Glass Slippers, Ever After, and Me

by Julie Wright

  © 2019 Julie Wright

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®, at permissions@shadowmountain.com. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters and events in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are represented fictitiously.

  Visit us at shadowmountain.com

  Proper Romance is a registered trademark.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Wright, Julie, 1972– author.

  Title: Glass slippers, ever after, and me : proper romance / Julie Wright.

  Description: Salt Lake City, Utah : Shadow Mountain, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019019686 | ISBN 9781629726076 (paperbound) | eISBN 978-1-62973-794-2 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | LCGFT: Romance fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.R55 G55 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019686

  Printed in the United States of America

  LSC Communications, Harrisonburg, VA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover design: © Shadow Mountain

  Art Direction: Richard Erickson

  Design: Kimberly Kay

  Cover photo: © maramarijicak/Shutterstock.com

  Other Proper Romances by

  Julie Wright

  Lies Jane Austen Told Me

  Lies, Love, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s

  To Chandler

  The sort of young man who treats every young woman

  like a princess regardless of her footwear.

  I love you, buddy.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Acknowledgments

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  “If fairy godmothers existed, there would never be an empty space in the freezer where the ice cream goes. Any responsible fairy godmother would keep that space magically stocked at all times.”

  —Charlotte Kingsley, The Cinderella Fiction

  (The “Make Your Own Magic” Chapter)

  My fairy godmother was all talk and no action. Like the tooth fairy, she was definitely not someone I could depend on. I had a sneaking suspicion the two had run off together a long time ago and were now downing drinks with umbrellas while they lounged on a beach somewhere exotic and peaceful. Somewhere I wasn’t, as I hadn’t heard from either one ever in my life. That’s why my hand clutched my phone, which contained the email that had popped up in my alerts while I paced among the trees still gripped by winter. Joggers along the trail narrowed their eyes at me and worked to avoid full-on collisions as I walked past without seeing them. Do I open the email, or do I ignore it for a while longer? I couldn’t decide. I had worked myself up enough to not feel the cold of February in Boston. Every ragged breath of air I sucked in felt barbed and insufficient to fill my lungs without doing damage. Please don’t let this be what I think it is, I prayed to the fairy godmothers of ink and paper. Let the words contain magic instead of more poison.

  My father always told me that with a name like Charlotte Kingsley, I must be royalty. He would tug on the ends of my red braids and call me his princess. He insisted my freckles were a constellation map to treasure. Even after he and my mom divorced and he moved to California—since it was as far away as he could get from my mother without actually leaving the country—I still felt the pull of the fairy tales he’d spun for me as a child. It was his fault I believed in magic.

  Magic.

  What did I know about magic?

  Nothing.

  Ironic, since I wrote fairy tales for a living. Well . . . not for a living. I had yet to make any actual money off of my writing career. But I dreamed of earning a living off my art at some point. That’s almost the same thing, right? With a grunt of disgust at myself, I walked home, still clutching the phone as if it were an explosive that would go off if I relaxed my grip even a little. My earlier plan to meet a neighbor for an evening jog because of the unusually warmer weather was entirely abandoned. Far better to do this within the privacy of my own walls than out in public view where there would likely be a scene.

  No matter what the email contained, a scene not fit for public consumption would definitely follow. I would either be elated with an acceptance and then dance around screaming like a crazy, happy person, or, if faced with another rejection, I’d spend the better part of the evening screeching out the wails of a paid mourner.

  Well, maybe not paid. Sadly, that’s not how rejection letters work. If it were, I’d be a billionaire.

  Inside my apartment, I paced for another forty-two minutes. My 480-square-foot apartment, filled with mismatched furniture and cluttered with puddles of various notepads and book piles I always meant to put away but had yet to actually pick up off the floor, hindered any therapeutic result that might have come from pacing. And circling around and around in the same direction made me dizzy, so I’d had to get clever and change directions every few minutes in the name of equilibrium preservation.

  The email on my phone could say anything. It could be a yes. Jennifer Apsley, the agent of my dreams, could want my book and the next ten books I write. She might have publishers already lined up, movie deals already in mind. She might have a contract attached to the email that was still unopened on the phone in my hand. Maybe when I opened the email, a tiara would magically appear on my head and a ball gown would swirl its way around me in a storm of glitter and possibilities.

  But it might be a rejection letter. Jennifer Apsley might tell me to just stop already. She might tell me to never submit to her again because she’s sick and tired of seeing my name in her inbox. She might have put out a restraining order against me on all future communication. And this might not be a rejection from just her; she might have warned all other agents that I am needy and pathetic and that they should steer clear.

  But maybe it was an acceptance.

