Love, Redefined: A Contemporary Romance Novel (Love Lessons Book 1)

by Brynn North

  “I’ll call them soon and see them this weekend,” I promised. “After I get my story straight.”

  The official story I came up with on the six-hour drive, which I needed to polish a little, was that Shane and I had--what I read so often on TMZ-- “irreconcilable differences.” I even listened to a podcast about it to make sure I understood the details.

  But the true story, which I didn’t plan on telling Vi or my parents, was that over the six long hours it took me to get to Vi’s, I had decided Shane was wrong. He needed to stick to the promises he gave me years ago, to love me for better or for worse. He said those words, and even though we didn’t sign a formal piece of paper committing us by law regarding that promise, didn’t mean it just went away. He got caught up in the moment, in his age. He just needed a little break to realize he couldn’t live without me, is all.

  “Well,” Vi said, standing up and heading to the kitchen. “I’m making up the guest room for you. I’ll put in all those fancy things you like, you know, like candles that smell like lemons and a fuzzy blanket. You’re staying here as long as you need.” She eyed me as I was already tearing up again, though this time in gratitude. “And I hope it’s a good, long time.”

  5

  I sat in Vi’s guest room, fingers hovering over the phone, working on the willpower to make the call I did not want to make. I had been in the same position for at least forty-five minutes. Finally, with a sigh, I hit “mobile” and the phone started to ring.

  “Hey, Mom! How’s it going?” I said as cheerfully as I could muster when she picked up the phone.

  “Well, this is a little unusual, you always text.”

  I forced a smile. Not even ten seconds into the call, and I was getting reprimanded on how I could do better. I changed the subject.

  “So yeah, I’m in Minneapolis,” I started.

  “And you didn’t tell me?” she interrupted. “When did you get in? Did you fly or did you and Shane drive?”

  “Well, I’m telling you now!” I replied brightly, skirting over the questions I did not want to answer, such as how I had arrived over a week ago and Shane was definitely not with me.

  “Well, we should have dinner or lunch soon. You free today? Or this weekend?” Damn it. Mom knew something was up. I could tell by the tone of her voice. She’d be texting Shane the minute I got off the phone if I didn’t give her a hint.

  “I can’t make the drive today,” I said, relieved at having an excuse. Mom and Dad had purchased a B&B right after I graduated high school, calling it the groan-worthy name of “Love’s Retreat.” They proved to have quite a knack for the B&B business, quickly growing it from four rooms to ten, and they even started to expand to guest cottages, which would be ready next summer. Love’s Retreat had been written up in multiple magazines, who often called them the perfect weekend retreat from Minneapolis. Even better, it was a two-hour drive from the city, which was the perfect distance of being able to get there in a day, and also using it as an excuse not to.

  “This weekend maybe? Or we’ll meet in between?”

  “I’ll check the records this weekend, see what we can do. Weekends are our busy times, you know. Sounds like you’ll be here a few days then?”

  The suspicion in her voice hadn’t gone away. Ugh.

  I sighed. “Shane left me, Mom. Or, I guess, maybe I left him. Whatever it is, I moved out.”

  I cringed at her gasp. “No. Why? What happened? You can’t just move out!”

  This would take a while. I reached for a pink throw pillow to prop behind my back and stretched out luxuriously. As much as I missed sharing a bed with Shane, I had to admit I liked having a queen-sized bed to myself.

  “Shane wanted to have kids, Mom. Biological kids. With a pregnant wife. And you know I can’t do that.”

  She paused for a heavy moment before speaking. “Well, he must be mistaken, then.” Her voice was firm, and I wondered if it was too early to start drinking. “You two have been together for years. This is just a rough spot. Every relationship gets them sometimes. You two were almost engaged!”

  “Yeah, well,” I grumbled, getting up after deciding it was not too early. It was five o’clock somewhere, as Jimmy Buffet had always promised us. “We weren’t married. Heck, he hadn’t even given me a ring yet, so I can’t exactly will him into doing that.”

