I have transformed the dining room into a library.
I still have a dining room table there. It’s sleek and low-profile with spindly midcentury modern style legs. The walls of the dining room are lined with books.
I read a lot on my iPad and Kindle, alternating between two of my favorite retailers, but there are other books that I also like to have in paperback and hardcover.
Emma points to all the books.
“I'm not much of a consumer, but when it comes to books, I don't tell myself no. As a result, if you go down to the Angel View thrift store in Yucca Valley that’s sandwiched between Ralph's grocery store and a Ross department store, you'll find that they have a very robust book section and most of those books are mine. I don't keep everything I read, otherwise my three-car garage would be overflowing with them.”
“You really give away all your books?”
“What else am I going to do with them? I only keep the ones that I really enjoyed or want to reread in the future. Other ones? I figure that it's best to share.”
“Yeah, I agree. I love going through the collections at thrift stores. They're so different from those in bookstores.”
“You'll see a lot of the popular authors, but you also get those shooting star kind of books,” I say, almost finishing her thought.
She turns around and stares at me.
Our eyes meet.
I take a step forward and look down at her mouth.
She licks her lips and I try to stop myself from leaning over and just kissing her.
She waits, but I hesitate.
Then… The moment passes.
It's for the best. She is engaged to a friend of mine, or at least she was. I have plenty of my own problems, as is.
“Tell me about Alex,” I say, taking a step away from her and making sure that whatever moment that has passed between us disperses for good.
As soon as I say his name, Emma withdraws into herself.
She even puts back the books that she took off the shelf and runs her finger nervously around the picture on the cover.
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything that you want to share with me,” I say.
“He cheated on me and it's over, but, of course, there are lingering…”
“Doubts?” I fill in the blank.
She starts to shake her head vigorously from side to side, while saying, “Absolutely not. There are no doubts, more like sadness.”
She turns her body away from me and I'm not sure what to do. I watch as her shoulders move up and down and then I realize that she's sobbing.
Without hesitating for another moment, I walk over to her and wrap my arms firmly around her.
“Shh,” I whisper into her ear. “It's all going to be okay.”
She shakes her head and her cries become more powerful.
She mumbles something and struggles for breath, but I can't quite make out what she's saying.
“It's going to be okay,” I repeat myself over and over again.
I hold her like that for a long time until she turns around and buries her face in my shoulder.
I haven't held anyone this close since… My throat tightens and I force myself to swallow hard to keep my tears at bay.
I take a few deep breaths.
I breathe through the nose and exhale through the mouth just like the meditation app that I forced myself to install on my phone has instructed me to do.
Slowly, I relax and that feeling that the ground is falling away from me disappears.
“Are you okay?” I ask, clearing my throat after she calms down a bit.
“I'm really sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes with her palms. “I don't know what came over me. That was so… Pathetic.”
“No,” I say, pulling her close to me and looking into her eyes. “You've been through a really traumatic experience and you just haven't dealt with it yet.”
“Alex doesn't deserve my tears.”
“You are not crying for him,” I say.
She looks up at me inquisitively.
“You’re not crying for him,” I repeat myself to make sure that she hears me. “Your tears are for the life that you have lost. You thought that you were engaged to a different man and then you found out that was a lie. That’s okay. We all go through that. It's just really raw right now.”
“Have you ever gone through anything like that?” Emma asks, pulling out one of the brightly colored chairs around the dining table.
She runs her fingers over the lemon yellow fabric, the exact match to the lemons growing in the backyard, and sits down.
29
Liam
“Have you ever been through something like that?” Emma asks again.
“I've been through a lot,” I say quietly.
“Like what?”
I look down at the floor. Skylar runs over and brushes along my leg, no longer seeing Emma as an enemy.
Then I look at my hands, broad and thick and tan, they used to look so different when I lived in the city.
Out here, working with my horses and taking care of the goats, the chickens, and my garden, I was forced to become a different person and my body has changed to match that.
“We don't know each other very well,” I say after a long pause.
She waits for me to add a “but” to that statement, but I don't. I'm not qualifying it, not yet.
“Yes, of course,” she adds when she gets the point, after an excruciatingly long pause.
I hope it doesn't change anything in our relationship, but for now I have to keep my secrets to myself.
Emma gets up and walks around the wall of bookshelves casually glancing at the spines. I sit back in the chair and watch. Most people tend to only display the serious authors on their bookshelves. There's an ego factor to it, like you want others to think that you are a better reader than you are, whatever the hell that means.
When she walks over to the middle, she sees all of the editions of my books. They fill up nearly an entire bookshelf all by themselves. When I first started, I never had author copies made.
