The knock comes five hours later, at a time too early for visitors. I practically crawl down the stairs and open my door, squinting up into Mark Fortune’s face.
At least he knocked, proof positive that men can be trained. I lean forward, far enough to see the driveway. And he parked on the street. Two points in his favor. Both of which are moot because the contract, of which I emailed him an executed copy, clearly states that he is supposed to be at home. Far away from me. I work alone, he writes alone, and everyone is happy. I look down, at the leather duffel bag in his hand, and raise one eyebrow.
“Good morning.” He’s back to the charmer I first met, his smile dipped in a casual familiarity that instantly irritates me.
“What are you doing here?” I emailed him the manuscript before I went to sleep. He should be at his desk, reviewing that content, and gently poking me, via email, for an outline.
“You forgot the attachment.” I stare at him blankly. “In your email,” he explains. “There wasn’t an attachment.”
“Oh.” It’s a distinct possibility, my all-night writing session leaving me a little loopy, my forgetfulness with attachments a common occurrence. A missing attachment doesn’t explain his presence on my front porch, at ten on a Saturday morning. “I’ll resend it.”
“I thought I’d just read it in person.” He smiles, and I stall, my mind torn between a desire for feedback and a visitor-free morning.
The feedback wins, and I step back, opening the door wider, and beckoning him in.
It’s not that hard to write a book. The words are easy. What’s difficult is the ability to breathe life into them. I chose Marka because her words jump. They have life, they have feeling. I chose Marka because I can see myself in her characters, I can feel their emotions.
The same man who wrote those words, those characters, just scratched himself. He’s reading my first chapter, in the midst of my freaking love story, and reached down, his hand gripping the front of his pants, the action one without thought, a disgusting habit that he probably does ten times a day. This is why I avoid men. This is why I avoid people in general. We are a disgusting, foul race, only a few centuries past smearing our faces with feces and dancing for rain.
“What’s wrong?” He’s looking at me, his eyebrows raised, plastic-rimmed glasses perched on his nose.
I bite my lip in an attempt to stop the curl. “Nothing.”
He returns to the page, his thumb licked before he flips to the next.
The thought of him reading my work is unnerving. There is a reason that I don’t allow anyone to see works-in-progress before completion. I once walked in to see Simon hunched over my computer, the mouse moving, my manuscript scrolling by. I’d snapped. It’d been our first big fight, one where I screamed and he’d scorned and we’d finally agreed, four hours and a hundred tears later, to never ever, ever touch each other’s stuff. I wouldn’t mess with his World of Warcraft laptop, and he wouldn’t so much as enter my office without prior permission.
He lifts the pages, and I tense, watching his face closely. “This is good.”
It isn’t a gush, but I still feel a knot between my shoulders relax.
“You wrote enough for me to get the tone of it. And I feel like I have a good handle on the characters.” He stands, one hand supporting his lower back, and I wonder exactly how old he is. Fifty? Old enough that I feel confident that he will never attempt a pass at me. Not that that’s been a common problem during my life. Most men dislike me, a condition that Mark will eventually reach, assuming he hasn’t already hit that precipice.
“Why do you love me?” I whispered the question against Simon’s back, my hand running along the skin, from freckle to freckle, connecting the dots.
“I love everything about you.” His voice was barely audible over the television, and I wanted to mute the sound, and ask the question a hundred more times.
“Even my quirks?” I was hesitant to pose the question, a small part of me worried that, somehow, in our year together, he hadn’t noticed them. Maybe, once he did, he’d run.
At that, he turned, his big frame shifting in the bed, his profile illuminated for a brief moment by the television’s glare before he was facing me. “I love your quirks most of all. You’re the most unique woman I’ve ever met, Helena. It’s what first attracted me to you.”
“I thought it was my supermodel looks.”
“That too.” He leaned forward and I felt his arm slide around my waist, the sheet between us, almost a cocoon of embrace as he pulled me closer and pressed his lips to mine.
“I’m starving.” Mark speaks, and it snaps me back to present, the memory of Simon replaced by an old guy who could use a good round with some ear clippers. “May I take you to lunch?”
May I. How pleasant on the ears, a simple rule that Bethany never could master. With her, it was always ‘can’. Can I… I’d corrected her a hundred times, but she still learned by example. And Simon was a terrible example.
