by Joyia Marie
Stubbornness, pure dee stubbornness, as my grandmother used to call it. She was right. I hadn’t done anything wrong so I didn’t see any reason I should be running out of town with my tail between my legs like a whipped dog.
I was the victim here. Chris was the villain. If anyone should leave, it should be him and that skank of his. That wouldn’t happen so here we sat, me, he and she, in the world’s most clichéd love triangle.
Yes, I have tried to think of something else to call this girl, but if the skank fits, wear it. Calling her a bitch would be an insult to female dogs everywhere. Calling her, anything else would involve using language I prefer not to use in mixed company.
“But D…,” Charlise started and I cut her off. I was so done with this. It was time to pull the plug.
“Look, C, I get it. I really do. I know things have to be awkward with you and I being friends and you and Bo being girlfriend and boyfriend. Bo was Chris’s brother and I know this has to be pulling you in two different directions. So, if we need to cut ties, I get it and no hard feelings,” I said finally speaking frankly.
She looked at me in shock, “So it’s just that easy for you? You and I have been friends since you got here and because I’m saying some things you don’t like, you’re willing to throw our friendship away? I thought I was your best friend.”
I noticed people around us starting to look and sighed again. Yep, this would be all over town before sunset. Grover’s Corner, our town, was small and Texan so gossip was the lifeblood. The fact Charlise was doing nothing to keep her voice down wasn’t helping, but then again, I wouldn’t look like a fool, she would. Charlise tended not to hold back on the emotional drama.
“No, it wouldn’t be that easy, but I don’t want you caught in the middle of this drama. Drama that is only slated to get worse now that that baby is here. So if you have to go, I just wanted you to understand that I’m okay with that,” I said calmly.
She looked at me as if she had never seen me before and I got it. The old me would have been apologizing and backsliding in the face of her hurt. The new me wasn’t that concerned with her hurt, as mean as that might sound. She didn’t seem very concerned with my hurt.
Charlise and the rest of the gang had rallied around Chris as if he was the injured party. They took every opportunity to tell me how sorry he was. Frankly, I was tired of it.
Strange how something like the love of your life doing the horizontal mambo with the same skank who swore for years she’d ‘get him’, really helps a girl mature. The last year of my life had been hell and I was sick of being the bitch. The lure of anywhere but here was growing stronger as the days went past.
I smirked when I thought about Janice, the skank of the Chris-getting persuasion. Well, she had gotten him and from all accounts had gotten him good. A girl couldn’t get a guy much better than a baby. I wondered if she was finding the having, not that she actually had him, as sweet as the getting. I had a feeling the answer was no.
Chris had shocked everyone when Janice got pregnant and he refused to marry her. It was the twenty-first century, but you couldn’t really tell it by this town. In this town, a boy knocks a girl up, said boy ponies up a ring. Alternatively, he leaves town, but as I mentioned before that hasn’t happened in this case.
The consensus was you play, you pay. If for no other reason than to give the child a name. The marriage might not last too much past the birth of the child, but the boy still made the effort.
Chris had refused. His parents had tried to force him. The church tried to force him. Even our friends tried to force him and he was having none of it. Janice was a drunken mistake he said and he wasn’t going to make it worse by marrying her.
He didn’t love her. He loved me. Talk about gossip, the town jungle drums beat for weeks about it.
I have to admit to a reluctant admiration for Chris. He’s a laid-back kind of guy, so I expected him to do the right thing, or the right thing as the town saw it, but he didn’t. Too bad, he didn’t have that kind of backbone before drinking from the town fountain. Ah well, guess I wasn’t the only one to have matured.
“D, I’m just saying you need to forgive him. It was just once and he’s…,” Charlise said leaning over the table to express her sincerity.
“I know, I know, really sorry,” I said cutting her off before she could say it again. “You seem to think I’m still pissed, but I’m not. Chris did me a favor. He stopped it before it got too far with him and me. For that, I forgave him months ago.”
