Yes, he’s still sculpted like a model with a jawline to make statues jealous, bold eyebrows, and full lips that are parted just enough to give a glimpse of his white teeth. But there’s a softness there, too. Maybe it’s the long eyelashes or the bold eyebrows, or the way his ears flare out a little toward the top in a way that’s admittedly kind of cute—
Oh God, Lindsey. Stop it right now.
I avert my eyes, searching for anything to distract me before I do it again. Before I let this man defy all my reason and logic. Before I let myself give him another chance because… Because why? Because he’s a brilliant writer? Or is it because he’s drop-dead gorgeous?
If I had to choose a reason, I would feel better about myself if it were the writer in him that makes this so hard, but I'd be lying to myself. When I accidentally put my hand on his chest to steady myself it was a mistake and proved that it isn't the author but the man who has me enamored. Pulling my hand away took effort, like the hard, powerful chest beneath my fingertips was covered in glue.
My eyes fall on a box near the fireplace.With a healthy dose of guilt thudding through my veins, I try to decide if I’m really going to snoop through his stuff while he’s unconscious. I glance inside the box and am surprised to see it filled with journals. Sifting through the journals, I see they are dated. I find the earliest journal and sit back on the couch with it in my hands. I press my fingertips to the edge of the journal, debating if I should do this. Just as I’m about to open it Chris makes a snorting sound and rolls to his side.
I look at him, working my lips to the side in thought, and then toss a pillow at him.
He stirs but doesn't completely wake. I get up and start prodding him with my toe, but it's no use. Even slapping him with his own hand—while amusing—is fruitless. I set the journal down on the couch and lay down on my side, resolved to wait until he wakes up. I'm doing the responsible thing by keeping an eye on him while he's unconscious, but a not-so-quiet voice in my head keeps reminding me that my intentions aren't so pure.
Amelia and Brooke will probably start to worry about me before long, because I did go out into the night to investigate something that sounded like gunshots. I pull out my phone and type out a few drafts of a text—yes, drafts, because the blogger in me never fully turns off—before settling on one that is short and simple.
Lindsey: Everything’s good, but Chris bumped his head (very drunk). Going to hang out till he wakes up. Please don’t worry about me.
I send the text to Amelia and Brooke before tucking my phone back in my pocket. Chris rolls to his back and stretches his arms behind his head like he’s taking a casual nap on the beach. The movement lifts the hem of his shirt up enough to show me a few inches of his tanned stomach.
I divert my eyes at first, having seen only the quickest glimpse of his happy trail and a hard line of muscle in the shape of a “V” that cut across his tanned skin and disappear beneath his jeans. My fingertips tighten on my knees and I press my thighs together, trying very hard to pretend there isn’t a wave of heat spreading between my legs. I thought celebrities only had actual abs when they were starving themselves for a scene, not when they’ve been living like a slob in the mountains and drinking a case of beer a day.
“Asshole,” I mutter quietly. “He’s an asshole.” I look down to my lap. “You got that?” I ask.
I flop myself down on the couch and cover my face with both hands, hating how Chris is wreaking havoc with my normally ironclad self-control and how rational thought seems lost when he’s around. I just talked to my vagina, for God’s sake. What is he doing to me?
No matter how many times I try to shut myself off to him, I can’t forget his books. If I had never read his words, I’d be certain he is the man he wants people to believe he is. Crude. Uncaring. Arrogant. It’s a perfect mask. Almost. But I’ve read his stories. I read You’re Fucking Wrong and saw between the lines, despite what I wrote about it on my blog, and despite what even he thinks about his own book. I’ve read the romance he wrote as T.S. Barnes and saw glimpses of someone truly special. Then the manuscript…
In his writing, Chris isn’t the man he pretends to be. In the book he showed the world, he thought his walls were up. As T.S. Barnes, the walls showed cracks. With the unfinished manuscript, he bared himself. He opened the door and invited the reader in—showed them he’s considerate and kind. Thoughtful, even.
