Chapter 4
Rowan
To quote Harley, my hot-as-fuck romance author gets back about an hour after he left, and I haven’t done much in the way of cleaning. I did get to unpack, but only a little. What I really did that had some value was talk to Harley. She made me feel better about this whole experience, but we do need to talk about what the plan is from here.
“Honey, I’m home!” He jokes. He’s got two big take out bags in one hand, and a six pack of beer in the other.
“I guess we’re doing some drinking, huh?”
“I was going to get a bottle of wine, to be honest. I saw a place in town that said ‘Liquor Store’, so I went in, and all they had was beer, wall-to-wall. I’m not kidding.”
“No way.”
“Seriously. Not a drop of anything else in the place, so I got a variety pack cause I didn’t even know if you liked beer or not.”
“I guess I do now.”
“That’s the spirt,” he says, opening up what appears to be mostly empty cabinets. “Shit, I really didn’t think this through.”
“I’m an easy girl. I can make the best of it.”
“I like the first part of that sentence,” he jokes. “Like it a lot.”
“Shut up.”
We sit at the little wooden kitchen table—at least there’s one of those—and eat our food like college kids in a frat. I’m so hungry I don’t even care. “Oh. My. God.”
“Good, right?”
“It tastes like Heaven on a bun right now. That might be the best burger ever!”
“Or you’re just really hungry.” Gray says.
“Probably a combination of both. But, still, it’s damn good.”
We spend a few minutes eating and not talking, and then, just as I’m about to bring the subject up, Gray does it for me.
“Listen, can we talk?”
“About?”
“This,” he says, motioning with his finger around the entire room. “All of this.”
“Well I thought you’d never ask. What’s the plan?”
“That’s the exact same thing Colton asked me a few minutes ago.”
“You talked to him? That’s great, now I can break Harley of her vow of secrecy.”
“You spoke to Harley?” He asks.
“Yeah. I guess we both needed our friends to let us know we aren’t crazy, huh?”
“I’m not sure Colton did that for me. This is a little crazy, but I think I more needed to just talk to a friend—no offense.”
“None taken, Grayson. Honestly we don’t know each other that well—I mean, we know some things about one another, but not a whole lot. It’s the same reason I needed to talk to Harley.”
“And what did she say?”
“Probably the same thing Colton told you—but in more of a Harley type way. She was supportive, but she also thought it was a little reckless.”
“She’s right. He’s right. Everyone’s right. I was thinking about it on the drive back from Ray’s just now. I know that you wanted to help and support me, but if you don’t want to be here—if you’re having any regrets I can make arrangements for you to get off the crazy train and get back to New York.”
I love the way he’s looking at me as he says that. It’s a blend of compassion and concern, but the concern is for me. I can tell when a guy is bullshitting, or being disingenuous, but Gray’s as real as they come, and he really does care about my experience. I don’t know what comes over me. Maybe it’s the same thing that came over him when he hugged me before, but I grab his hand across the table with both of mine and start rubbing in circles with my thumb. I make really intense eye contact and smile so that he knows I’m okay.
“Listen, I’m a big girl, and I knew what I was doing when I practically forced my way into your passenger seat. I wanted to be here with you, and I still do. I just also want to know what the plan is for the foreseeable future. I want to know where we are.”
“You’re amazing, you know that? I meant what I said before—I love having you here with me. All of my other travels have been alone.”
“Other travels?” I ask.
“Yeah, I’ve been around. Not like that, though. I mean it literally. I’ve been around.”
“Like where?”
“Sweden. Luxembourg. South Africa. China. France. Japan, too, but only for a week. Come to think of it, I’ve been all over the goddamn place.” He starts laughing, and it’s a real belly laugh. It sounds like he hasn’t really spoken to anyone about this before, because I can see him remembering as he’s speaking.
“Wow,” I say. “I feel like I should get out more often. But that’s amazing—did you go with your family?”
“Some,” he tells me. “They always took us places when we were kids.”
“Us?”
“Me, my brother, and my two sisters.”
“Wow,” I say. “Four kids is a lot. Not as much as my family, but still.”
