“Yes, and I think we’ve all learned a valuable lesson here today,” I replied.
“Don’t ride with you?” a dark-haired boy, who’d up until now had chosen to remain silent, spoke up.
“Bingo,” I answered, pointing at him.
Moments later, I breathed a sigh of relief when the ride began to slow down, coming to a complete stop soon thereafter. One by one, the other children exited the ride, leaving Jackson and I to disembark last. I walked to the gate with my tail tucked between my legs. It had been a while since I’d honestly felt ashamed of something that had come out of my mouth. That shame grew by leaps and bounds when I saw Peter. His face was stern, reminding me of the look my father had given me pretty much every day of my life growing up.
“I take it you heard me,” I murmured, hoping that he was just deep in thought, contemplating the meaning of life, and not grossly ashamed of his girlfriend.
“Christ, Mena, I think the entire fair heard you.”
“Can we go on another ride before we leave, Dad? Puh-lease.”
“No, buddy, I think we need to put as much distance between us and this place as humanly possible.”
He grabbed Jackson’s hand and walked with him toward the parking lot.
“Peter, I’m sorry.” I practically jogged after them, my legs barely keeping up with Peter’s strides. “It just slipped out.”
“Yeah, that seems to be a pattern with you.”
Stung by his words, I fell back a few steps, watching him continuing his mission on out of this joint. I wanted to say something in my defense; I wanted to cry. I wanted to make things right again. Above all, I just wanted to quit feeling like I was lower than the dirt path beneath my feet. My pace quickened as I tried to catch up with them, my mind working overtime to find the right thing to say.
“Hey, Dad?” Jackson peered up at his father, who hadn’t so much as glanced over his shoulder to make sure I was even still behind them.
“Yeah?”
“What does fuck mean?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Thanks to a storm in Philadelphia, I rolled back into New York later than usual on Sunday evening, exhausted emotionally, mentally, and physically. After the events of the weekend, a part of me wished that Jo would already be in bed when I got back to our apartment. I’d had enough peopling over the last forty-eight hours.
No such luck.
The back of her head was the first thing I saw when I walked inside. She looked up when she heard me walking in. Even from where she was sitting on the couch, I could see about a dozen questions in her eyes.
“How did it go?” she asked, turning her body around to face me.
“Just dandy.” With a sigh, I threw my purse, keys, and carry-on bag on top of the counter, sauntering into the living room to plop down on the other end of the couch.
“Why do I feel like there should be a narrator piping in at this very moment to announce, ‘But everything really wasn’t all that dandy.’?”
“Let’s just say it had the same level of success as the Hindenburg and Titanic. Except in my case, everything was going great … until I accidentally taught Jackson—and a smattering of other people’s children—a four-letter word on a ride commissioned by the devil himself. This, of course, led to Peter having to have a talk with Jackson’s mother, who in turn left me with a ‘Bless your heart’ parting gift when she came to pick Jackson up early.”
“Wait … a normal ‘Bless your heart’ or a Southern ‘Bless your heart?’”
“Full on Southern.”
“Oh, fuck.” Jo’s lips pursed together.
“Coincidentally, that’s exactly the word that afforded me the opportunity for Peter’s supermodel ex-girlfriend to bless my heart. Well, that and the fact that I gave Jackson an apple that wasn’t organic.”
“You animal.” Jo laughed, running her fingers through her hair. “But let’s circle back to the four-letter word incident, if we may.”
I recounted the incident at the fair with the teddy bear ride, including the mysterious wheel in the center of the car, the miscreants sharing the ride with us, and the aftermath of a little slip of the tongue.
“And that’s the story of how I found myself banned from the Virginia State Fair.”
About mid-story, Jo had gotten up from the couch to rummage through the kitchen. She returned to the living room, giggling as she plunked a bottle of pinot noir down on my lap.
“I know it’s a school night and all, but I figured after the weekend you’ve had, you could definitely use some fermented grapes to wind down a bit.”
“That’s great, but you forgot the glass.”
“No, I didn’t.”
My eyes trailed down to the uncorked bottle and, with a shrug, I brought it up to my lips and took a sip. “There is one silver lining to it all.”
“A handful of families in Virginia will never be able to look at the fair the same way again?”
“Besides that.” I took another swig of wine. “I think the kid likes me.”
“Sure, he does. You just taught him the most useful word in the English language.”
“Right? It’s all about perspective.” A notification on my phone alerted me to an incoming text message. “It’s Elle. She probably wants to talk about the guy who’s claiming to be her long-lost father.”
“Wait, what?”
“Exactly.” Grabbing the bottle of wine and my phone, I prepared to head into my room.
“And people say life in New York is full of drama and debauchery. The next time you go back to Virginia, I’m coming with you,” Jo called out from behind me. “I’ll just stay in the background and observe with a bucket of popcorn. You won’t even know I’m there.”