I look at his sleeping form, remembering a passage from the manuscript. Just one of many breathtaking moments, but for some reason this passage in particular resonated with me. Enough that I read it again and again until I memorized every word. Maybe it's because I could almost imagine Chris saying it in that gravelly voice, his amber eyes shrouded in sadness.
He smiled and nodded, but not because he thought what she said was particularly funny or even much worth agreeing with. He smiled and nodded because what was really on his lips, what was really fighting to reach his tongue and spark it to life was an idea, an idea so immense and so powerful that it had lived inside him for as long as it was worth remembering. He smiled and nodded because he couldn't say it clearly enough, express it the right way.
Maybe she’d listen politely, nod her head too, and then she’d smile just like he had.
She’d lie and he’d lie and just like every other fucking couple on the planet, they’d keep on smiling and nodding, never letting the impossible things that stirred inside turn to words for fear of getting it wrong—the things that mattered most but defied explanation. So they wouldn’t get it wrong because if you never try, you can’t mess it up. They’d get it right enough. And damn it, wasn’t that all he should ever hope for?
Wasn’t it?
Like dirty secrets, they’d bottle themselves up. Not in clear glass bottles to share, but in dark boxes to be tucked in corners where they could gather dust and be forgotten. If that wasn’t the American dream, he didn’t know what the fuck was.
I lay there, watching his long eyelashes and full lips, twirling my hair as I replay the passage in my head again and again. “Are they just words to you, Chris Savage?” I ask his unconscious form quietly. “Is that part of you or just another mask?”
I feel myself drifting off to sleep as I grapple with a frightening idea: I’m not going to be able to turn my back on the mystery that is Chris Savage until I know the truth about him. Until I know which one is the real him—the poet on the page or the savage in front of my eyes.
8
Chris
I stir awake with something between a hangover and a feeling like I fell asleep on the wrong end of a gun range. Either way, I feel like shit, but when I blink away the haze of a bad night’s sleep—on the floor of my living room, apparently—I see something that makes me raise an eyebrow.
Psycho Fan is sleeping on my couch. I’m disappointed for a minute when I realize I must’ve gotten drunk and fucked her somehow without remembering, but her hair isn’t messed up and her clothes seem intact. With how long it has been since I’ve had a woman, she wouldn’t have made it through an encounter with me so clean and put together. It’d look like she just walked through hurricane force winds for an hour or two.
I scrape my hand across my chin, cracking my neck and getting to my feet carefully because every movement sends stabbing pains through my head. I put my fingertips to the worst spot and feel a scab on my forehead, nodding to myself as understanding starts to set in. I vaguely remember getting drunk and shooting guns. I must've made enough noise to draw Lindsey up from her cottage. Maybe she hit me in the head with a frying pan to get me to keep it down and then dragged me in here.
I nudge her leg with my toe, watching with more than idle curiosity as she stirs in a way that presses her chest up, giving me a tantalizing view of her small tits. Small, yes, but they have a nice shape to them, like perky little teardrops that I wouldn't mind getting a taste of.
I run a fingertip up her thigh, dragging it until I reach the bottom of her shirt, pulling the fabric up enough t
o expose part of her stomach. With a shake of my head, I pull my hand away. Maybe I could get her to fuck me. Right now, even. But ever since I came out here, I haven’t been able to see the world the same way. It wasn’t some drastic moment or anything special, just a subtle shift in color, as if that makes any sense.
I decide to let her sleep, throwing on my jacket and heading outside.
The half-mile hike uphill has become familiar to me in the past six months. There’s a switchback I imagined my parents used to follow up the mountain together. Probably on some wholesome morning walk where they’d sip their coffee and talk about whatever normal people talk about. Probably the weather and news, the two things that become more interesting than sex and drugs to a large part of the population once they retire. I almost envy that, now. Maybe people just get sick and fucking tired of being a player in the game by then. It’s easier to take a step back and watch it all from the outside in, climb outside the fishbowl and hang up your suit, trade it in for slippers and a bathrobe so you can watch the world burn from your own lawn chair.
