by LJ Evans
After the coffee, Blake made his excuses. “I know that you really came to see, Cam, and not me. So, I won’t hog your time with her.”
“Please. Don’t be silly, come back to the apartment with us,” my mama protested in the Southern polite way that she was supposed to do.
But Blake knew Southern manners as well as anyone. “Thank you, but I’ll have to decline, ma’am. I have an early appointment. It was a real pleasure seeing you again.”
He shook both their hands. “I hope that I’ll get to see a lot more of you if this woman would ever agree to move in with me.”
He pulled me close and kissed my cheek again. Then flicked me on my nose and made his last goodbyes.
We were all silent at first walking home to my place. Daddy looked like he wanted to say something, but mama was giving him the evil eye. Me. I was smiling still.
Daddy hugged me. “It’s good to see you smiling again, honey.”
“I know!” I said with a lot of my old sarcasm and attitude which made my mama smile too. “So. Don’t hold back now. Tell me what you think,” I said to both of them, but mostly mama. If I’d never listened to her while you were alive, it had almost been the opposite since. I listened to her all the time.
“I think he likes you a whole lot,” and she actually choked up.
“Because it’s pretty hard to like me,” I said with a smile again.
“Well…” my daddy teased in a way he used to tease me but hadn’t in a long time for fear I’d break.
“I think the bigger question really is, what do you think?” mama asked.
I was quiet. Considering. “I think at first I liked him because he remembered me the way I was. And then I think I liked him because he wasn’t afraid to fold Jake into our conversations. But now.”
I didn’t know how to put it into words.
“Now?” mama prompted me.
“And now I think I like him because he’s Blake. I like his smile and his charisma and his Southern charm. And I like the way he makes me feel and the way that I don’t have to pretend to be anything I’m not around him. I don’t have to pretend to not have loved Jake.”
Mama hugged me. “That sounds like a lot of reasons.”
“I miss him when he’s not with me. And I think of him more than I think of Jake.”
I breathed out shakily. That sounded disloyal to me. Saying that aloud about you. But mama got all teary eyed.
“Those are all real good things.”
“But…”
“But nothing. Don’t you know by now, Camdyn, that life is too short for buts. If this is how you feel, and he wants you to be with him and you want to be with him, then just do it. Worry about the rest as it comes up. Enjoy what you have. If it lasts, great, if it doesn’t then you’ll have some more beautiful memories to add to your life story.”
And you know what, mama was right. I can see you pretending to have a heart attack at me admitting she was right. I can see you tousling my hair and rubbing it in. But, it didn’t hurt so badly like it used to because I knew that I’d get to tell Blake mama was right too. And, he’d be happy in a whole different way.
***
When I told Blake, he sent mama a bunch of flowers. Right then. He stopped kissing me, took out his phone, dialed 1-800-Flowers, and had them deliver flowers to my mama’s house. It was kind of hilarious. And sweet. And so impulsively Blake.
He was bouncing off the walls with energy. He started pulling things out of my drawers and throwing them on the bed. I laughed at him and told him I wasn’t moving in that day. And he said why not?
And you know what else he did? He went out and got boxes. Right then. He said mama was right, life was too short not to make every moment the moment you wanted to live. Right then.
Of course, I didn’t move in that day. I started packing though. And, every day for a whole week, when he’d get off work and I’d get out of school or work, he was there with takeout and boxes. It wasn’t that I had that much stuff. Really, it was an apartment, how much could there be? But, we’d get side tracked. You know. Like you and I used to get side tracked studying. I was good at sidetracking people. I’d forgotten how good at it I was, and I was enjoying remembering and getting more practice at it.
But, even though I could sidetrack Blake, he never let me lay on my butt and do nothing after. He had me up and packing again. He said I could relax once I’d moved in.
***
He actually owned a house. A very grown-up kind of thing to me. It was on a quiet, tree lined street that reminded me a little of our street. Except that it was in the city. Way more cars. Not a street where kids could really play football. But, that was okay too.
I’d only been to Blake’s house twice before I moved in. So, it seemed a little like I was going to stay at a hotel, or sleep over at a friend’s. But, Blake wanted me to make it my home too. He said he didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything that was in the house. So, if I didn’t like something, toss it. If I wanted to add something, go right ahead.
Blake had paid someone to move my stuff. Not because he didn’t have the muscle to do it, but because he said he didn’t want me to have to do it. Sweet, right? He was always sweet. After they’d gone, leaving the boxes strewn about the places we’d directed them, Blake said, “I have something to show you.”
And he led me down the hall to his bedroom. Well. Our bedroom. He had this massive king sized bed in it that made me wonder about how many women had been in it and made me realize that I really didn’t know very much about Blake. Or rather, grown-up Blake, but also that I didn’t really care. I was here now. I thought he had one thing on his mind, and when I went to kiss him, he kissed me back, but then pulled me to the night stand.
