That, well, it might have been the most profound bit of advice I had ever gotten.
And it came from my little hardass sister, of all people, a woman who was seemingly allergic to relationships as a whole, not to mention love.
"It's too late."
My voice sounded pathetic to my own damn ears.
"Harden the fuck up," she said abruptly, back to being the same old Wasp she usually was. "That is not how a brother of mine talks. You shake that shit off, get up, and go get the girl if you want her."
"It's not that easy."
"For you?" she asked, looking close to laughter. "Since when?"
"After the book thing, after almost kissing her, but getting interrupted, I ran off." I looked over at her, finding her expectant. "And I didn't come back."
Her face hardened, jaw going tight, eyes getting small. "Let me guess. No call, no text, no email, no comment on her Facebook wall? Nothing? Complete and utter radio silence?"
My saliva tasted like battery acid as I swallowed. "Pretty much."
"Bad move, bro. Jesus," she said, jumping off the table, and looking off at the gate. "It's not like you to be that fucking clueless. How long?" she asked, turning back.
"A little over a month."
"A little over a month," she hissed.
"Oh, fuck. Did I awaken the scorned woman buried deep inside?"
"Oh please," she said with a smirk. "As if I would ever let a man in enough to scorn me. No. But you did awaken the 'all us women are in this together against the fuckfaces' that exists inside all women. That was such a dick move, Cy. You're going to have to work twice as hard as you have ever needed to before to get her even to speak to you again."
With that, she gave me a small punch on the shoulder, and headed back inside to torture all the other guys.
I stayed there for a long time, wondering what it even was like to have to work at it.
And forgiveness, for a normal woman who had been around this block a few times would be hard enough.
But from what I could tell with Reese, she hadn't dated anyone in years, and the guys she had dated were, ah, was there a nice way to say wimpy little man-children? Because they were fucking wimpy little man-children who she had actually had to break up with. I wasn't sure she had ever actually been in a situation where she felt jilted.
You know, unless you counted in her books.
And, to her, they counted.
I once saw her throw one at the wall in the library when she thought no one was around because, apparently, the leading man was wrong, and did the - and I quote - 'a-hole alpha thing where they talk in circles until the supposedly strong heroine actually ends up being the one apologizing' which was a book no-no for Reese.
I didn't even know how to go about apologizing for my behavior. To get her to trust me again. If she even could. Who would trust a man who ran off for a month at the slightest bump?
Ugh.
I had a feeling I was going to have to pull one of Reese's favorite plots.
The grand romantic gesture.
And see how it went from there.
SEVEN
Reese
Cyrus could go eff himself.
Oh yeah, I said it.
Okay, so I didn't technically say it.
But I thought it.
With emphasis.
And bold lettering and all caps.
It was a complete one-eighty from where I had been last night. I had gone to bed after a long, unhappy, non-calming bath. I tossed and turned. I woke up in the middle of the night with an oppressive weight on my chest that I couldn't call anything other than genuine unhappiness.
That, well, it sent me walking right down to The Creamery as soon as Daya opened up the next morning.
"This is early for you," she said immediately as the door closed behind me.
"I hate him," I declared, hoping for firm, and failing miserably.
"Of course you do, Ree," she said with a soft, sisterly smile. "Of course you do. What happened?" she asked as she scooped my usual order.
So then I told her, the words bursting out almost uncontrollably, feeling so good to be able to speak them to someone, to purge it all.
"Maybe he has like a micro-cock," Daya suggested as I put a scoop into my mouth, making me choke hard as she smirked at me. "Just kidding. He's got a third leg; I'd bet my life on it. I'm sorry you lost your new buddy, Ree. Seriously. You guys were the cutest 'just friends' that I have ever seen. But, yes, 'fuck him' is the mindset you should be in. Look, I know you're in here all the time. But we are usually just both lost in our own separate worlds and don't talk. But I know you enough to know you're a catch. This is his loss. Truly."
I maybe wasn't going to go that far, but I could definitely get behind the being mad at him idea. If for no other reason, but that I was tired of feeling mopey.
See?
This was why I didn't come out of my books.
I liked the fictional realm of emotions.
Especially in a genre like romance where you knew that no matter what your hero and heroine go through, what wicked twists of fate, or extreme uphill battle, they will always end up happy.
Life wasn't like that.
It didn't matter how interesting a heroine you were, how hot, or sweet-talking your hero was, how well you got along.
Sometimes life simply didn't work out.
Sometimes you felt things.
Sometimes you hoped for things.
And then... nothing.
Sometimes life was like the long, boring ride up on a rollercoaster without the free fall, belly-dropping excitement of tipping over and flying back down.
Which was part of the reason I didn't come out of my castles and highlands and cowboy ranches.
Life was better on the page.
The sooner I got back to that, the better.
"Okay, so, I know you're in scorned-woman mode, but, um," Daya said, reaching up to tuck her hair behind her ear.