The switchback ends at the top of a leaf-covered hill where the trees aren’t as thick. Two small headstones sit in the center of the clearing. I walk up to them, crouching to brush the leaves off that built up since yesterday. I take my normal spot, back against a nearby tree where I can still see the headstones.
"I'm still not planning to apologize, if that's what you're wondering," I say after I've sat for a while. I felt like an ass at first, coming up here and talking to no one, but I've convinced myself it's therapeutic. It helps me avoid dealing with the question of whether I believe they can hear me or not, because it doesn't matter. I come, I talk, they listen or they don't, and I feel better. That's as simple as it can be.
“I wasn’t,” Lindsey says. I somehow managed not to hear following me, but I see her now cresting the hill with a strange look on her face.
Apparently, she wasn't asleep. "Don't worry, this isn't as sappy as it looks," I say, motioning to the gravestones. "I basically just come up here and talk shit to them."
She sits down a few feet away from me, a safe distance away, like I’m a wild animal who might lash out without notice. She sets a journal down in the leaves beside her and my chest tightens when I see my mom’s handwriting on the cover.
“What are you doing with that?” I ask.
“Have you read these?”
“Just give me the fucking thing.” I stand, reaching for it, but she tucks it behind her back, still wearing that strange expression.
“What are you avoiding?” she asks.
“Give it to me.” I’m towering over her now, completely aware that all I’d need to do is reach down and pluck it from her hands to put an end to this, but some dumb, superstitious part of me is aware that I’m standing in front of my parents’ graves, and it feels like they’re watching.
She doesn’t stand up or cower before me. All she does is lock those green-brown eyes on mine, not budging. “I’m going to make this offer one time,” she says finally. “I want to help you finish the manuscript. Whatever it takes.”
I wait for her to crack a smile or give me some sign that she’s joking, but she just keeps fixing me with those damn eyes in a way that I’m annoyed to admit is kind of sexy. I’m used to women who can’t hold eye contact with me and blush at the slightest hint of effort from my end. Either my time out here has made me lose some of my swagger, or Lindsey is cut from a different stone.
When I realize she's not kidding, my brain starts to run with the implications of what she's saying, My mind runs through all the civil ways she could help and then the devil on my shoulder says what I really want. Her... naked. I can already imagine what she'd look like with those big eyes squeezed shut, my name spilling from her lips as a sheen of sweat coats her body. It'd just be fucking, though. Yeah, I'd open her up to a new world of experience and show her what a real orgasm feels like, but it'd be my cock and her pussy. Like two disembodied parts devoid of any real emotion or connection.
That never used to bother me. Hell, that used to be exactly what I was looking for. If I even got a sniff of baggage or emotional attachment, you’d have needed Liam Neeson and his special set of skills to track me down.
I’m over empty though. I lived, ate, and breathed empty. Empty money. Empty experience. Empty people. Just moving from place to place and fucking with no meaning.
“When I came out here,” I say finally, moving back to my tree and sitting down again, forearms resting on my knees. “I thought I’d find myself. You know what I mean? Like some old movie. I’d go pull trout out of the river with my bare hands and I’d hear the secret to happiness in the rustling of the fucking branches. Instead I learned that chopping more firewood than I’ll need in three lifetimes is great stress relief. It’s easier to go to town and pick up my food from the grocery store than it is to hunt for it. And living without TV and distractions didn’t make me a different person, just more boring. The only time it felt right was when I was writing.”
“So why’d you stop?” she asks. “Why’d you throw away the manuscript? Why only publish one book as T.S. Barnes?”
I consider closing up, just shutting my mouth and sitting against the tree like a statue until she gets pissed and leaves for good. It’d be easier, easier than trying to explain something I can’t quite put into words. Instead of shutting her out though, I raise my finger and point at the journal in her hands, knowing I can’t explain it in a way that will make sense.