*****
As it turned out, downing an almost full bottle of wine and staying up late to chat with your best friend the night before work wasn’t such a great idea. Head pounding from tannin consumption and regret, I dragged myself through the halls of Drake Publishing, wearing my sunglasses until I came to my new, and beautifully dark, office in the corner of our suite. Removing my glasses, I plunked my purse down on my desk, which was already covered with more manuscripts than I would ever be able to go through in a month, and pulled out a bottle of water and my trusty ibuprofen.
“Good morning,” our intern, Penelope, stopped by my office with her high-pitched, sing-song voice, “and happy Monday. That’s such a funny thing to say, isn’t it? I mean, what’s so happy about Monday, am I right?” She giggled at her own joke, each chortle further intensifying the thundering in my head.
“I’m going to need you to dial it down to a three or four until at least noon today,” I answered her, taking two ibuprofen tablets and shoveling them into my mouth.
“How are you liking your new office?” she asked, her eyes searching every nook, cranny, and corner. “It’s pretty dark in here without the light on. Here, let me get this for you.” She reached for the light switch as my life flashed before my eyes.
“No, no, no,” I pleaded, holding out my hands as though I possessed some magical superpower that could cause her to freeze in her tracks. Apparently, Penelope’s comprehension of the word ‘no’ was different from that of the rest of the world’s. One agonizing split second later, the fluorescent light above me hummed to life, and I threw my hands over my eyes to keep my head from exploding.
“Oh, rough night?” she asked, stating the obvious.
“Rough night, rough life, who’s counting?” I took a step back, my heel catching the leg of my chair, which caused me to stumble backwards into my seat. Slowly, I removed my hands from my eyes, blinking furiously as the light attacked my retinas. My fingertips roamed from my eyebrows to my temples, where they stayed, massaging my pain away until the ibuprofen could kick in.
“It’s a good thing Phineas asked me to stop in to see if there was anything I could do to help you lighten your new workload.”
Of course Phineas would send Penelope in to check on me, because he
knew no matter how busy I was, I wouldn’t want to burden anyone else with my workload when I knew they already had their own. But I also knew I had to get started on the edits for Love Me Tender, the paranormal romance I’d discovered, which meant I would have zero time to get to the slush pile we’d amassed in the short time since announcing our acceptance of unsolicited manuscripts.
“Actually, yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Penelope.”
I grabbed a stack of manuscripts from my desk, handing them to her. She took them from me, a little too excited to be receiving a pile of documents that probably wouldn’t be worth so much as a second glance. The publishing industry was notoriously hard for new writers to break into. Rejections were a more common sight than even the daisy dukes and cowboy hats I’d seen roaming around the fair.
“I just love that we’re doing this,” Penelope announced, throwing her Brazilian blowout over her shoulder while she thumbed through the stack balanced precariously on her arm. “Imagine the lives we could change, you know?”
“Or the dreams we could shatter.” Penelope briefly stopped thumbing through her pile to give me a stern raise of her microbladed eyebrow. “You have your fun, I’ll have mine,” I added, wishing like hell I had a cup of coffee in front of me, instead of a perky, young intern full of hope and ambition.
“I prefer to take the optimistic approach.”
“Give it another decade. Optimism dies and is replaced with complacency after thirty.” Penelope stared at me, confused. “You’ll see. Now get out of here, you idealistic whippersnapper.”
“Okay, I’ll start working on these right away and give you my thoughts before the end of the day.”
Her voice rose again to it’s far too cheerful, screeching level, which penetrated my skull like a ball-peen hammer. Reflexively, I brought my hand up to my forehead to massage it.
Penelope put her hand over her mouth. “Oops, sorry. Dialing it back down now.” She gestured with her hand, moving it down a notch at a time as she spoke.
I nodded, giving her a thumbs-up with one hand, while still cradling my throbbing head in the other. When I could no longer hear her Louboutins clicking across the ceramic tile floor, I sighed with relief. How others could be morning people, I would never be able to understand. Elle was like that. When we shared a dorm in college, she would wake up with a smile on her face most mornings. It was a quality that not only made me love her that much more, but was also often the reason why I’d thought about shoving her out of the window, depending on my frame of mind. Today would have been a window-shoving kind of day.
Just as I was beginning to settle in and crack open Love Me Tender, a knock on my doorframe roused me from my concentration.
“Good morning,” Phineas greeted me, taking a sip of coffee from his mug.
“Not you too. Honest to God, I don’t know how you people do mornings.”
“There’s bourbon in here.” He held up his mug in jest, eyeing my partially cleared desk. “I see Penelope paid you a visit.”
“She did, and may I just suggest a better vetting process for our interns next year.”
“What’s wrong with Penelope?”
“She’s so damn … hopeful.”
“You’re right. How dare we have hope in this office.” He chuckled.
“Not to mention, they get younger every year.”
Phineas furrowed his brow, something he always did whenever he was perplexed, deep in thought, or even amused by something, I’d noticed. “Our interns have all been seniors at Columbia … hence, the same age.”
“Then it must be because I’m getting older, a fact of which I refuse to believe.”
“Heh,” Phineas snickered. “You? Older? What are you like twenty-nine now?”
