Page 6 of The Loves We Lost
Avery runs back to me and throws her arms around me. “I love you so much, Mom,” she says, her face pressed into my hip. When she looks up at me, she looks so much like her father that my heart hurts. Wide blue eyes and blonde hair that can’t decide if it’s beach waves or curls. She’s not old enough to realize I have hazel eyes and sable-brown hair, and we don’t look the same. But one day, she will, and then she’ll start to wonder about the parent she does resemble.
I’ve converted one of the three bedrooms to an office. When I sayconverted, I mean I got rid of the twenty-seven-year-old bed and lumpy mattress, then put a desk, mini-fridge, and two bookshelves in there. It still has ugly, deep-piled, silver-grey carpet. And the floral wallpaper accent wall is looking tired, as is the pale grey paint on the other three walls. But it’s mine.
I set my laptop on the desk, pop a can of soda from the fridge, then sit down in my chair. Nora Roberts once said she could fix a bad page but couldn’t fix a blank one. It’s taken me five years of writing to embrace that.
Cracking my knuckles, I catch sight of my inspiration board for my latest motorcycle club series. There’s a bottle of whiskey. Red lipstick on a mirror that says,You lied to my face. A dark concrete room with a swirl of smoke. Large tattooed hands gripping the soft part of a woman’s thigh hard. The silhouette of a bearded man’s face. A shiny Harley Davidson. And white texton a black screen that says,I wanna be loyal and nasty with the same person forever.
I try to immerse myself in the world I’m writing. It’s a world that scares me. If it didn’t, I would be in it for real. It’s why I’m writing it. It’s a safe form of facing it. It’s possibly the reason so many people read motorcycle club romance too. It’s danger from a distance.
The reality though? Not so fun.
It’s the reason Avery’s father isn’t a part of our life.
The sound of my daughter’s favorite TV show’s theme tune filters through to my office. I’m tempted to put headphones on, but I always worry that I wouldn’t hear her if she needed me. There are moments like this when I dearly wish I could have given Avery a sibling. She’d have a best friend forever, someone to hang out with when I’m holed up writing. But these are feelings I try to keep buried—that I’m meant to be a mom to more than one child. My neighbor just had a fourth child, a little boy. I had to bite back the twinge of sadness when I dropped off a little gift for him, that I’d never have a large family like theirs.
I try to settle myself back into the scene I was writing. But just as in real life, it’s hard to suddenly stop and then restart a blow job. I look at my edit outline. About two scenes ahead, there’s a fight with a rival club that needs fixing. I try to write and edit chronologically, but when it just doesn’t happen, I skip past a couple of scenes ... never more than five, or I start to lose track of the plot’s intensity.
TheGladiatorsoundtrack is my go-to fight-scene writing playlist. No words, but I can imagine my heroes on metal war horses, also known as their bikes, charging into the unknown, willing to look death and uncertainty in the eye.
They’re fearless. Brave. Bold. Unwavering in their pursuit of the life they want.
I envy them that.
I think about the way Avery’s father would look at me sometimes after he’d been out on a run with his club. He lived that life with arms wide open from the moment he found them.
Me? I live life with my arms tightly wrapped around my middle, worrying about wars in the world and spiders in the bathroom. I can’t stop either.
I loved the idea of who he was becoming more than the reality. As a man, he was intoxicating. Competent. Loyal. Protective. Delicious when naked. Creative as a lover. My best friend. But as a biker, he was becoming more violent, less safe. Not towards me. But out in the world. He was always armed. I remember the first time I saw the weapons stacked on his dining table and knew I couldn’t live in that environment. And I remember the first call for bail money I didn’t have and he ultimately didn’t need because his club stepped in and bailed him out.
I didn’t want anything to do with that life. A life at risk.
He took me to a party at the Bethlehem clubhouse one time. I couldn’t get my head around the concept of club girls ready and willing to simply be a warm body for a horny biker. I struggled with it even more when I spent a lovely ten minutes chatting with an old lady called Eileen, then caught her husband thrusting into some young girl’s throat in a dark hallway that led down to the bathroom. He put a finger over his lips, then used his fingers to mimic firing a gun in my direction.
My phone rings, making me jump. I glance down at it, fully prepared to ignore it, but I see it’s my agent, Louise. She’s a rock star. Stayed with me through thick and thin. We went out on submission with my first book together, and she negotiated a three-book deal for me. That’s how the motorcycle club series got started. I’m wholly a romance author. I’ve been told the story arcs for my heroines dance the line toward women’s fiction, but I’m here for the love story, the explicit on-page sex, and theangst of watching two utterly conflicted people find true love with each other. The happily ever after.
The messier the emotions, the more I want to write it.
“Hey, Lou,” I say, answering the phone.
“Good news, I can join you for a little while at the book signing in New York.”
“Yay. That makes me so happy. I’ll arrive in the afternoon. Mom is coming to stay with Avery until I get back home and she goes off on her cruise. While I love my child to the deepest yet unmanned trenches of my heart, I’m looking forward to some time alone. I’ll need some sleep after getting this book finished.”
“This one was a fighter, then?”
“It was.” Some books come easy. They literally fall out of my head onto the page. I hit my word count every day. I finish the book early. And I always know that if I write a book like that, the one that follows will take me to the brink and back. “I had no idea Vengeance’s book was going to be so all-consuming. Or dark. But I liked Kim’s comments. She was insightful with her feedback.”
“Good. So, it will be finished tonight?”
“It will. I might be finished too by the end of it. If I don’t show in New York, you know it’s because I bled out typing the last thousand words in the final half hour before submission. In that instance, please direct royalties into Avery’s college fund.”
Louise laughs. “So much drama. I’ll book into the same hotel as you. You want to grab dinner the night before?”
“Yes. Somewhere I can get a decent cosmo.”
“I’ll arrange it and send you the details. Good luck tonight.”
“I’ll need it.”