“Helena?” Mark is standing now, looking at me with an expectant air. Now that he’s here, we should knock out some work. There is still an outline to do, rewrites to complete, plus the awkward act of depositing him into his truck and nudging him in the general direction of the New London airport.
My stomach picks that unfortunate moment to growl. I look down at it and weigh the idea in my head. “Okay,” I concede. “But just a quick lunch.”
He’s barely had this truck, yet it already smells of male. It’s been so long since I’ve been so close to a man, so long since I spent this much time with anyone, other than Kate. And Kate knows my limits, she doesn’t press my buttons, and she understands her place. This man is different. He will be a bulldozer, one who slowly grinds over my carcass and then backs up to complete the job.
“What do you feel like eating?” Mark shifts the truck into drive, the lurch of the cab causing me to grab at the door, the other hand tightening on my seatbelt. He doesn’t look over, his eyes on the road, his voice calm.
“Thai.” It’s an easy answer, a food I have been craving for years. In the Life After, I eat at home, an easy way to avoid an Approach: the sympathetic and slow shuffle of a stranger, their hands reaching forward for a handshake or hug, an overwhelming need to say something to the widow of Simon Parks. You’d think that, four years later, locals would have forgotten, but they haven’t. That’s the problem with a small town and a beloved teacher. Anything tragic sticks in their history books. I need an action and reach forward, opening the glove box, finding and pulling out a vehicle rental contract.
“Mark Fortune.” I read, settling back in the bench seat, and tucking one foot under my thigh. “Sounds like a porn star.”
“Helena Ross sounds like a librarian.”
“Ehh…” my voice drifts off, my life comprised of little more than books and regret. “That shoe kinda fits.” I read further. “So, Mr. Fortune, you’re from Memphis.” I eye the top of the contract, one dated yesterday. He stayed the night. In this little town just off the Sound, where no one but soldiers and college students live, the wee bit of locals a hodgepodge of whaling descendants and nosy families.
“Yep. Born and bred.” He stops at the exit of my neighborhood. “Right or left?”
“Left. What’s Memphis like?”
“It’s nice. I have a ranch on the outskirts. My daughter goes to Ole Miss, so it’s close.”
His daughter. I shift in the seat, remembering that painful fact. “She’s a freshman?”
“Yep.” He turns to me, the corner of his mouth lifting ruefully. “The house is a little empty with her gone.”
My bad luck continues. A year earlier, and his callused life would have been busy with teenager drama and prom fittings. He certainly wouldn’t be sticking around, sucking up my days with dining and conversation and other time-wasting events. He reaches forward and flips on the radio, a country song softly rolling out from the speakers. I return to the contract.
“This thing is eighty bucks a day?” A bump in the road jostles the contract and I look up. “Turn left. You should have gotten insurance.”
“Insurance is a rip-off.” He seems unworried, steering the wheel with only one hand, his eye contact with me unnecessary given our high rate of speed.
I distract myself with the page, my stomach twisting when I get to the extension of the rental. “This contract is for a month.” I shove the pages in his direction.
“I figured I’d stick around.” There is a spot of traffic ahead and he lifts his foot off the gas, his calmness growing more frustrating by the second.
“I don’t want you to stick around.” I mean it, but the words come out flat, as if I’m having second thoughts. I’m not. I want my empty house back. I want my rules and full control over every aspect of my environment. I want something that, two weeks ago, my prognosis stole from me. Once Mark starts writing, I’ll be at the mercy of his pen. Can I tell him my story? Can I give him my heart and trust him with it?
We come to a red light and he turns his eyes from the road to mine. “I won’t get in your way. Just give me a little bit of time each day, and we can knock this out. Two hours a day, whenever you want. In a month, this could be on its way to the publisher.”
An entire book, written in just a month. He could do that? It sounds like heaven, to have everything off my chest in that length of time. It also sounds like hell, to go through all of that pain, that quickly, with a stranger.
I look away from his eyes and pull on the top of the seatbelt, my chest suddenly tight. “I don’t really work well with others. Literally and figuratively speaking. Plus…” I hesitate, unsure whether to mention the elephant sitting between us. “You and I don’t have a history of getting along.”
“You’re referring to the emails.” He tosses out our history as if it’s minor, a cutesy squabble between friends.
“Yes.”
“I thought we got over that.”
