for.

  For our first date, he left a bouquet of blue irises on my seat in the car for me to discover rather than bringing them to the door. There was subtlety in his wooing. Irises were beloved of perfumers, the emblem of French kings. They were my favorite flower at the time, an unexpected choice that told me he paid attention when I talked. An actor, he took me to the theater. It was an invitation into his world, a stepping stone to his dreams. The play was King Lear, and when the blood ran freely, I hid my face, glad he’d chosen something violent instead of romantic. I didn’t want to watch others kiss when all I could think about was kissing him. We went to dinner afterward, and as I stared down at my empty plate, I realized I had been able to eat with him, something I had never before managed on a first date. It’s a sign, something within me whispered. How can you spend forever with a man if you can’t even eat around him? Sometimes my subconscious is alarmingly prosaic. Every other first date had seen me choke down a few reluctant mouthfuls, pleading a big lunch, while the butterflies in my stomach flew like acrobats. But not this time. This time, with him, I ate ravenously, filling myself with all the possibility that simmered between us.

  Three weeks later, under a blue moon, he told me for the first time that he loved me, and he worked all that summer, sweating under a hot Texas sun cutting grass to earn the money to buy me an engagement ring. I said yes to a boy I hadn’t even known five months before—terrified, but more certain than scared. We married two years later—on the day I graduated from college. I was frightened to marry that young, but underneath the fear, I recognized something else—the absolute inevitability of him. So many little twists in the path had led us to each other. If either of us had taken a single wrong turn, we would never have met. But the butterfly wings brushed against fate and, in that perfect storm of destiny, we happened.

  It has been twenty-five years since that day I saw him sitting in a place I wasn’t supposed to be. When I have been nervous about our future, he has been our rock, the immovable object to my irresistible force. My fears and worries are flights of fancy—they’ve danced around him, occasionally ruffling his hair, but never pushing him off the path. His certainty has been breathtaking, his absolute confidence in us unshakeable. Once, I asked him how he was so sure of us when I had been so uncertain. The face with the beautiful blue eyes smiled at me and said, “Because I wished for you.” And everyone knows that wishes made on blue moons always come true.

  A sixth-generation native Texan, New York Times bestselling author Deanna Raybourn graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a double major in English and history and an emphasis on Shakespearean studies. Deanna’s novel Silent in the Grave won both a RITA® and Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award. Her Lady Julia Grey series has been nominated for an Agatha, three Daphne du Mauriers, a Last Laugh, four additional RITAs, and two Dilys Winns, among other awards. Her latest novel, A Spear of Summer Grass, chronicles the adventures of a scandalous flapper in 1920s Kenya. Deanna makes her home in Virginia where she lives with her husband and daughter. City of Jasmine—a 1920s adventure novel—will release March 2014. Visit Deanna online at www.deannaraybourn.com.

  Love at First Sight?

  By Caryn Moya Block

  I’ve had several people ask me why I have destined mates in my paranormal romance stories. Some of them even scoff at the idea and complain that real life isn’t like that. I would have to disagree. I think it can be like that, and here is why.

  When I attended college in Arizona, one of my professors asked me to be a part of the new student government they were trying to get organized. I agreed and dived in wholeheartedly, writing bylaws and having elections. Then I was invited to attend the statewide student government conference, and again, I agreed. Little did I know that by doing so I would find the man I was going to marry.

  Our college h
ad three different campuses in three different cities, all about thirty-five miles apart. Each campus had its own student government with members attending the conference. To save money, the school decided we would all meet at the main campus (not mine) and ride up together to the conference with our advisor.

  A longtime girlfriend and I drove up together and parked at the main campus. Neither of us had been there before, and we didn’t really know our way around. We decided to head for the office and hoped someone there would tell us where to meet the rest of our group.

  I will never forget the next few moments. We had turned down the proper pathway that ran to the office when a young man came out of the door and started walking toward us. His blond curly hair was down to his shoulders, and he wore a T-shirt and a pair of ratty jean cutoffs. Seeing him was so overwhelming that I stopped. I knew from that first moment that this was the man I was going to marry.

  “Who is that?” I asked my friend.

  She replied that he was the president of the student government on this campus and would be leading our college group at the conference. My future husband walked up and started directing us to where we would be picking up our bus.

  How did I know he was the one? I would say now that I was guided by the divine. At the time, I had no idea why I knew. I just did. It was like a voice spoke in my head: There he is, the man I am going to marry.

  Was it love at first sight? No, it was knowing at first sight.

  My husband of more than thirty years is a handsome man, but he isn’t drop-dead gorgeous. It certainly wasn’t his ratty clothes that drew me. Did I mention he had a goatee? With his sun-lightened blond hair, the goatee looked like a ball of lint and did nothing for him. In fact, the goatee covered up the cute dimple in his chin that I came to love later on.

  Once we were all loaded onto the bus, I found out how wicked his sense of humor was and still is. One of the students was an older woman who was near my mother’s age. She was a member of the student government from the third campus, and I had never met her before. As we were driving past the farms and pastures full of cows, somehow the fact they were different colors came up.

  I sat quietly in my seat, amazed, while my future husband convinced the woman that white cows have white meat, dark cows have dark meat, and mixed-color cows are for hamburger.

  I didn’t know whether to be angry or laugh. I was taught to treat your elders with respect, and playing this prank on someone who could be my mother was unsettling. On the other hand, how was it she believed the bunk he was telling her? To say that my husband can be persuasive is a given.