  I wandered into the kitchen and snagged a can of bubbly wine from the fridge. Mom was still talking. I knew she meant well, and everything she was saying came from a place of love, but she often came across like a bull in an antique shop. She seemed to believe that if she explained her way of thinking, everyone would come around to it.

  “Well, how about if I call Shane and talk to him?” Her voice told me this was more of an announcement than a question.

  “No! Please, please don’t do that,” I screeched, horrified. The last thing I needed was my mother begging my almost ex-fiance not to dump me. I took another swig from the can.

  “Katrina, you can’t just stand there and let him do this to you! You need to fight for your man!”

  I groaned, loudly. “Mom, this isn’t some ’70’s country song. I can’t make Shane do something he doesn’t want to.”

  “True.” I could almost hear her lips purse as she thought about it. “Then you just need to show him what he’s missing from afar.”

  As much as I didn’t want to take advice from my mother, who had been married to my father since she was eighteen, I was slightly intrigued. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Show him what he’s got is better than what he doesn’t. You know. Live life to the fullest and show him he’s missing out.”

  I looked down at myself. It was before noon on a Tuesday. I was drinking canned wine, wearing wrinkled pajama pants I had since college, and my hair hadn’t seen shampoo in at least four days. If this was what Shane was missing out on, he’d be relieved as hell to have gone running for the hills.

  “Thanks for the advice, Mom, but I gotta go get ready for something,” I lied. “I’ll come up soon.” Another lie, at least if I could help it.

  I tossed the phone down on the couch, feeling like a total failure. Can’t have a baby, can’t keep a man, can’t afford an apartment in Chicago on my own, can’t keep my parents happy…the list of my failures seemed to keep growing.

  6

  One month later

  Vi surveyed me, hands on her hips.

  “What?” I asked defensively. “I’m saving dishes!”

  She marched over and took the cookie off my shirt, where it was resting on my boobs as I laid on the sofa. “And creating laundry is that much better?”

  I gave a little half-shrug. “Gotta do it anyway. Can you pass me my wine glass?”

  Vi gave me a hard stare as she passed it over. “Katrina Love.” She pronounced my name in the same tone my mom had used when I was sixteen and getting in trouble for borrowing her favorite handbag and staining it. I winced. “You need to get back into the land of the living. It’s only four in the afternoon and you’re drinking cheap wine and eating cookies on the couch, crying to bad Lifetime movies. And that wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t the third time this week I found you like this.”

  I studied my toes, noticing for the first time the polish was chipped and they desperately needed a pedicure. I ran my fingers through my hair to distract myself. Oops. By the feel of it, it had been a while since it had been introduced to shampoo.

  Vi watched me take an analysis of myself. “Your pants are dirty too. And have a hole near the crotch.”

  “Thanks, Captain Supportive,” I grumbled as I discreetly checked myself. Damn it, she was right. It didn’t help that she had just come home from work and was looking put together and gorgeous, with a white shirt that showed off her tan skin and rolled up just enough to see the birds fly up to her arm.

  She sighed. “You have to pull yourself together, Kat.”

  “My almost fiancé left me. And not for another woman, for any other woman,” I re
minded her through gritted teeth, annoyed as hell.

  My defense ended up making Vi look even sadder, which in turn, made me feel even worse. “So since the asshole dumped you, you’re going to sit around in misery for weeks on end? What is your plan, anyway?”

  I gnawed at a hangnail, caught off guard at this conversation. Truth be told, I didn’t really have a plan. Shane’s work had always taken precedence to my freelance career. For the first few years after I graduated, I joined him in his quest to become a major financial manager, moving first to LA, then a short stint in Charlotte before we spent a couple of years in Atlanta. Finally, we had landed in Chicago, which made me happy because it was at least close-ish to home for me, and under two hours to Shane’s family in Milwaukee. Somehow, my college dream of becoming a book editor for a major publishing house never really materialized, since I wasn’t able to get situated in any one company. Instead, I ended up taking freelance work here and there, editing people’s theses and the like. It wasn’t exciting but had brought in enough to cover my bills and put a few bucks into my savings account, one that was now quickly dwindling.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to doooo!” I yanked the throw pillow I was leaning back on over my face and whined into it. “I screwed myself over, thinking we were a ‘partnership’ and we would do life together. Some effing partnership. I learned to clean our damn floors with the best cleaning products while he made piles of cash.”