I was proud of what I did, but I was also embarrassed by displaying them proudly. It was almost as if I didn't think that my work measured up to the likes of John Irving, Jim Harrison, and other serious American men of letters.
But what makes a writer serious in the first place?
For some reason, if a male author writes about love, the book is considered serious literature but if a female does it then it’s just fluff.
Well, fuck that.
Life is too short to pretend to be someone I’m not.
Millions of people around the world have devoured my work and have proudly displayed it on their bookshelves for everyone to see, so why shouldn’t I do the same thing?
“I'm sorry to bring this up again,” Emma asks, “but when we talked earlier about your writing method, you sort of mentioned what you used to do but not what you're currently doing. Can you tell me more about that? Like, how are you such a prolific author?”
“I realized that I was suffering from burnout when I started to spend a lot of hours out of my day procrastinating. So, I started to research procrastination and productivity. Then I developed a system of writing basically only for an hour a day. I can write for a lot more hours, but I limit myself to one hour exactly. Usually, spread over three writing sprints.”
“Wait, that's all? So, how does that work? I thought you would be writing like six hours a day, seven days a week.”
I laugh and say, “Close, but no. I now write one hour a day five out of the seven days a week. Sometimes, I will do more if I'm in the mood, but most of the time I don't.”
“So, you do writing sprints?”
“Yes, twenty-five minute, twenty minute, and fifteen minute writing sprints. I tell myself that I know exactly what I need to cover or where I'm headed in the story. Then I just grab my phone and start dictating.”
“You dictate?”
“It’s
faster than typing and I’ve had issues with carpal tunnel and other wrist problems.”
“How does it work?”
“I sit at my desk and talk into my phone. Sometimes I go on a walk and occasionally, I ride my horse.”
Emma raises her eyebrows in utter shock, but musters to say, “I feel like you live on some other planet.”
I laugh and she laughs along with me. When my hand touches her, accidentally, I don't recoil back and neither does she.
Instead she looks up at me and I lean closer to her.
The gravitational pull that I feel toward her is impossible to deny.
Now that I know that her relationship with Alex is completely over, I don't stop myself.
Our lips touch.
Her mouth is soft and delicate, but our kiss is not. There's a hunger in our kiss and I push her against the bookcase.
I haven't known her long and yet the sexual tension seems to have existed between us long before we met.
I run my fingers up her curvy body. She pulls away, but only for second and then presses harder against me.
I open my mouth slightly and let my tongue find hers. I hold her with both hands.
She kisses me back, harder each time. I push her back against the bookcase more firmly and a few books fall down on top of us.
“Oh my God!” she yelps from surprise.
I laugh and she laughs, too.
When our eyes meet again, she reaches up to kiss me, but I pull away.
“What's wrong?” she asks.
I can hear the disappointment in her voice.
“It's hard to explain,” I say quietly.
“You’re a writer,” she says.
“I know.”
I divert my eyes from her.
I know that if I were to look into them again, she would immediately know the truth about me and every last one of my secrets would be exposed.
“Okay,” she says, straightening her clothes even though they're not out of shape. “I understand.”
She turns around and walks away from me. It takes me a moment to catch up to her, but when I do, I see that she's hiding her face from me.
“Emma, please stop…” I start to say. I pull her hand, but she pulls it away from me. “This isn’t about you. None of this is about you.”
“Of course, nothing is ever about me,” she says.
I search her face, but it's blank. Whatever she's feeling, she's bottling up deep inside and all I see is a wall of anger and disappointment.
“I really like you,” I say.
She doesn't know this, but even saying those words are quite difficult for me.
“Look, I know that I was engaged to your friend and that none of this should be happening between us. I'm not with him anymore so I'm not breaking any rules, but you do have your guy code.”
“Alex and I are not friends. He invited me to your engagement party because he wanted me to invest my money with his fund. We haven't been in touch for years. I just happened to run into him.”
“You haven’t talked to him?”
“No, and I suspect that he didn’t really have much interest in me until we talked about my investment.”
“I can't believe that he invited you to our party to make a business deal.”
“You can't?” I ask.
“No,” she says, raising her eyebrows and shaking her head. “Of course, I can. Work is the only thing that he really cares about.”
“Look, this has nothing to do with Alex. I like kissing you,” I say, “but my life… It's complicated.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I can't tell you. You found out one aspect of my life, but I have others. Things are dangerous for me. I can't say much more than that.”
She stares at me, furrowing her brow.
I look at the crinkle that it makes on her forehead and realize that this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
She wants to know everything, not just as a reporter but as a woman.
She deserves to be with someone who can tell her those things. Only problem is that I'm not one of those people.
“I'm going to go,” Emma says.
The tone of her voice gets very low, signifying that she means business.
“Please, don't. I thought you were going to stay for dinner?”
