Page 22 of Divorced from Number Thirty-Eight
And I feel my interest in her increasing exponentially.
Fuck.
“What do you do, baby?”
“I’m a writer.”
Everything in me stills because that’s…perfect. Everything about her screams author—the cute little skirts she wears, the blouses, the glasses (though she’s not wearing them right now because they were lost in a fucking fire). But it’s more than the outside—it’s her quick wit and quiet, observing nature.
Cataloguing everything and storing it away to use later.
Yeah, I can totally see her writing some sort of cozy mystery or a thriller, diving deep into the plot and getting lost in her characters.
“What kind of books do you write?”
Her chin comes up, the recalcitrance increasing by an order of magnitude. “Romance novels.”
My brows fly up. “Romance novels?”
“That’s what I said.” It’s a pert rejoinder.
“Wow. Faye Sullivan is a secret romance novelist.”
“It’s not a secret.”
“Then why am I just finding out about it?”
“Because we’ve barely spoken?”
She has a point, but I’m enjoying teasing her too much to acknowledge it.
“Wow,” I say instead.
“What? You think your shy, homebody of a neighbor doesn’t know anything about love?”
“No,” I tell her, my teasing fading as I think about what my love life has looked like for the last years. “I think that writing about love is one of the hardest things a writer can do.”
Her face smooths out. “What?”
“Love is universal and complicated and one of the things people want most in the world. To be able to write about it and make it feel sincere, make it something that readers want to root for has to be tough.”
“I—” She swallows and shakes her head. “I guess I never thought about it that way.”
She’s befuddled again, and it’s fucking cute.
And soft, her eyes coming back to mine, her words quiet. “Thank you for saying it that way instead of reacting how people normally react.”
It’s dangerous how easy it is to talk to her, dangerous how much I want to know every part of her. Yet, I find I’m unable to not touch her, so I stroke my fingers along her side again. “How do people normally react?”
She sighs. “By asking if I try out my sex scenes before I write them. Or asking me if writing love stories is just a little hobby and one day if I’ll write real books.”
“Seriously?”
“Unfortunately, I am.”
I scowl. “That’s bullshit.”
“Maybe so, but that’s the world we live in right now.” She exhales again. “I provide for myself. I pay my bills. I do something I love, but I think because most romance books are written by women for women, they’re still seen as less.” Her nose wrinkles. “Gotta love that my job writing fiction mirrors the real world sometimes.”