He looked down at it, and that’s when I saw that there were two pictures on it. One was Blake and I. Some stupid picture he’d snapped with his iPhone that first night that he’d taken me out, and I’d worn Anne’s scarf and jacket. But, we both looked happy. I had a real smile on my face, not my fake one. The other picture was a picture of you and me. My mama must have given it to him. It was you with your arm wrapped around my waist, chin on my head. And we were both so blissfully happy. In the background was the Tower Bridge in London. It was from the time you’d gone with me to Worlds. It felt like a lifetime ago.
I looked at the two pictures, and I got all teary eyed. I wasn’t really crying. Just emotional. Blake pulled me into his arms and hugged me and then looked down at me.
“I want you always to remember that I love you right now for who you are. For all you’ve been through. But I also want you to realize that I never, ever want to take Jake’s place. Your love for him is there. Will always be. I get that. Our love can be here, separate. Our own thing. Just like the two pictures.”
“You love me?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“Kiss ass.”
“Super Girl.”
He flicked my nose, and I smiled up at him.
“I love you too, Blake.”
“I know.”
“Ego-maniac.”
And then he kissed me and made me forget all about you for a while. For a long while. It was longer and longer each time, but it would never be forever. You were mine and I was yours and that wouldn’t change. But, for now, I was also Blake’s and he was mine. And I liked that too. And I know, somewhere out there in the stars in the Delphinus constellation, you are thinking that it’s good too and that you are happy that I am happy. And for right now. That’s enough.
About the book
Thank you for reading my book! As I said in my “Message From the Author”, I hope you enjoyed reading it and would consider writing a review. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing this extra step.
Regarding the medical topic in this book, I want to humbly apologize in advance to the doctors of the world and those living with diabetes. I know that my book is not completely accurate in all of its depictions of this disease. While I have known quite a few pe
ople with diabetes in my life, some more severe than others, happily, all of them have had their diabetes treated without incurring the severe consequences that the character in this book experienced. I have, however, been on the receiving end of someone I was close to who had Type 1 diabetes collapsing, experiencing “black outs”, and needing immediate medical attention, so what I’ve written was drawn from my own fears in those moments. With that in mind, I want to state that the severity of the medical condition in this book was simply for dramatic impact, in a work of fiction, and so I again apologize for my portrayal of the disease, the transplant, and the results. I can only implore you to remember that it was intended to entertain and touch the spirit and not necessarily depict reality. Thank you for your understanding.
For more information about diabetes, please visit the American Diabetes Association at www.diabetes.org.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Taylor Swift for writing music that inspires the creative in all of us. Thank you to my editors and companions who listened to me talk about these characters until they seemed a part of our family. Thank you for improving my story and making it more than I thought it could ever be. Thank you to Laura and Brenda for all their edits and those who overlooked the mistakes the first time around. Thank you to all who believed in me and pushed me to make this book available to the public.
About the Author
LJ Evans, lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband, daughter, and the three terrors called cats. She's been writing almost as a compulsion since she was a little girl where she was both inspired and spurred on by her older sister. While she currently spends her days teaching 1st grade in a local public school, she spends her personal time reading, writing, and binge watching original shows like The Crown, Stranger Things, and Downton Abbey. Her debut novel, my life as a country album, was the 2017 Young Adult Book of the Year in the Independent Author Network's Book Awards.
Connect with LJ Evans and learn more at:
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Books by LJ Evans
my life as a country album – April 2017
my life as a pop album – January 2018
my life as a rock album – coming summer 2018
my life as a mixtape – coming soon
Continue reading for a preview of the next novels in the
my life as an album series
my life as a pop album
Hello
Hello. I’m Good Girl Mia. Mia Andrea Phillips. You probably don’t know me, but you might know my brother Jake. You might know Jake because, for a short while, he was plastered all over the sports channels and magazines as the future of the NFL. That was when he was the superstar quarterback for the University of Tennessee, and before his diabetes and his bad kidneys forced him to quit.
My brother Jake was the first one to call me Good Girl Mia. It was his way of teasing me about never getting in trouble. And it’s the truth. I am a good girl. There’s nothing I can do about it. I have always been the good girl. I’ve been the friend, the helper, the one you could count on. The one to drive you home if you drank too much. The one to stop you from making monumental mistakes. The one who never gave her parents any problems because her brother and his girlfriend gave them enough.
In fact, I’ve been so good at helping others that I actually gave Jake a kidney. Yep. An actual body part. Unfortunately, that didn’t end very well, so maybe I’m not as good at helping out as I’d like to be…
If you are a Good Girl also, then you know how it goes. You know that Good Girls never break rules and that they never, ever run off with the bad boy.
Well then, how in holy potato peels did I end up here, with a sexy as all get out musician laying naked next to me? Well. That’s the real story, isn’t it?
