Page 11 of Happy After All

“Thank you, Albert,” I say, then switch my focus back to Nathan. “You can go back to your room or ... or you can come if you want.”

“I’ll come with you; there’s no need for you to deliver it.”

“That’s nice, thanks.” I’m not sure it is nice because he’s so visibly put out.

“Seriously,” I say as he continues to follow me. “You saved Wilma’s necklace. Let me just ... get it for you.”

“I’ll come with you,” he repeats, but his tone isn’t friendly, and he doesn’t acknowledge my reference to his recent heroism.

“It was very nice of you,” I say as we walk out behind the lobby to a shed that stands separate from the walled courtyard of the motel.

“Do you think I’m genuinely so awful I wouldn’t help an old woman screaming in a pool?”

“No, but she wasn’t in danger, and I just think it was extra nice of you—” I give up and decide to try a different tactic. “I’m also a writer, which is just to say I get that it sucks to be interrupted when you’re trying to work. Unless of course you wanted to procrastinate.”

It isn’t landscaped out here. It’s scrubby and rocky and dusty, and I’m always afraid I’m going to see a rattlesnake. I’m hot as hell, and he makes me feel jumpy. I just want to get him his power strip and go back into the AC. Yelling at Albert about penises is infinitely preferable to being sticky and hot and feeling turned on in spite of Nathan, his rudeness, my vow of celibacy, and everything else.

“I don’t procrastinate,” he says.

I laugh. Then realize he’s serious. “Oh,” I say. “Well, that’s ... wild.”

“I came here to work. Why would I procrastinate on the work?”

“I don’t know. You spend three months locked away in a motel room and seem to do nothing but write, and you only put out one book a year.”

His eyebrows lift. “Only?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just ... you can do a fifty-thousand-word book in thirty days if you do sixteen hundred sixty-seven words a day.”

“I’m familiar with the pitch for National Novel Writing Month. Thank you.” He says it like that’s amateur stuff. I can read it in his tone.

I guess I started it because I implied he was slow. But that wasn’t really what I meant. I was just questioning the veracity of his statement that he never procrastinated.

“I write romance, by the way,” I say as I muscle open the door of the shed after wrestling with the padlock.

“Mm,” he says.

“That’s actually what we were arguing about. Albert thinks romance is unrealistic.”

Nathan’s expression remains neutral. “It is.”

I make a scoffing sound. “I . . . You . . .”

“I write military thrillersbasedon the military, and I wouldn’t call them realistic. People aren’t paying for realism. They want a narrative about heroism and blowing shit up. Within that there are some details that are real, but ... nothing in real life is that simple.”

This is the most he’s ever spoken to me, and he’s irritating me. “But you know when people say that about books you write, they aren’t dismissing your whole genre. When they say it to me, that’s what they’re doing. People don’t value emotion. They don’t value hope, even if they should.”

I chose romance because I needed to believe in happiness still. Even when my whole life fell apart, I needed to believe in it. Not just in happiness, but that happily ever after was possible, even if things had gone horribly, terribly wrong.

I never thought about it until I had my heart broken. After that I realized I had a choice to sit there in hopelessness. I did for a while, but then I decided I couldn’t live that way. Hoping for happily ever after feels brave now.

More and more, I want to be brave.

“If I have a hill I’m willing to die on, that’s the one,” I say. “Falling in love when everything is terrible is as brave an act as blowing shit up. Except it’s something regular, everyday people can choose to do. A radical act of real-life bravery.”

I’m not sure I understand how deeply I believe that until the words come out of my mouth.

“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it,” he says. “But my experience is that when life gives you shit, there’s really nothing much to continue to hope for.”

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