“How many siblings do you have?”
“You remember I said that I’m Irish-Catholic, right?” He nods. “Well, think of like, Angela’s Ashes kind of Irish Catholic. I have eight brothers and sisters.”
“Holy shit,” Gray says. “Nine kids? That makes the four Blackman’s seem tame by comparison.”
“Yeah, there were actually ten. The first baby my mom and dad had apparently died, but nine of us lived. It was a little hectic growing up.”
“A little? Hell, your parents were raising a small classroom’s worth of kids. God bless your mom.”
“But back to your family for a minute,” I say, changing the subject a little. “ They travelled with you a lot?”
“I think so, by most standards anyway. When I talk to people our age most of them didn’t go to as many places as we did. I grew up a little bit differently than most people. There was a lot of travel but there were no trips to Disney or Hershey Park. None of the typical family stuff. Typical for us was a trip to Hong Kong over Winter Recess from school, or an impromptu summer vacation to Denmark. That’s just how I grew up. So as I got older I just kept it up, only without my family.”
“That’s so cool,” I tell him. “I haven’t been anywhere. England, once, in college, but only for three days and a lot of it was doing that touristy London shit where someone walks you around and lectures about the history of this castle, or that building. It kind of sucked, actually.”
“Ooh, that’s rough. Gotta stay clear of the guided tours.”
“See, if only I knew someone as well traveled as you back then, you could have told me. So how many countries have you been to in total?”
“Whew,” he says, looking up. He starts to count on his fingers but switches to counting out loud when he exceeds ten countries in Europe alone. He finally stops. “I might be one or two off, but somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty.”
“Twenty? Wow.”
“Yeah, I’ve been around.”
“Can I as you a personal question?”
“You can ask me anything you want, Ro. Anything.”
“Okay, isn’t that. . .really expensive to travel like that? I mean, even if I wanted to and had the time, I don’t really have the money on a receptionist salary to travel the world like that.”
“When I was a kid my parents paid. But later on I found a bunch of travel hacks that let me get around for cheap. They’re there if you don’t mind living really, really frugally. It’s not the traveling itself that’s so expensive, it’s the eating, and the hotels, and the expensive sight-seeing. Traveling taught me a lot in that regard.”
I’m fascinated by his experience traveling, but the whole idea is foreign to me. My parents were grounded—literally and figuratively—in where we grew up in New England. We took a few family vacations here and there, most of which were stressful and completely unenjoyable—I have the horrifying pictures to prove it. I can’t imagine the freedom that comes with being to go wherever you want, whenever you want.
“What kind of things did it teach you?”
“That you can get what you really want if you believe hard enough. If you take the time to figure out how to achieve your goals, then you’ll achieve them. That’s what I did when I didn’t have the bank account to go all the places that I wanted to go, but I made it work. Life’s kind of like that, too.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “I guess it is.”
“And who would have thought that after all that traveling that most people don’t get to do—over most continents, and over twenty countries, that I’d end up back in rural Arizona, a financial disaster and a failed writer.”
“You’re not a failed writer, Gray. You’re just. . .you’re just down on yourself right now because of some setbacks.”
“I just don’t see how I’m going to turn it all around at this point,” he says. “If I wrote two books that basically flopped with readers, then what’s going to magically happen with the next one, or the one after that? I just don’t see it.”
I think about his question for a second. I know that I could just give him the generic supportive drivel—the stuff you see on social media about pushing through difficulty, or following your dreams, but I’d rather give him a real answer—something he could use.
“I’m no expert in romance.” I say.
“It’s not like becoming a surgeon, Ro. If you’ve read a few books you’re basically are an expert.”
“Okay, well, as an expert,” I say, doing the air quotes around the word ‘expert.’ “I can offer you a few hypotheses as to why your books might have. . .what did you call it?”
“Flopped.”
“Right. Why they may have not done as well as you wanted them to. I can’t prove any of this, exactly, but I have some ideas.”
“I’m all ears,” he says, taking a sip of his beer before giving me his full attention. “But before we get into why I suck so bad, can we move this to that couch over there?”
“Yeah, of course.”