“Bless you.” I studied his face, waiting for him to crack. However, he remained serious, like he was waiting for me to confirm his assessment rather than refute it. “What? Do you need me to stay late tonight or something?”
“I’m being serious. I just assumed you were in your twenties.”
“If only. I’m actually in my,” I lowered my voice to a whisper, “early thirties.”
“Early thirties?” Phineas repeated, feigning shock and awe. “You’re right, you are a woman of advanced age. I’ll have HR email our retirement packet to you.”
“That may not be an entirely bad idea, because it’s become increasingly clearer to me that I can no longer hang like I used to, which means I should probably just be put out of my misery now while I can still manage to control my own bowel movements.”
“Remind me not to ever give you any motivational speaking projects.”
I smiled, thumbing through the manuscript for Love Me Tender. “You know, I’m kind of disappointed the King himself doesn’t make an appearance in this novel. If you think about it, the title is kind of false advertising.”
“Maybe that’s something you can discuss with the author when she comes by the office.”
“What? When was this set up?”
“Just this morning. It’s one of the reasons I’m in here right now … that and I was kind of getting sick of all the pleasantries being flung at me. She emailed me to let me know she was going to be in town, and I figured you could go through some of your edits with her.”
“Like how I think her ending stinks and she should just burn the last twenty pages of her life’s work?”
“What’s wrong with the ending? Too happy for you?”
I looked up in time to catch the playful glint in his eye. “Actually, I’ll have you know I think the ending is too bittersweet. People read romance because they either want to recreate their own love story or experience the quintessential happily ever after if their story didn’t work out as planned. They want to end the book with a satisfied sigh, not a frustrated one because the story veers off course and adopts a more philosophical rhetoric.”
“I disagree with you.”
“That’s okay, we’re all wrong sometimes.”
“Oh, how I wish there was really bourbon in this mug.” Lifting it to his lips, he took another swig.
“I have that effect on people.”
“What I was going to say was, I believe the purpose of the story, aside from the romantic aspects of it, is to give the reader hope for the future of the protagonist and her guardian angel love interest. He will always be there to watch over her for the rest of her days. It’s quite romantic when you think about it.”
“It would have been even better if he had chosen to fall from heaven to become mortal and spend the rest of his natural life with her.”
“How would it be fair to ask him to give up his life and potentially paradise for an eternity while the main character doesn’t have to give up anything? The answer is, it’s not. And so, the story ended exactly the way it should have ended.”
“It was the easy ending.”
“I guess you’ll just have to take that up with the author, then.”
“Fine. I will.”
“Tactfully.”
“Aren’t I always?”
“Mena.” The stern expression on his face told me I’d better rephrase my answer.
“I’ll use so much tact that tacky will become my middle name.”
He shook his head, taking a step back into the hallway to return to his office. But just as he began to move, he paused. “Oh, I almost forgot the real reason why I came in here to begin with. I’m speaking at the publishing convention in two weeks, and I thought it would be nice to set up a booth and have someone available to answer questions from attendees, especially since embarking on our latest endeavor. And, God help me, I think that person should be you.”
“Isn’t the convention on a Saturday?” I asked.
“Yes, but you’ll get paid overtime, if you agree to go. I realize it’s a bit of an inconvenience. I promise you it’ll only be for half the day.”
In two weeks, Peter would be coming to visit me here and probably wouldn’t be too happy with spending most of the d
ay sitting around waiting for me. Then again, I very well couldn’t tell Phineas to go kick rocks after the faith he’d shown in me since the day he’d hired me.
“Mena?”
“Yeah, that’s … that’s no problem. I’ll be there.”
“You’re a lifesaver. Let’s plan on meeting here at eight. We should be out of there and back home by noon.”
*****
I’d been awake for a solid hour listening to Peter’s breathing and the rhythmic melody of his heartbeat underneath my ear, which was pressed firmly to his chest. We usually slept like this, naked with my arm wrapped around him and my head on his heart, our legs entwined. I was the most at peace when I was in bed with him and had been since our first night together so many years ago.
2007
We’d gone out drinking in celebration of Elle’s twenty-first birthday that night. And by we, I mean Elle and me. Neither Peter nor Luke were of legal drinking age yet, essentially forcing them to be our babysitters. Although, I figured Luke would be perfectly fine with watching over Elle—he’d been completely and totally enamored with her since day one—Peter was a different story. He’d captured my attention when I first met him, mostly because I couldn’t read him. His expression had been the definition of a poker face for most of the night, aside from a few strategically placed sarcastic comments here and there, which I’d found refreshing amidst the usual drama that accompanied dollar pitcher night at Magillicutty’s, a Roanoke bar frequented by college students. Its popularity ensured that it would be packed any day of the week, and that night was no exception.
As the night progressed, and Elle and I found ourselves at the bottom of more than our fair share of shot glasses, a decision was made that would prove to change the course of our lives forever.
“I think I should go back to their dorm with them,” Luke said, casting a concerned glance over at Elle, who somewhere during the course of the night had acquired a baseball cap with ‘Straight Outta Rehab’ etched on it.
When Stars Collide Page 7