Daya, well, she didn't mumble and fumble and trail off her sentences. As a whole, she had a seemingly unshakable confidence I admired.
"But what?" I prompted when she didn't finish.
"I have them," she offered, not quite making eye-contact.
"Have what?" I asked, watching as she reached under the counter to pull out a manilla folder full of a good four-hundred sheets of paper. "The pages?" I nearly shrieked, beyond excited instantly.
See, a while back, after I noticed for the umpteenth time that Daya was writing what seemed to be a story, I asked her what she liked to write. When she came back with 'erotica,' well, I had to ask and offer.
Ask if she wanted some feedback, and offer to help her with some publishing resources if she decided to go that route.
Apparently, Daya, the woman who had worked behind that counter pretty much since it opened, had been writing erotic fan fiction online for years.
After a little subtle encouragement from me to maybe consider writing something full-length, she apparently had.
That, well, it was beyond cool.
See, I'm a reader. I love books. I love the smell, the covers, the fonts, the page decor, the author pictures, the dedications. And, of course, the stories.
But I knew I wasn't a writer.
That being said, I still envied that ability. To create worlds. To suck people into them.
And I had never actually been able to be close with a writer before. I hadn't read a word of her work, and I was already fangirling so hard.
"Yep. The pages. Don't get too excited," she said, keeping her hand on the stack even as she pushed it toward me like she was struggling with letting it go. "I can't promise it's any good."
"You told me that you have like five-thousand followers on your story blog. You don't get that many followers by being a crummy writer, Daya."
"But I've only ever written short, smutty stories, not a full-length love story."
"Hey, worst case, it needs some revamping here and there. But at least
you will hear that from me, not some agent or publisher or mean-hearted reviewers. If there are any issues, we can work out the kinks together."
Her breath exhaled on a relieved sound, her shoulders relaxing, her smile going a little less forced.
"One thing."
"Anything," I said as I picked up the folder. Okay, so maybe I hugged it to my chest a little. Shut up. It's totally normal.
"Don't read it here in front of me."
I smiled at that, the first real smile I had felt in a while. "Deal."
That night, I went home, excited for a romance for the first time in a long while, finding myself staying up until three AM, devouring every last word of Daya's book.
It needed some kickass formatting, a quick line edit, and a cool cover, but it was good.
It was really good.
I intended to tell her exactly that as soon as I got out of work the next day.
--
"What's going on?" I asked, walking into the library the next day to find the other two librarians as well as two volunteers standing around the circulation desk, having a whispered, but animated conversation, arms flying, faces contorted.
Quite frankly, I wasn't in the mood to put up with some trumped-up drama. Like the time they threw a fit because someone wrote a naughty haiku in the bathroom stall.
Heck, I praised the effort.
It wasn't bad!
But I worked with much older ladies who had more - ah - delicate sensibilities than I was inflicted with.
Different strokes for different folks, as my grandmother would say.
It was simply that I was in the minority at the library. Which made sense because, well, nobody went into a field as unsteady as library sciences anymore. Unless, you know, you want to get paid pennies to be around old, musty books all day.
Which I did.
But anytime I suggested we do something more progressive to bring people back in again, like a poetry night for teens, or a simultaneous book club for moms of under school-age children where the kids would go do a craft with Marcy, the librarian in the children's section, and the moms would go with me to talk books, well, they shot it down.
No moms read anymore, Reese, I would be told by one.
I don't want to be stuck, alone, with a bunch of misbehaved brats. Kids these days don't have any discipline. That, incredibly, came from the children's librarian.
It was a bit draining to try to keep a dinosaur from dying out when they were just patiently waiting for the meteor to hit.
"Oh, Reese, finally," Barb said, shaking her head at me like I was late. I was five minutes early.
Again, I thanked the fact that three days of the week, I worked the afternoon and evening shift. Alone. With just the volunteers. That was maybe the only thing that kept me sane the other two or three day shifts I worked. Well, that and the idea of 'retirement.' Not for me, for my coworkers.
We all have dreams, right?
"What are you all talking about?"
"We got a donation this morning," she announced, face pinched. To be fair, it might have always been pinched. Whether that was from her pinching it up all the time that, as the childhood adage went, it stuck, or just how she was born, was impossible to tell.
"Oh, great!" I chimed, brightening slightly.
Donations were few and far between these days, making the budget tight. No one thought to give to the local library anymore. Unless cleaning out their bookshelves, and dropping old, damaged, outdated, useless books counted.
It didn't.
And I understood. Especially since the women's shelter opened. Talk about a worthy cause.
We did get a trickling in from older residents of the town who didn't want to see the library disappear in the digital age. But it was usually only, at best, a thousand dollars.
Still, it was generous.
And it helped.
"No, Reese. We got a donation," she went on, looking at me like I was an idiot for not realizing that when she said it the first time, she meant a sizable one.