Did he? He thought that all of these years, all of these hateful words… had they not meant anything to him? Maybe the issue is that he knew. He knew, for all these years, that he wasn’t Marka Vantly, that it wasn’t a gorgeously annoying supermodel who was showing me up on bestseller lists, and outselling my print runs. He knew, and probably guffawed his way to the bank, and found me and all of my snide remarks amusing. My face flares with embarrassment, and I’ve never felt so stupid. “Stop the truck.”
“What?” He glances over, his foot not moving from the gas pedal, the truck still humming along at a pace that will surely kill me. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t want to ride with you.” And I don’t want to write with him either. How could I? Everything I knew about him is false. “You’re a liar.”
“A liar?” He finally slows, pulling the truck to the side of the road, the vehicle bumping over a curb and coming to a stop on the shoulder, so close to the guardrail it almost kisses it. I reach down, fumble for the handle, and crack the door open, the guardrail in the way, preventing it from opening. I feel claustrophobia swell and think of the safe room, the locked steel, being trapped. “Helena.”
I turn to him. “I’m stuck. Pull up and give me more room.”
“We’re on the side of a highway. I’m not letting you walk down it in this traffic.”
I close my eyes, slow my breathing, and try to think of a giant meadow, of wind, of open space. “Then pull forward. Start driving. NOW.”
I don’t open my eyes but I feel the truck lurch forward, the ease of the seatbelt as it loosens, and I relax, reaching forward and hitting the window control, welcoming the burst of fresh air.
“How am I a liar?”
He’s either an idiot or obtuse, and I’d place a bet on either. “You’re a man.”
“Yes.” He turns his head, one hand loose atop the steering wheel, and I glance nervously down the road. “And that bothers you?”
I shift in my seat, trying to formulate an explanation that I haven’t yet worked through myself. In some ways, I’m happy—overwhelmingly so—that he looks the way he does. I’d been intimidated by Marka’s perfection, her pouty lips and sex appeal. When you combined that with her writing, her sales, her following… it had been unfair, had pissed me off, put our relationship on uneven footing that had always left me the loser. Now, that intimidation factor was gone, the competition diluted, my vision of her gone.
Still, I knew how to battle with her. With a man, with HIM, everything is different. He smiles when I would have expected her to jab. He chuckles when she would have sneered. His eyes soften, are dipped in compassion and understanding—qualities I hadn’t expected her to possess.
In this fight, I don’t even know where to stand. I swallow. “You should have told me the truth.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he sighs, and he actually sounds sincere. It must be a cowboy thing, the ability to drag words along the ground and kick up emotional dust. “I’m not in the habit of telling anyone. My daughter and my agent. That’s all who know.” He leans forward, turning down the air conditioner. “Well, and now you.”
“And Kate.” I add quietly, and cracks form along the ridge of my anger. I, more than anyone, understand secrets. I understand how one person, one whisper of truth, can crumble empires, destroy lives, reveal monsters.
There was a day that I was a monster. And this man… he will soon have to carry that truth, hold that secret, guard that pit.
Maybe it isn’t a bad thing he’s kept this façade for so long. The man can keep his mouth shut. It’s a tool that will, in the next few months, come in handy.
I look out the window, and feel some of my hate fade.
“It won’t be that bad.” He puts on his turn signal and merges into a space between two cars that an elephant would find tight. “I talk less when I write. It can only be an improvement to this.” He gestures in the open space of the cab, and I smile despite myself. This: (a noun) the awkward exchange of words between two opposites.
He turns right, and I watch a jogger stop, bouncing up and down in place, her eyes meeting mine through the window. “I can’t even picture you writing,” I admit. The thought of this man hunched over a laptop is amusing. He probably pecks at the keys with his pointer fingers. He probably double spaces the start of each sentence and forgets to save his work.
“It’s a very masculine endeavor. A lot of grunting and flexing.”
I laugh, the sound barking out of me, and I lift my hand to my mouth to cover the slip. “You’re not going to take this seriously.”
“It sounds like a dark book, Helena. You’re going to need some comic relief at some point.”
I turn to look at him, and his eyes are soft, the kindness in them clear. It’s cute that he thinks he can handle this, that he can take in my sad story and create a novel from it. But all he knows is that I lost my family. He doesn’t understand how.
And it’s the how that is the most twisted piece of it all.