Page 1 of The Love Interest
1
EMMETT
Jack Irons needs a woman.
These five words have been haunting me like an annoying cartoonScooby-Dooghost for days now. Weeks? Months, maybe.
Jack Irons needs a woman.
It makes me uncomfortable. It’s unsettling. Like all unsettling things that haunt me and make me uncomfortable, it’s probably true.
My protagonist needs a woman.
Idon’t need a woman.
I need inspiration.
Those are the only three true words that are applicable to me at this point in my life.
Well, here are eleven more:I need to turn in a fucking novel to my publisher.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence,” Hemingway said. “Write the truest sentence that you know.”
If I wrote those three true sentences into my Microsoft Word doc, I’d have a nineteen-word manuscript. Booyah. Nineteen down. Seventy-nine thousand nine hundred eighty-one to go.
Fuck you, Hemingway. With your short novels and your Paris and your four wives and your affairs. Some of us have seven-figure publishing contracts that specify word count ranges. Some of us are devoted New Yorkers. Some of us can actually manage to write novels without getting women all tangled up in our sordid literary obligations.
Some of us only fall in love once in a lifetime, because once is enough.
Too much, even.
And also, nowhere near enough…
But what kind of woman would Jack fall in love with?
A single mom stripper with a heart of gold who’s trying to complete a law degree.
A grumpy, foul-mouthed local cop who also happens to have a great pair of tits, a heart-shaped ass, and a love of big band-era jazz music.
The seductive cousin of his beloved deceased wife who may or may not be a serial killer.
That chick who plays Wonder Woman…
What would it take to make Jack Irons fall in love again?
To see himself as a man who deserves that kind of love from a good woman?
To want to share his life with another person again?
To fall asleep next to the same woman night after night, believing that he’ll wake up to her beautiful face every morning for the rest of their lives—and not feel guilty about it?
To dream about and plan with and talk about the overwhelming urge to bring another life into this world with her?
How the fuck would I know?
I don’t even believe it can happen more than once.
Why should it?