Charlise looked at me with scorn. “Forgave him? Yeah, right. That’s why you won’t talk to him. You won’t go to any of the gang’s parties. You leave a gathering if he shows up there.
“If that’s forgiveness, girl, you need to check your dictionary. I get it, you’re pissed, and you should be. That was some lowdown crap Chris pulled, but still… I can’t believe you’re going to let one drunken night mess up the years you and Chris were together.”
“Well, that’s as far as I’m willing to go. I haven’t stabbed him in the chest with an ice pick. I haven’t pulled out every bleached blond hair in Janice’s head. If I choose not to associate with him then I think that’s my right,” I said defensively, not sure why I was letting myself be pulled into this same old argument.
Another vow of the ‘new me’ was not to put up with unnecessary BS, yet here I was doing exactly that. Time to pull the plug. Again. I smirked. This was one stubborn plug.
“Look, I need to go. I still have grocery shopping to do,” I said scooting my chair away from the table before grabbing my purse off the back.
“Go?” Charlise asked, looking around at all the interested faces. She flushed as she realized just how not private our conversation had been. “You can’t go yet. We haven’t even had lunch,” she said leaning forward with a hiss of frustration.
“Funny, but talking about ‘him’,” I said, making air quotes around ‘him’, “really kills my appetite. Maybe I should tell everyone about the wonderful ‘Chris Diet’, it has done marvelous things for me.” I finished, gesturing toward my new thinner body.
Before she could say anything else, I turned and walked out of the little café. Our little town didn’t boast many restaurants other than the fast food chains that seemed to be everywhere so the café was the place for ladies to lunch, but casual, hence the jeans and t-shirts Charlise and I were wearing. I ignored the whispers and the looks as I made my way to the door.
Once outside the glass doors I could see the talking picking up as women drifted from table to table spreading the news to anyone who might have missed anything. Again, the wide-open road was calling my name and the urge to answer was getting to me. I was tired of this crap.
I turned and walked toward my car for the short drive to the supermarket. I could have walked it, but the heat made that undesirable. In addition, I would need my car to get my groceries home. I ignored the heads turning as I walked to my car. Yep, the grapevine was buzzing already.
I felt another spurt of anger toward Chris and Janice. They caused this crap, but they were coming across as the victims. Chris, because he lost the ‘love of his life’, or so I’ve been told, and Janice as deserted single mother. Me? I was the bitch who just couldn’t get over it.
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Sorry, Book One
So Sorry, Book Two
Unapologetic, Book Three – coming Fall 2014
Crush Saga
Crush, Book One of the Crush Saga
Synopsis:
Tracie Winters is a curvy writer of romances who’s had a crush on Hollywood actor Devon Moore, for 10 years. That was fine, it was the way she liked it. He keeps his gorgeousness on the screen and she gets to admire him from afar. No harm, no foul, and nobody gets hurt.
Until…
Tracie writes a book. That book becomes a best seller and is optioned by a movie studio. She gets roped into writing the screenplay, in Hollywood.
Oh, was it mentioned that this book has a character
that bears a striking resemblance to Devon Moore?
Or, that after a talk show interview where Tracie says Devon Moore is the actor she’d like to play the part, he gets the part?
Or that Devon Moore tracks her down to thank her for the shot?
Or that her crush might be crushing back?
Crush is a new adult romance novel that explores what happens when just once you get exactly what you never dared wish for.
Chapter One: Tracie
I looked up from my laptop as my assistant, Carla, bounced in with my much-needed white chocolate mocha espresso drink. This was my second of the day and with the way things were going, not my last.
Why, I wondered again, had I agreed to this madness? Then I thought about the paycheck and sighed. I am such a word ‘ho.
“Guess what?” Carla sang as she pressed the drink into my eager palm.
“What?” I asked after a long slurp. Carla likes guessing games and I hate them. However, I have learned over the years trying to avoid playing them with her takes longer than playing them so now I just play along.
“Guess who’s coming to meet you?” she sang, her big brown eyes shining in a way I haven’t seen since the last sale at the Shoe Warehouse.