“No, I don't think that's a good idea.”
I ask her to stay again, but again she refuses. I ruined it.
She walks out the front door and slams it shut behind her. I want to follow her out and ask her to stay again, but I hesitate.
I know that it's best for her if she goes.
I'm a dangerous man with a dangerous past.
I'm not just a writer, I have demons hunting me.
More than demons, actual bad men with guns who are determined to get their revenge.
The best thing that I can do is to let her go because I know what happens if I don't. I have lost one person in my life to them, I can't have anymore innocent bystanders paying for my crimes.
I look over to the window and watch her get into her car. More than anything, I want to run out there and ask her to stay.
30
Emma
I don't know what happened. He kissed me and I felt that he wanted me. I knew that he did and I wanted him, too.
Our mouths found each other and, suddenly, it all made sense. Then things changed.
He pushed me away. He tried to pretend that he didn't, but the trance of being there in his arms had dispersed.
I run down the steps to my car with angry tears in my eyes. I'm such a fool.
How could I let that happen?
My anger has nothing to do with Alex. I know that I don't owe him anything and we are no longer together.
I've done nothing wrong. Still, my anger remains.
I hate that I have put myself into this situation.
Why?
The events of the whole day mash together in my mind. I have come here looking for D. B. Carter, knowing full well that the guy on that forum was lying or at least making fun of me.
Then, I happen to actually find the real D. B. Carter, who turned out to be someone I had already met.
Liam promised that he was not the guy from the forum who pointed me in this direction, but how could he not be?
I get into my car and shut the door. I take a few deep breaths and look in the rearview mirror. He is standing on the porch but doesn't make a step to follow me.
I let out a sigh of relief.
I don't want him. He told me all about his writing and it felt like he was opening up to me, but in reality, he's as shut as a clam. He's unreachable and I don't need that in my life.
When I look back in the rearview mirror again, my body longs for him. It's a silly expression, one typical of books, and yet that's exactly how I feel.
Every part of me, down to the molecular and cellular level, craves him.
I shouldn’t compare, but kissing Liam was nothing like kissing Alex. With Alex, things were simple. I knew that he liked me. I knew where we stood. I liked that certainty.
In the end? In the end he broke my heart in a way that will probably take me months if not years to recover.
Is this what is really going on?
Do I just want Liam because I can't have Alex?
I inhale deeply and exhale slowly through the mouth. I feel the breath escape my lips and I run my tongue over my lower lip, pausing briefly over each indentation.
Out here under the bright desert sun where the humidity is below ten percent, my lips are chapped and dry.
I lick them again to give them some moisture and then wipe a rogue tear running down my cheek.
I press the start button on my car, but the engine doesn't start. I look at the screen thinking that I had left the key somewhere in his house, but the missing key notification doesn't pop up.
I feel around my purse and find it in there.
I press the pedal and the start button again. Agai
n, nothing happens.
What the hell am I supposed to do now?
I try again and again, but still nothing happens. A sudden knock on the driver's window startles me and I jump.
It's Liam.
He moves slightly out of the way when I crack the door.
“My car won't start,” I say.
Even though it's spring and I can feel a breeze of cool air settling on the valley, the sun is still beating down hard on the earth. Without air conditioning, the inside of the car becomes unbearable.
I step out, leaning my body against the powder blue door.
“I'm sorry,” Liam says.
I ignore him and instead bury my head in my phone.
“I'm going to call AAA,” I explain.
He leans over and brushes his fingertips against mine. A shock of electricity runs up my arm. When I look up at him, he takes my hand in his and squeezes it tightly.
“I'm sorry,” he says with his eyes twinkling in the sunlight.
“It doesn't–”
He kisses me.
He takes a step forward and pushes my body against the car. When we collide with one another, the world falls apart and is put together again with all the pieces that make sense.
He runs his fingers slowly up the nape of my neck, reaching all the way up to my earlobes and then cradling my chin as if it were a saucer. His lips are firm and determined. At first, he was hesitant, but now he takes control.
I haven't seen this side of him before, but I like it.
I kiss him back, gently touching my tongue with his, but when he pulls away slightly and then kisses me again, his mouth gets feverish.
His hands move up and down my body from the small of my back all the way up my spine.
After a few moments, they move toward my waist and then he cups one of my breasts.
“You're so beautiful,” he says through his kisses.
Our bodies become heated, dirty, messy, and wonderful all at the same time.
When I toss my head back, he kisses down my neck to the top of my breasts. My breathing speeds up and my body starts to quiver.
I look up at the cloudless blue sky as he tugs at my jacket. The buttons seem to come out of the loops all on their own and he slides his hand under my loose-fitting blouse.
All the Lies Page 13