  Or maybe it was a full-on renunciation in which an evil sorcerer in a black suit would appear as soon as the email opened. The sorcerer would delete all word-processing programs from my laptop and laugh in that deep, booming, maniacal laugh that only evil sorcerers know how to do. He would break all the pens, pencils, and crayons in my apartment building and forbid me from ever thinking about filling a blank page again. Though in reality, any crayon I might have owned was already broken. There is something untrustworthy about a person who manages to keep their crayons intact.

  But maybe the email was validation—with party favors, balloons, a unicorn, and a disco ball.

  Or maybe . . .

  I swiped open the email on my phone at 5:13 p.m.

  “Dear
Charlotte Kingsley . . .”

  At 5:16 p.m., I reached into my freezer to find the spot usually occupied by Breyers raspberry fudge ice cream entirely vacant. Sometime between 5:16 p.m. and 5:17 p.m., the first tears rained down on my cheeks. That empty spot in the freezer felt like the time I had woken up on Christmas morning when I was seven to find all the space under the tree empty because my mom had decided I was too old to believe in North Pole legends, and she felt it would be easiest to rip off the Band-Aid so that my belief could bleed out in minutes rather than years.

  That empty spot in my freezer was almost worse than the rejection that had led me to the freezer in the first place. After a lifetime of constant reminders that magic does not exist in the world, should it have come as a surprise to discover that my fairy godmother was a flake and had forgotten the magic ice cream after she’d already flaked on sending the magic book deal that came with a matching tiara?

  Rejected.

  Again.

  I blinked back my own personal eye monsoon and sucked in a shuddering sob, determined to pull myself together long enough to function as I swept open the home delivery app for Bob’s Grocery.

  Once the essentials were ordered, and the little timer began counting down the twenty-six minutes it would take for the delivery person to bring me what I needed, I murdered my phone.

  I can only assume the delivery came twenty-six minutes later, since I never set the clock on my relic DVD player and I couldn’t check the time on the phone that lay in pieces below the newly-formed dent in the wall.

  I forgave the DVD player for being a useless timepiece, readied it with the first disc of The 10th Kingdom, and settled in to overdose on rocky road ice cream—the life metaphor I planned to eat—and the Hallmark Channel fairy tales I would never have in real life, when my front door opened again.

  It wasn’t the delivery driver to tell me I had gotten her tip wrong, which I might have, considering I no longer had a phone to calculate such things for me.

  Anders Nilsson stood in my doorframe, looking every bit the stereotypical Swede. Anders had emigrated from Sweden when he was a kid. If someone had given him a horned hat and a fur toga instead of the knee-length blue jogging shorts and Boston Red Sox T-shirt he wore, he’d definitely look ready for raiding some defenseless Norse village. His arms, chiseled straight out of Asgard legend, were poised with a camera in hand. Anders was a hobbyist photographer who took freelance photography jobs on top of his day job as a paramedic.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you take a picture right now, no one will recognize your corpse; that’s assuming they find it.” He set the camera on the table by my door—Was that the click of a photo being created I just heard?—and crossed his arms over his chest. His head was already shaking like a blond-haired clock pendulum of shame. Back and forth. Back and forth. Shame, shame, shame.

  It wasn’t fair for me to think of it that way. Anders would never want to shame me. He was my friend, the type who wants to help whenever possible.

  He entered my apartment without being invited, in much the same way he’d opened the door without knocking.

  “I’m sorry, Lettie.”

  “How did you know?” I asked as my voice cracked. His showing up to offer comfort and solidarity made me want to cry harder.

  “New driver at Bob’s. She got lost. She stopped me for directions when I was on my way back into the building from my run. I noticed the bag with three ice cream tubs in it and figured . . . well, I figured.”

  I lifted three fingers in the air. “They only had three. What kind of crap store fails to prepare better for emergencies by having only three tubs of rocky road in stock? And they didn’t have any raspberry fudge at all.”

  “Yeah. They’re real monsters. I’d offer to go out and get you more, but I really think this habit of yours is incredibly unhealthy. Three is plenty.” Anders stepped over the pile of murdered electronics on the floor and raised his eyebrows. “Well, that explains why it went straight to voice mail when I called. And it explains why you didn’t meet me to go running.”

  He picked up the remote, probably to turn off my movie. I fixed him with my “I will kill you if you even twitch in that direction” glare. Anders took the intelligent road, leaving the television and the movie that was playing alone so he could sit by me on the couch. I snapped the fingers of my free hand at him to prompt him to hand over the remote.

  He did, but he wasn’t happy about it. “At least turn it down so we can talk.”

  I knocked it down one click.

  Anders sighed. “You need an intervention,” he said before looking at me and scowling. “And a spoon. I can honestly say I’ve never seen anyone use the scoop as a spoon before. What would your mother say?”