  “I, uh, think I got that. Sort of. It was more than a bit muffled. And didn’t really make sense, to be honest.” She cleared her throat. “You know, you could take him up on his offer to give you a few bucks to get situated, it’s not like you didn’t sacrifice…” her voice trickled off as I yanked the pillow back off my face and breathed in the fresher air.

  “No!” My voice was sharp and she dropped it.

  I mean, I understood I let my career go so he could chase his, but if there was one thing I did not want was to be supported by a man who didn’t want me. Taking money from him, even though he offered and I might have been entitled to accept, would just be a reminder I had made crappy life choices. Deciding that having dinner ready and the laundry folded for Shane when he came home from yet another sixteen-hour day at the office was more important than becoming a high-flying executive myself.

  “Eff that. I took half of what was in our shared bank account, but like hell I’ll accept one dime from him out of pity.”

  “Then you need a plan,” Vi said briskly, reaching for her iPad on the reclaimed wood table next to us.

  “What are you doing? It better not be downloading Tinder,” I warned her. A new man was not a plan.

  “Please,” she rolled her eyes, tapping at the screen. “Bumble is better. But that’s not what we’re doing. We’re creating a list for you.”

  “A…list?” My eyes wandered around the room, resting on the modern black and white painting above Vi’s fireplace. I idly wondered how much it cost, and if I’d ever be able to afford one like that myself.

  “Yes. A ‘Katrina Needs To Get Her Groove Back’ list.” Vi’s fingers started flying on the keyboard.

  I groaned. “Can we not call it that? Cuz I don’t exactly have enough money to fly down to Jamaica for two weeks and find myself a young hottie.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Call it whatever you want, I don’t care. But we’re making a list of things you need to do to get you back on track in life. Besides lay on the couch for two weeks straight, creating a mold of your butt,” she said with a look that I avoided. I didn’t blame her, this was probably a very expensive couch straight from Restoration Hardware’s showroom.

  I started toying with a loose thread. How could I tell her the truth? Tell anyone the truth? Because the truth was, at thirty years old, I felt totally, utterly washed up. Unwanted. No major job skills because I let my ex lead the way with his career, thinking I was supporting us as a “team” with taking care of the mental and emotional labor. And, for the cherry on top, was unsure if I wanted children, and definitely was unable to have any. Proper prize right here. The damn list she wanted to make together of steps to propel me forward needed to start with figuring out what the heck I wanted to do, and that seemed like an insurmountable task in itself.

  Vi’s mauve painted fingernails paused on the keyboard. “Step One: Hair.”

  “Hair?” I yelped. I mean, I wasn’t exactly a supermodel, but I wasn’t bad enough to make it Step One, was I?

  She eyed me. “When’s the last time you washed it?”

  “Fine,” I grumbled that she had noticed. It had been a while, and even longer since the haircut and color. Not that I would admit it to her.

  “I already booked you with my guy. Haircut, color, and,” she looked at me firmly, “eyebrow wax. You see him tomorrow.”

  I reeled. Guess she had noticed. “Tomorrow! I thought we were just going to come up with ideas! Not like, you know, execute them.”

  She gave me another look. “You got something else more pressing to do tomorrow?”

  She had me there. And I grudgingly admitted to myself my eyebrows had gotten a little out of control.

  “Fine. I’ll go,” I said sourly. “What else is on your stupid list?” I tried to peer at the screen.

  “My stupid list is going to get you your life back, Katrina.”

  “I had no life to begin with,” I pointed out.

  “Can’t argue with that.” She turned the screen toward me so I could read better.