I’M A MESS: The Meet
“I’m a mess right now, searching for sweet surrender.”
-Ed Sheeran
My best friend, neighbor, and almost sister, Cam, once told me that her life could be played out in a series of Taylor Swift songs. And I understood what she meant because her life with Jake was like all the old Taylor songs. Angst and heartache and yearning.
After I had graduated from the University of Tennessee and moved back home to run the family business, my life became a series of Ed Sheeran songs. “I’m a Mess” seemed to resonate with me at first because I felt like I was just going through the motions while secretly looking for a sweet surrender. And I definitely couldn’t figure out how everything was all going to work out.
I guess that wasn’t completely true as I did have one thing going right for me and that was working at my daddy’s car dealership. The one he planned on handing over to me in the fall. Contrary to most people’s opinion of me, I liked running the dealership. And I loved the vague idea that we might be starting a tradition where someday I would pass the dealership on to my kids. Not that there was any chance in the near future of me having children.
Because, let’s face it, my personal life was the part of my life in all sorts of disarray. You’d never know that by looking at me. I prided myself on the fact that very few people knew about the emotional turmoil that rolled like waves through me on an almost daily basis. My mama once told me that if you went into someone’s house and the place was nice and tidy but the cupboards were a disaster, that it said something about them. And I knew exactly what she meant because that described me to a tee. Neat and tidy outside, chaos on the inside.
My life wasn’t going to get any easier that July because that’s when HE entered my world, flipping it on its axis even more.
That day it was hotter than blue blazes with the humidity like a wall you could almost see if you squinted hard enough, and I contemplated laying down on the tile showroom floor to cool off like our dog Sparky. But instead, I lifted up every last hair on my head and stood under the air conditioning vent trying to dry the sweat off my neck.
And of course, it was then, when I had my hair, bangs and all, swept up like a Conehead that he sauntered into our dealership. While I was a sweaty puddle, he looked like a Jamie McGuire book boyfriend come to life.
He was lean and muscular in a blue t-shirt and just tight enough ripped jeans that accentuated every sculpted line. Lines of gorgeous muscles that belonged in an underwear ad. He was tall, but not too tall, around about six feet, and had sexy, bed-tousled looking brown hair that highlighted his pale gray eyes. Eyes that were the color of the winter skies right before a tornado. I was a sucker for a boy with tattoos even if I thought I’d never date someone who had them. And this piece of gorgeousness had them.
There were words wrapped around each wrist, and some sort of bird on his neck. None of it was easy to make out over a distance, but that made me think about how, if I was close enough, I could brush aside those curling ends and investigate more. And I suddenly wanted to do that very much. Every fiber in my body was aching to drop my grossly sweaty hair and sweep up his, just so I could get a good look at him, his tattoos, and his scent.
my life as a pop album
(my life as an album series vol. II)
available now
http://bit.ly/MLAAPAlje
Continue reading for a preview of vol. III in the my life as an album series
my life as a rock album
Always: Letter One
“When you say your prayers, try to understand, I’ve made mistakes, I’m just a man.”
-Bon Jovi, Ingram, & Stanfill
Dear Bella,
I watched you walk away today. You went through security without looking back. I wanted to bust something. I wanted a drink. I wanted you.
You went away because I’m an asshole. I know you say that isn’t it. But if that wasn’t at least partially true, you’d still be here, or I’d be there with you. Either way, we wouldn’t be a fuckin’ country apart. The
reality is, I can’t keep anything good in my life for long.
I almost bought a ticket at the ticket counter and followed you through security. I was in the damn line, had gotten my credit card out, and was called to the counter before your beautiful face flashed through my mind. And it wasn’t your adoring face. It was your pissed off face because I knew that if I followed you now, it would only look like I was trying to possess you again. As if I didn’t trust you to love me and go. As if I didn’t trust you to eventually come home.
And I realized the truth standing there. I don’t trust you’ll come back. But, that’s the messed-up part of me that has been tossed away and crapped on. The piece that was there before you entered my life. The piece that I thought I’d thrown out like the garbage it was.
But, I should know better than anyone how garbage can come back to life. Don’t I weld fragmented pieces together every goddamn day? And this garbage, this jagged, bitter piece inside me needs to be mended together so that when you come back, as you say you will, you’ll find someone soldered together with gold instead of cheap ass glue.
So that you can have someone who deserves you.
I can’t let you go completely though, Bella. I won’t. So, instead of crossing the line you told me not to cross and flying across this God forsaken country, or beating your family into a pulp trying to get your new phone number from them, I’m just going to write to you. I don’t know if you’ll even read the letters. And if you do, I can’t promise they’ll be pretty. I’m not a fuckin’ writer. But hopefully my words will be good enough for you to understand something important which is that where I belong is next to you and where you belong is next to me, and that’s all that matters. None of the other shit that you worry about is important. Just us.