“Because of those,” I say simply.
She looks down at the journal, considering. When she looks back up at me, her eyes are searching. “I could read them to you, if it’s too hard for you to do it.”
Her offer takes me by surprise. I didn't explain that every time I even think about reading my mom's journals it feels like the earth is opening up beneath my feet, threatening to swallow me into an endless darkness where I'll have nothing to do but look at myself and all the mistakes I've made. All the people I've hurt. I didn't explain it, but somehow she saw it.
She’s still watching me, fingertips poised to open the journal and start reading, just waiting for me to give her some kind of sign that it’s okay.
My heart is thumping against my ribs and a sheen of sweat coats my forehead despite the chill of the morning. I don’t even know what’s in those journals. I have no fucking idea. It could just be journal after journal of how heartbroken she is that her son devoted his life to pissing her off. My family wasn’t perfect, but they didn’t deserve the way I treated them. I guess that’s easy to say now that my parents are gone and it’s too late to change anything.
I find myself nodding so slightly that I think she might not even see it, but it’s all I can manage right now.
She opens the book and starts to read my mom’s words, in a slow, reverent way that I immediately decide is how my mom would’ve wanted it read. As Lindsey starts to read, the words float effortlessly by, lulling me into a kind of trance where I can imagine for a while that I hadn’t been such a fuckup—to a place where I might have asked my mom about her life and sat quietly while she told me her story.
Journal 1: Martha
Everybody has a story, whether they’re still searching for it or they’ve found it or they don’t realize they already lived it; everybody has their own story worth telling. I’ve spent years telling myself it wasn’t worth writing my own down, but with everything that has happened in the past year, it seemed like the right time.
I’d be lying if I said I was writing this for myself or for some stranger to find in a few lifetimes.
These are for you, Chris. Part of me thinks I’m being silly for even going to the effort, that you might burn these or just set them out with the trash without so much as opening the front cover, but I decided to try, because you never let us explain our side of what happened. I want you to know why we did what we did and—
"That's enough," I say shakily. I stand up suddenly, wiping my nose with a t
rembling hand. "That's enough."
Lindsey slowly closes the journal, looking up at me with real concern in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she says. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”
"Yeah, it was," I snap. A strange kind of anger rolls through me, making my muscles feel tense and my brain feel clouded with red. "You shouldn't be up here." I point down the hill back toward her house. "Leave the journal when you go."
She looks wounded, but sets the journal in the grass carefully. “I meant what I said,” she starts. “I’ll still help you with the manuscript. You can be an ass all you want. That story deserves to be—”
“Go,” I growl.
She closes her mouth, letting a glimpse of the anger she’s holding back show through. Good. Be pissed. Hate me. And stay the fuck away before you make all of this any harder than it already is.
She turns and walks away, leaving me alone on the hill with the journal.
“Enjoy the show?” I ask my parents’ graves once Lindsey has left.
9
Lindsey
I’m still seething and it’s been almost two days since Chris snapped at me and sent me away from the hilltop. I tried as hard as I could to swallow my pride and help him. Some soft, stupid part of me wanted to believe there is something inside him worth saving, and that helping him write his manuscript would do it. I even thought I could handle the inevitable outbursts and harsh words that would surely come with trying to help him, but I wasn’t ready for it.
I cried like a baby when I got home that morning. Brooke and Amelia were already up, so I had to hold it together just long enough to get in the shower where I could fall apart in private. I hate him for making me act like someone I’m not. I hate how he makes me feel so weak. More than anything, I hate that there’s something about him that refuses to let me forget he even exists. A part of him crawled into my mind, curled up, and made itself at home, stubbornly refusing to budge no matter how hard I try. Just when I think I’ve moved on, I feel that nagging presence, and the endless obsession with the compellingly broken man and the book he’ll probably never finish.
Baby for the Brute_A Fake Boyfriend Romance Page 26