“Who?” I said, hoping, praying, and wishing that she wasn’t about to say, ‘the director’, Tim Taylor, or even worse, ‘the producer’, Daniel Shane.
One more change to the script, that day at least, and I was going to lose my mind. I already had enough ‘teensy’ changes and ‘itsy’ tweaks to keep me busy for the rest of the day.
“Devon Moore,” she breathed.
At first, I didn’t say anything. My rhythm was thrown off by the quick conclusion of this game. Usually, I had at least two more rounds of questions before I got anything like an answer out of Carla so I felt like I had come to the bottom of a staircase a step before I expected to.
Then her words sank in and my heart just sank. Well, it was more than that, my heart sank, I felt the blood drain from my face, my armpits got sweaty, and my hands grew cold. Imagine every cliché about the body’s reaction to shock and I had it.
Devon Moore was coming to meet me? The hell you preach, I thought, before jumping up as if the trailer had just caught on fire. I gotta go, I thought frantically, I gotta go now.
I snatched the power cord out of the wall and shut down my laptop before stuffing it into my bag. I looked around frantically for anything I couldn’t live without until Hurricane Devon had passed. Keys – check, laptop – check, purse – check. I grabbed up my coffee drink and turned toward the door ready to make my escape.
Carla watched me in shock before grabbing the strap to my laptop bag and jerking me to a halt. Fortunately, I had already finished half my drink so it didn’t slop over the top with my abrupt halt.
“Uh, where are you going?” Carla asked, “I said…”
“I heard you and I gotta go,” I said frantically as I tried to pull my laptop case strap out of her hand.
Carla held on with the tenacity of a pit bull with a rump roast. I looked at the case and wondered. I actually only ‘needed’ my flash drive which was on my key chain. I could hit a library and work from there.
“Tracie? Trace!” Carla said bringing me out of my thoughts. “Uh, why do you need to go when Devon Moore is coming here especially to meet you? You love him. You worship him. You think the sun rises and sets on his say so.”
“Exactly,” I said, pulling the laptop case off my shoulder and letting Carla have it.
Screw it, I would either work at the library or come in later to finish the changes. Time was a-passing. This didn’t stop the tenacious one. Carla merely grabbed my arm with her spindly yet surprisingly strong fingers.
I sighed. I wasn’t surprised that Carla wouldn’t just let this go. This was one of the problems employing a relative, boundaries are a bit…fluid, shall we say. Carla was my cousin and the most organized person I know, so when I needed a personal assistant and could afford one, whom else would I hire? I looked at Carla’s cute sweet caramel-colored face and gave it up.
“What happens around men I think are attractive?” I asked and when she still looked blank, I broke it down for her. “Junior Prom?” I prompted then waited for the porch light to go on in front of her mental house. I saw when it did.
“Oh? Oh. Oh!” she said each repetition more horrified than the last. She slipped the laptop case strap back on my shoulder quickly, then turned me toward the door, while saying, “You need to go.”
“Thank you,” I sang sarcastically before opening the door.
I took a step before slamming into a brick wall. Well, not really. As a writer my trailer was a little out of the way, but not that far. No, this brick wall was the delightfully well-muscled and delicious smelling chest of one Mr. Devon Moore. I couldn’t resist a tiny sniff. He smelled like musk, man, and all things tasty.
“Whoa there, sweet, where’s the fire?” said the hot-cocoa-with-whipped-cream-and marshmallows-on-top voice that had narrated more than a few of my dreams. Okay, then, fantasies.
I looked up then some more and I see it. The face that has starred in more than a few of my imaginings, Devon Moore. At 5’4”, looking up at the majority of the adult human population was normal for me but this was up on a completely new scale. The man was tall.
Then I remembered which man I was talking about and I sighed. I longed to lean my forehead against this brick wall also known as his chest and cry. It was him. It had to be him. All the laws of nature demanded it be him. I tried to resist but then I felt ‘it’ start.