  “She’d applaud me for being efficient. This saves me from having more dishes later.”

  That wasn’t true. My mother would definitely not approve of me using a scoop instead of a spoon any more than she approved of me going outside without a hat—because, according to her, the sun will cause the freckles scattered across my cheeks and nose to get so huge that they will become lakes of cancer in my old age. “Redheads are prone to freckling,” she’d said to me a hundred times with that scowl of disapproval because my red hair came straight from my father. But what my mother didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. I was twenty-six years old, writing advertising copy for eyewear, and paying my own bills. Didn’t that mean I could go outside without a hat? Or use a scoop to eat ice cream if I wanted to?

  “Lettie . . .” Anders’s blond eyebrows were raised so high on his forehead, it looked like they were trying to reach escape velocity. “Your mother would beat you with that scoop before letting you do what you’re doing.”

  He’d met my mother the one time she’d come into town to stay with me for a weekend so we could have “bonding time” while my stepdad and sister went on a father-daughter trip. I’d spent most of her visit hiding in Anders’s apartment, even though he lived in a rather cozy—which was a nice word for cramped—studio apartment. Anders knew what he was talking about. He’d heard her make the “lakes of cancer” comment as well.

  I shrugged. “It’s a good thing she’s not here then, isn’t it? I moved away from her precisely so she doesn’t get to know the details of my life choices. If you’re going to get judgy, I’ll move away from you, too.”

  Anders shook his head some more and looked longingly at the remote, but he didn’t reach for it again, though he was clearly tired of having to talk over the onscreen trolls and the werewolf I’d had a crush on since I was thirteen and discovering the magic inside stories. He picked up his phone instead of prying the remote from my hand. He ordered Thai takeout from our favorite restaurant, The Thai Guy, to be delivered to my apartment—as if coconut curry could fix what was wrong with me.

  No one makes bandages for broken hearts.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I told you. An intervention. You at least need real food.”

  I scrubbed my wrist over my right eye to remove the last bit of crusted tears. I used my wrist, as I wasn’t willing to relinquish the scoop or the remote. “I don’t need an intervention. I need inspiration. I need to write a book that the publishers want.”

  Anders’s arm went over my shoulder. “Forget what they want. Write what you want. Write your authentic self. That’s the only way to make real art.”

  I leaned back into the pillow his arm made for me and stared at my ceiling. “I don’t need to make art. I need to make my rent payment. Besides, publishers don’t want art. They don’t want authentic. They want the hot new thing. It’s time to put up the white flag and admit that the only writing I will ever be good for is descriptions about fun and sassy eyewear that leads to a fun and sassy life, which is actually the most fictitious thing I’ve ever written. Eyewear can’t give anyone a fun or sassy anything.” I sighed. “I’m over
it. I’m done. I’m not writing anymore.”

  With that declaration, I sat up and dug my scoop back into the carton only to hear the dull thud of metal on cardboard. The ice cream was gone.

  I stood to retrieve a new carton, making the mistake of dropping the remote onto the couch. Anders took advantage of my tactical error and hit the power button. He let out a purposely loud sigh of relief at the silence that followed.

  “If you don’t like the entertainment, you can go watch your own TV,” I called out to him.

  “I don’t have time for TV. I’m going out tonight,” he called back.

  “Chloe?”

  “Yep.”

  “You’ve been dating her for a while now. What . . . almost two months.”

  “So?” he said.

  “That’s a long time—like eternity in dating years. She must be the one?” It felt good to think about something else—something not me. And it was a conversation I’d been meaning to have with him anyway. He’d seemed entirely absorbed by his admiration of her after their first date. All conversations were Chloe-this and Chloe-that, but now he spent more time in my apartment helping himself to my fridge than he did wining and dining his girlfriend.

  He’d followed me into the kitchen, startling me when his voice came from directly behind me rather than the other room. “I don’t know. She’s pretty great, but I don’t know.”

  I shut the freezer and turned to face him. “What don’t you know? She’s gorgeous. The woman’s got legs that just never seem to end. I’d kill for legs like that. And her hair? All dark sleek and style.”

  “You make her sound like a car.”

  “What? This is nothing like a car. Cars don’t have legs. Or hair for that matter.”

  “Whatever. Anyway, I do date women for reasons other than how they look. I’m not one of those shallow guys.” Anders pulled out a bowl and spoon and handed them to me as if I might actually use them. He was adorable that way.

  I put them back in the cupboard. My living room might have been a mess, but I liked my kitchen to be tidy. “I didn’t say you were shallow. And it’s okay to like how somebody looks. It’s not like enjoying the beauty of another person is a bad thing. But, since you’re being all weird about it, fine. Tell me what you look for in women.”