  Did we fall for each other immediately? No. In fact, he decided to make a play for my girlfriend during the conference. She wasn’t interested, thank goodness, because she had a boyfriend waiting for her at home.

  Just getting him to notice me took awhile. But I was determined, because in my heart, I knew he was the one. There was never a question in my mind that we were meant to be together.

  Our courtship was rocky. We lived in different cities and literally had a mountain range between us. Luckily for me, student government business often had us on the phone with each other. Frequently, after school business was discussed, we would talk and learn more about each other. I started going to his baseball games, and he came down for our campus’ picnic. Things became more serious when we started going steady.

  At the next year’s statewide student government conference, my future husband proposed. We had fallen head over heels in love. The road was still rocky when my parents didn’t approve and my fiancé decided to join the Air Force after graduation. But we kept trying and working to be together.

  August 1, 1981, we were married in a park in Arizona located on the Colorado River in front of our family and friends. My girlfriend stood up with me as my maid of honor, while our student government advisor was my fiancé’s best man.

  We have been together through thick and thin ever since, traveling around the world while my husband was in the Air Force and having two boys who are now adults. And it all started “at first sight.”

  This last September, our first grandchild, Vera, was born. I can’t wait to tell her about the first time I saw her grandpa walking toward me.

  Love at first sight has always been an interest of mine. I will often ask other couples how they met. I know two other couples, both married more than thirty years, wherein the woman knew her future husband was the one. I am sure there must be more. Call it “love at first sight” or “knowing at first sight,” but it isn’t as rare as you would think.

  In my romance novels, I write that my heroes and heroines may know at first sight that they are destined to be together. But it’s never that easy for them. Just as my husband and I did, they will have to work at being together and learn to appreciate their perfect mate.

  Caryn Moya Block burst onto the paranormal romance scene with Alpha’s Mate in January 2012. Since then she has been an Amazon best seller, was named one of the Indie Authors to Watch in April 2012 by iReader Review and won the Global E-book Award for contemporary romance in 2012. Visit her online at www.carynmoyablock.com.

  Falling in Love with the Intern

  By Megan Frampton

  It was pre-Clinton, I didn’t wear a blue dress, and he wasn’t particularly besotted by my position.

  But, other than that, the truth is that I dated, fell in love with, and eventually married my intern.

  If it were in a novel, it’d be way too cliché to be believed. It was New York City in the late eighties. There were nights in clubs seeing seminal bands. We had completely different romantic pasts, different backgrounds, and it was meant to be a one-night stand.

  Now it’s close to twenty-five years later, and we’re still together. Married. With a teenaged son.

  We met for the first time at a Nick Cave concert at the Ritz in New York City. He was the music director of a local college radio station, and I was out of college by a few years and was the editor at a music industry tipsheet. A mutual friend introduced us because she knew he was interested in interning at my magazine.

  We were both with other people at the time. I was in a long-dysfunctional relationship from college, while he had Quite the Reputation as being a ladies’ man at his college. (As I found out later, his Reputation was Quite Deserved.)

  The first time we met, or so he later told me, I wouldn’t look at him, and he could barely hear me, because I was so shy and soft-spoken, plus we were at a rock show, so it was hard to hear anyway.

  It’s a classic office romance, when you look at it. He did join the magazine as an intern, and it got to be a habit for the two of us to go out for frozen yogurt when he was answering phones. I admired his very long legs in his very snug jeans, and he seemed to like making conversation with me. We were both with other people, but there was definitely a spark of…something.

  Nothing happened while he was working for me, but eventually I was out of the long-dysfunctional relationship and had moved to my own apartment in Brooklyn. I was throwing a housewarming party and happened to be at CBGB’s record canteen when I ran into him. He told me he’d broken up with his girlfriend. I handed him a party invite, and that was that.

  And then—then he showed up at the party, coming all the way from New Jersey. He brought moonshine for his white-trash background and Jameson for my Irish heritage. We drank, and eventually he leaned into the fridge to grab something, and I grabbed his ass.

  That might have been the bravest and stupidest thing I’d ever done.

  We spent the rest of the party making out.

  The next morning, I was mortified. Just like any romance heroine would be when she had done something so totally unlike herself. I’d just gotten out of a six-year relationship with the wrong guy, and what was I doing sucking face with some college guy who was younger than I am, lived in another state, and had been my intern?

  If it hadn’t worked out, that might have ended up being the Most Mortifying Experience of My Life. Thank
fully, it did work out.

  The next afternoon, he called. Just to make sure I was feeling all right. We talked for a while, and then—oh my God, we made plans to see each other.

  What was I doing?

  I was being adventurous. I was taking a risk, where I never had before, not romantically, not anywhere in my life. Even moving to New York City and taking a job at a music magazine hadn’t been a particular risk. My free-spirited parents had raised me to follow my passion, and my passion was music. Not the making of it, mind you. I liked writing about it. My dad was a journalist who worked in the arts section, so it made some sense for me to do the same. Making a decent living was perhaps seventh on the list of things to strive toward, after Never Drink Inferior Beer, Stay Warm, and Wear Black All the Time. Things I continue to work toward.

  Our first official date, we met at Sbarro underneath Madison Square Garden. I spilled my soda all over the floor. I was that nervous. He thought it was cute, not clumsy.

  We talked on the phone. A lot. He was in the midst of finals during his senior year in college. He went to school in New Jersey, and I lived in Brooklyn. I’m not sure that it would have lasted if we had been able to see each other more. As it was, we were able to get to know each other via conversation rather than rushing headlong into a passionate affair.