We never got sizable ones.
"Really? How much? From whom?" I asked, moving behind my desk to stash my purse under it.
"Eighty-thousand dollars," she declared from the other side of the desk.
"What?" I gasped, head shooting up.
My first thought was not the nicest. I figured someone must have died. You know, because who else had that kind of liquid income to give to the local library?
"Yes, right there," she declared, pointing behind me toward a box sitting behind the desk in a corner, one I figured for a shipment of books.
"Wait... in cash? We got an eighty-thousand dollar donation in cash this morning?" I gasped.
"Waiting right outside the door like it was no big thing when I got here," Marcy piped in. Her dislike of children - and obvious misjudgment in career choices - aside, Marcy wasn't my least favorite co-worker. She was the second closest to my age, next to the other night shift girl, at thirty-seven, childless, husbandless, but with a cat collection that made any seventy-year-old spinster jealous. She was short, heavyset, with a pretty face, shiny brown hair, and bright blue eyes.
I was trying to process that, trying to understand how careless one had to be to leave a box of cash outside a library unprotected, when a note slammed down on my desk.
Startled, I jumped back, my head shooting up to see Barb looking at me disapprovingly. Which, well, was her default look when it came to me, so I didn't think much of it.
"What's this?"
"The note that was inside the box," she offered, tone glacial. "Read it," she demanded.
To the Navesink Bank Public Library,
Please accept this donation of eighty-thousand dollars to build the long sought-after teen center.
- Anonymous
The teen center was my dream.
And only mine.
See, we had a lovely library. Five years running, it was named the best in the state. There had been a grant seven years before which allowed them to completely renovate the space. The children's wing had new carpets, bookshelves, tables, puzzles, computers, a craft room, and a reading nook that had floor-to-ceiling windows. The main part of the library got new beige tile in the lobby, then swirled brown and beige carpets throughout the stacks, new shelves, new modern desks with plug-ins for chargers and even HDMI ports, new computers, a huge new collection of DVDs, books, and another matching reading nook, albeit a bit smaller. But after the landscaping, and paving, and the new roof, and the bathroom renovations, there had simply been no money to put in a proper teen room.
I see no reason why they need their own room, Barb had said when I brought up the idea at a budget meeting. They have shelves in the back behind travel.
Her argument won, of course, because a budget meeting was generally to decide how to cut back instead of genuinely make improvements, so I shelved the idea, even though it was a burning desire of mine.
Teens needed a room.
Teens in Navesink Bank, especially, needed a room. They needed a place where they could go to stay off the streets, away from the bad influences, where they were safe, and could talk with peers without getting shushed by the adults.
I had even, in my excitement over the idea, had Paine and Kenzi draw me up the plans, converting an old, outdated section we used for unusable things such as encyclopedias into said teen room. I wanted it closed in, but with all glass, so we could easily keep an eye on things. I wanted their own shelves full of new and relevant titles. I wanted a separate computer lab. And I wanted a comfortable seating section. And I wanted it to not look like some sixty-year-old who hadn't gone to design school in forty years (ugh, don't get me started on the choices of wall art in the main area of the library) designed it. I wanted it fresh and inviting so local teens would feel comfortable there.
But I had long-since given up hope of getting that dream.
Even if I got a genuine pang anytime a teen came up and asked me if we had the newest dystopian, and I
had to tell them no, even though we did, incredibly, have six copies of the newest Grisham.
"There is also this," Barb went on, even though my head was spinning a bit too much already. She slammed down a document on top of the letter. "Which legally binds us to, if we accept the money, use it to build the teen center. If a penny goes to anything else, we could be sued."
It was like Christmas, my birthday, and every single book-mail day all rolled into one.
Because, until I saw that, I knew, I just knew that the rest of my coworkers would gang up, and find a way to use the money without giving me my dream.
Now they couldn't.
I was getting my teen center.
"Who have you been talking to, Reese?" she snapped, eyes shooting daggers at me, but, for once, it didn't even bother me.
Talking to?
Well, I mean, my whole family knew.
My mom, aunts, grandmother, and sister were doing alright in life, but could never afford eighty-grand. Not even if they all chipped in. My brothers, too, had nice lives going, but it was unlikely. My sister-in-law, Elsie, well, she made an obscene amount of money, but she had other things on her mind right then. No way was she giving me the teen center I had talked about a year before.
So that was everyone.
Right?
I hadn't talked about it since then except to... oh.
Oh.
My.
God.
That wasn't possible, right?
After five weeks of radio silence?
After screwing with my feelings more than anyone had been able to in more years than I could remember?
Why?
More specifically, why now?
Was this his form of an apology?
Because, honestly, it wasn't an apology.
It was generous.
It was over-the-top and heart-soaringly awesome.
But it wasn't exactly those words one needed for it to be considered an apology.
Cyrus (The Henchmen MC Book 9) Page 7