  I sat up a bit to take a harder look. My abs groaned with the effort. In bold letters, the screen said, “Step Two: Job.”

  I groaned out loud and flopped back on the couch, reaching for my wine glass. And the cookies. “A job where? Doing what?”

  I mean, yes, I needed some money, that much I knew. Vi was kind enough to let me live with her for free, but my future was a bunch of unknowns and my freelancing gigs had dried up. Where I was going to live, how I would pay my bills…any of those answers were a complete mystery right now. I was basically living off a few thousand bucks I had transferred from my shared banking account with Shane - exactly half of what was in there, nothing more, nothing less. I had sort of been hoping he would have reached out to me when he saw the transfer, asking me how I was doing, but instead I’d gotten complete radio silence.

  “I don’t care! Work at Starbucks or at Target for all I care, but you need to be doing something!” She was already pulling up their websites.

  “I can’t work at Target! I’d spend my entire paycheck there!”

  “True. You would,” she consented, shutting down the tab. “But find something.”

  “How can I apply for jobs when I’m hundreds of miles away from home?” I argued back.

  “Are you sure Chicago is your home right now?”

  She had me there. “I don’t know where my home is,” I admitted. Except that I wanted it to be with Shane. Back where we were. To reverse all the hurt and anger from the past month and get back to where we were. Who we were.

  “So take a temp job,” she suggested as a compromise. “Something here, in Minneapolis, to keep you busy and get some cash coming in. Figure out the rest later.”

  “Like that’s easy,” I grumbled. “What do I do, walk in, and ask if the coffee shop is hiring?”

  “That would be a start,” she agreed. “Or…”

  The way she strung out the word into three syllables grated on me, just like she knew it would.

  “Or what?” I demanded.

  “Or Boston works at TC Media - you know, they publish Minneapolis Magazine - he mentioned the editor’s administrative assistant is going on maternity leave for the next few months. The baby came premature, and they didn’t have anyone lined up yet. She needs someone ASAP and is asking around to see if anyone knows a good hire.”

  I was already standing up, crumbs flying from my shirt to her white ash floor. “Oh no! You aren’t going to do this to me.” Vi knew one of my sore spots was I never got to write for a real publi
sher - books, magazines, or otherwise. Sitting in an office every day as a temp, knowing they were doing my dream job, would kill me.

  Not to mention working with Boston, of all people. Boston, the annoying older brother of Vi. The one who teased us restlessly throughout middle school until he left for college. The one I had a not-so-secret massive crush on when I was in middle school and he knew it. I hadn’t seen him in years, and I wanted to keep it that way. Seeing him every day would make me feel like even more of a failure to launch than I did now.

  Luckily, Vi merely shrugged. “Don’t blame you,” she said mildly. “Let’s look at other options.”

  The ‘other options’ she had for me were bad. Really bad. At least for me. I didn’t want to be an elementary substitute teacher, I hated driving so being an Uber driver was out, and I didn’t know the first thing about working in a jail, and I didn’t think I wanted to learn.

  “Fine,” I relented after the fifth horrible job she showed me. “Just give me Boston’s damn number.” I’d have to grit my teeth, be polite yet distant to him, and get through it.

  Vi smiled brightly at me. “No need to, you meet with his editor tomorrow right after your hair appointment. I’ll send you the address.”

  “You tricked me!”

  She just laughed as she got up from the couch. “Got you out of your funk, didn’t it? And don’t worry, I didn’t forget about the list. We’ll finish it later. Right now, I gotta get ready for Dateline.”

  7

  I snuck a quick peek at Shane’s Instagram, then Facebook. Nothing new since this morning. In desperation, I opened up the Peloton app and checked to see if he had exercised. Yep, at least I had some proof there that he was alive. He rarely missed an early morning spin class.

  I stroked the glass of my phone, debating. I was desperate to reach out to him. I had done everything I could think of to get Shane to regret the words he said, regret the breakup he seemed stuck on. In desperation, I hit Google in the early hours, night after night. To my dismay, one thing kept coming up over and over.