‘Why me?’ I wondered as my mouth opened and shut like a freshly caught catfish. I vaguely noticed the way his large hands almost completely encircled my biceps. I was too busy going into geeky, nerdy girl mode, otherwise known as GNG. My modus operandi for when I was around any attractive man. Yep, some days it was so cool to be me.
“You all right, sweet?” Devon asked as I did my fish impression. I did manage to get out a moan but forming words was still beyond me.
“She’s fine. Just a little startled,” Carla said trying to rescue me from my pit of twitches and groans.
It was a nice try but so not going to happen. Once GNG starts, it’s like a cold, it has to run its course. I could blame my affliction on being raised by a widowed mother who had only a sister-in-law and brother-in-law, so my late childhood was relatively male free. My uncle did what he could, but with four of his own, he didn’t have a lot of attention left over for a quiet child that didn’t get into trouble.
I could blame it on a lack of self-confidence. I could blame it on many things but bottom line, get me around an attractive man and I make Peewee Herman look like George Clooney. The Junior Prom fiasco was just the tip of an iceberg of geeky nerdy behavior.
I have learned avoidance was the only answer. It's clichéd, but I have to say it. Attractive men are my kryptonite.
“Okay,” he said slowly when I finally slammed my mouth shut. Speaking was not an option right then.
“I just wanted to meet the author and tell her I really enjoyed her book,” Devon said to Carla while looking at me with his dark brown eyes.
I have no idea why he was talking to Carla. Maybe my performance thus far had convinced him English was not my native tongue.
Then his words sank in. He liked my book! He had read my book! He could read!
Okay, I will freely admit I was as much a believer in stereotypes as the next person. Because Devon Moore was so very pretty, I naturally assumed he had the intellect of a stuffed animal. Not kind, but there you go.
Maybe I needed to believe that to keep myself from getting any more involved than I was. I was involved. Oh good Gertie was I involved.
Confession time, in case you hadn’t guessed, I had a huge, mondo, ginormous crush on Devon Moore. Crush was putting it mildly. If I had the time, I would be a stalker. In a way, I already was.
I had seen everything he had ever been in including the soap opera he u
sed to be on and the weekly TV show he’s on now. I had them recorded. I watched reruns. I ordered and slept in the cast t-shirt. I wanted to have his illegitimate love child. I loved this man. Or the way he looked anyway.
In case you haven’t figured it out, Devon Moore was cute, fine, handsome, delicious, everything a man should be and more. Women want him, men want to be him. All women and all men, regardless of race. He’s so pretty he doesn’t look real. He looks like an artist rendering of a man.
Imagine if you will, a man 6 feet tall, maybe about 200 pounds with a runner or basketball players build but a lot more cut. Man has a six-pack and yeah, I’ve seen the pictures to prove it. Okay, then make him the wonderful shade between white chocolate and milk chocolate, with dark chocolate eyes and a straight white smile featuring my favorite, dimples. Are you imagining? Okay, that’s Devon Moore.
The silence clued me into the fact I was now expected to speak. I ran the last thing I heard through my head, cleared my throat as if I had a postnasal drip, and managed to squeak out, “Thank you?”
Then he smiled and I felt like I had been blinded by the sun. Then again, what a way to go. “No, thank you. If you hadn’t lobbied for me, I don’t think the producer would have thought of me for the role of Aiden,” Devon said giving me another lovely cup of his hot-cocoa voice. Mmmm, chocolate, I thought blissfully.
Then his words sank in. Not consider him? Not consider the man I had based the character of Aiden on? Was the producer blind?
I guess my outrage must have overcome my GNG because I managed to spit out, “But you are Aiden!”
At his startled expression, I wished I had stayed mute. Yeah, way to let the object of my affection know he was the object of my affection. This would be fine, if I thought I had the least little shot with Aiden, or Devon rather, but I didn’t. I might write fiction but I didn’t live it. Devon Moore was so far out of my league the only thing we had in common was we were both carbon-based life forms.