We clean up our trash and Gray throws it in the can that sits under the sink. I savor the feeling of being full for the first time in two days, even though I ate a little more than I should have. I’m still thinking of ideas as we get up from the kitchen table and head over to what looks like a very comfortable couch that’s in better condition than the rest of the place. I plop my butt down on one side of the sofa and Gray sits next to me.
“All ears. Tell me why I don’t suck.”
“Are you familiar with Occam’s Razor?”
“Say what?”
“The law of parsimony,” I say, not really clarifying much. I see his eyebrow raise like I’m speaking Greek. “Sorry, I was a philosophy major in school.”
“I bet you want to get that one back.” He jokes.
“Why do you say that?” I ask
“Well, no offense, but I always thought of philosophy as one of those majors people went into when they didn’t know what else to do, or if they were okay not making any money.”
“You’re right, totally different than a degree in English—that’s where all the money and women are, right?”
He smiles and says, “Touché. You got me there.”
“It’s okay, I get that all the time, whenever I tell anyone what my degree is in, actually. But philosophy gets a bad rep. It’s probably the best degree someone could have. It teaches you how to think, how to argue a point, how to spot bullshit when someone’s trying to convince you of something.”
“Huh. I guess I never thought of it that way. I always had a stereotypical view of it, like it was a bunch of hippies in a room discussing whether there’s a sound if a tree falls and no one is around.”
“There are plenty of hippies in philosophy classes, trust me, but when you get to the higher level classes those people disappear, and you’re left with real thinkers. Anyhow, back to my question, which you sort of answered already.”
“The razor thing?”
“Occam’s Razor, yeah. It says that when you have a lot of different conclusions you could draw about a situation —say, why a book isn’t selling—it’s usually the simplest one that’s the reason.”
“Right,” he says. “Like me sucking. That’s pretty simple.”
“Would you stop already, you don’t suck. The guys in the Brotherhood suck at writing.”
“You’ve got that right.”
“You can write, Grayson. You can write your ass off, actually. Your books are hot.” I feel my cheeks get warm warm when I say that out loud. It’s true. I read all of his books in a record time. They’re some of the sexiest scenes ever. I know I don’t have a lot of experience reading romance, but I can’t imagine anything hotter than some of the situations he writes about. “What you’re really having a problem with is selling. That’s a different issue, and to solve it you need to ask different questions.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but right now the only question I want to ask myself is where the bed is. I’m enjoying sitting here talking to you, and I actually really appreciate you thinking of my writing career. But I’m dead right now, and I think I need to recharge my batteries before we get into any deep philosophical analysis. Is that okay?”
“It’s more than okay,” I tell him. “I’m tired too. It’s a little early to go to bed for me, so I’m going to stay up a little. Maybe clean up, take a shower, read.”
“All good things,” he says. “And you don’t have to clean my uncle’s place, by the way. It’s my job, not yours.”
“Your job right now is to get some rest, and to stop saying that you suck. I’ll do my part in my own way.”
“Fair enough. And to answer your question about a plan, the honest truth is that I don’t have one. But I’m also not going to string you along, or mope around licking my wounds, I promise. Right now I’m here for a week, until my car is fixed, and then I’ll be back to normal life.” He gets up and stretches, his arms shooting straight up to the ceiling. When he does his shirt lifts up slightly, and I can see the bottom two of his six pack. It doesn’t even look real at first—like someone drew a picture of perfect abs. It’s gone a second later when he lowers his hands to his side again, but I don’t need much time to get turned on by him. He takes step towards me, leans over, and kisses me on the cheek. But instead of pulling away, his lips go from the skin of my flushed cheeks to the side of my ear. “I can’t imagine being here without you, Rowan.”
The words make the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up—the sound of his deep voice toned down just low enough to hum in my ear drives me quietly crazy, and I feel my whole body come to life while he’s close to my skin. I want to reach out, to put my hands on him, but I don’t. He pulls away, a smile on his face directed at me, and then he’s gone to his bedroom. I wait until he’s out of the room to take a big ole deep breath, and I exhale to slow my heart.
This week is going to be interesting.