Page 70 of Guys Can't Write Romance
“Writing session tomorrow?” Chad asked, hoping his voice sounded casual.
“I can’t tomorrow,” Daisy said, sounding almost apologetic. “But the day after?”
“Sure,” Chad said. “Hot date with Ethan?”
She nodded, fishing her keys from her purse with unusual clumsiness. “Yeah.”
“I’ll bring some coffee to wake you up.” The teasing comment had a gentleness to it that hadn’t been there in their earlier interactions.
She gave him a faint smile that carried a hint of something complicated. “He’s really not that bad.”
“I’ll bring the coffee just in case.”
The moment held a strange intimacy, not romantic exactly, but a kind of understanding that hadn’t existed before. Two people recognizing something in each other that they weren’t quite ready to name.
Chad climbed into his Jeep and watched Daisy climb into her sedan. Once inside, he pulled his pages from his backpack and flipped through them. The words seemed to carry more weight now than they had when he wrote them. There was no mistaking that his female lead’s quirks had shifted from generic type-A personality to specifically Daisy. When had that happened?
Meanwhile, in her car, Daisy read over her latest chapter, where Rick helped a kid perfect his batting stance while making terrible jokes about ‘swinging for the fences’ in life as well as baseball. When had her boring lead turned into Chad? When had she started writing Chad’s laugh, Chad’s coaching style, Chad’s surprisingly insightful life advice delivered through sports metaphors?
They were so screwed.
And the worst part?
Their novels had known it all along, the characters on the page more honest than their creators were ready to be.
Across the parking lot, Mags and the other group members watched through the cafe window with mischievous grins, decades of combined life experience recognizing the familiar dance playing out before them.
“A week,” Mags said to no one in particular, stirring her tea with practiced elegance. “I give them a week before one of them cracks.”
“My money’s on Chad,” Helen said, her grandmother’s intuition sensing the vulnerability beneath his carefree exterior. “He’s less practiced at denial.”
“Daisy,” Ruth countered, her teacher’s insight recognizing the pressure building behind Daisy’s carefully maintained facade. “She’s got more to lose. That perfect image she maintains can’t withstand this kind of emotional honesty much longer.”
“Twenty bucks says they both crack simultaneously,” Liv offered, her romantic soul always believing in perfect timing.
“You’re all terrible,” Bernie said with the exasperation of someone who had been listening to these women speculate about romance for decades, then added, “Put me down for ten on Chad.”
Chapter seventeen
Reading Between the Lines
The late afternoon sun warmed the coffee shop’s patio as Daisy watched Chloe read her new pages, fighting the urge to snatch them back. She’d already reorganized the sugar packets twice (by color, then by type), straightened all the chairs at neighboring tables, and was seriously considering color-coding the creamer selection.
“You really suck at patience,” Chloe said without looking up, her eyes scanning to the bottom of the page then flipping to the next with deliberate slowness that Daisy suspected was meant to torture her. “Did anyone ever tell you that?” She brushed aside several of her newly dyed green curls as she read on.
“I’m patient,” Daisy protested, though her fidgeting hands betrayed her. She tugged half-heartedly at the hem of her sundress, then adjusted her sunglasses, then twisted her napkin into increasingly frantic loops.
“Uh-huh,” Chloe murmured distractedly, her nose buried in the freshly edited chapter. She paused to jot something cheekyin the margins with a pen before continuing. “You’ve been watching me read like I’m about to announce the lottery numbers.”
“In a way, you are. I just need to know that Rick’s fixed. Nothing else. No deep analysis or character assassinations.”
“What if they need assassinated?” Chloe asked, turning another page with excruciating slowness.
“Do they?”
“I’ll let you know in one more minute.” Chloe’s deliberately mysterious tone wasn’t helping matters.
Chloe’s eyes skimmed down the rest of the page and then on to the last one. A few seconds later, she slapped it down onto the table and shot Daisy a grin. “You want the good news first?”
