Last December we spent the entirety of the office Christmas party drinking entirely too much Dom Perignon and flirting like smashed idiots, and when she cornered me later that night and asked if I wanted to ditch out of there early and go back to her place, I told her under no uncertain terms that I was only interested in one thing—and that I’d only ever be interested in that one thing.
A leopard can’t change his spots.
Not if he tried.
Not if he could or even if he should.
Not even if he wanted to more than anything in the world.
Chapter Three
Stone
* * *
Age 10
* * *
“My dad said you could have your own room if you want, but I told him we could just share the bunk bed in my room,” my best friend, Jude, says after we leave my mother’s burial. “I told him you probably didn’t want to be by yourself.”
Jude puts his arm around my shoulders, but I don’t feel them.
Everything around me looks like a dream; realistic and familiar but not real.
I can smell the peanut butter toast he had for breakfast.
I can feel the rain drops sprinkling from the sky.
I can hear the people all dressed in black having quiet conversations behind us.
We walk to the silver limousine parked under a shade tree. A driver opens the passenger door for us.
“You want to play Xbox when we get home?” Jude asks when the door shuts. He’s probably trying to take my mind off of things, but I’m not in a mood to do much of anything.
“Nah,” I say, staring ahead at the piece of glass separating the back of the limo from the front.
“You want to swim?” he asks.
“It’s raining.”
“Maybe we can read some comic books? I just got the new Morpho Man. I’ll let you read it first,” he says.
“I kind of just want to be alone.” The air in the limo is stuffy and hot, and all day I’ve been feeling like the wind’s been sucked from my lungs. I press the button to crack my window a couple of inches. I can breathe a little better, but I still feel like my chest is being crushed from the inside.
A minute later, Jude’s dad, climbs into the back seat of the car, his black suit coat damp with rain.
Jude moves out of the way and his dad takes the spot beside me.
“It was a beautiful service, kid.” Paul gives my shoulder a squeeze. It’s the only thing he’s said to me all day, but he’s always been a man of few words, only saying something when he feels it’s meaningful enough to share.
Last year, my mother went to the doctor with a searing headache. At first they thought it was a migraine. It turned out to be an inoperable brain tumor that had already spread throughout her body. They gave her two weeks to two months to live.
She lasted six.
With my grandparents long gone and my dad out of the picture, she was anxious about who would look after me once she was gone. That’s when Paul stepped up. Jude and I were already joined at the hip. He promised Mom it was no big deal, even telling her he’d always wanted another son. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe he was just adding that part to make her worry a little bit less. I’m just thankful I don’t have to go live with strangers.
Thunder rumbles through the sky as the limo takes us out of the cemetery and to Jude’s house on the other side of town.
I turn around to look back at the rainy graveyard, but Paul slips his arm over my shoulder.
“You’ll learn soon enough,” he says, “that life’s too short to look back. Keep looking forward, Stone. You should always be focusing on your next move.”
I’m not sure what he means.
Maybe someday I’ll figure it out.
Chapter Four
Jovie
* * *
I check my stagnant word count for the ninth time this morning. I’m sitting at forty-one thousand with fifteen chapters left to write until the break-up scene and at least another nine chapters after that. An email from my editor sits in my inbox, a gentle-yet-stern reminder that this book is due next week.
When I signed the contract for Heartsong Books to publish my fifth novel last year, I wasn’t expecting that ten months later I’d be going through a divorce. To be fair, we were doomed from the start. The husband and wife part lasted half as long as the boyfriend and girlfriend part—which was a laughable five months.
No one ever tells you that insta-love often leads to insta-heartbreak.
Or that quickie marriages sometimes lead to snail-paced divorces.
Everyone tried to warn me not to rush into anything, but convincing someone that the man they love isn’t the Prince Charming he’s pretending to be is no easy task. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to see it. A romantic at heart, I thought I knew what love was.