Page 17 of Dear Mr. Author

I go to squeeze his shoulder, let him know I’m here for him, I understand.

But before I get the chance he pushes away from the tree and begins to walk back toward the path we came.

“Madden?” I call after him.

“I’ll email you,” he snaps over his shoulder, his tone striking my chest. “About lesson two.”

I watch the broadness of his shoulder moving away from me, the way they shift under his shirt, the anger coursing through him. He walks quickly to the park exit, with long strides, leaving me breathless.

But one phrase keeps bouncing around and around in my mind.

Lesson two.

Chapter Ten

Madden

I lean against the balcony railing, looking down on the city as it glistens in the sunset. Everything sparkles around me and I think about the meeting in the park, how the past reared up and crashed into me like the waves in the sea, the ugly goddamned sea, the one that catapulted my writing career and took my parents.

I never planned on telling her about any of that.

I’ve never been much of a drinker, but being close to her makes me feel drunk, makes me feel like I’m on the most powerful intoxicating drug imaginable.

Step aside truth serum.

It’s like my seed has taken control of my instincts, telling me my woman deserves to know everything about me, all the things that have gone into me to make me the man I am today.

If we’re going to be together forever, we shouldn’t keep anything from each other. My body roars that message at me, drums it into my mind, even now, even if it’s been several hours since I last saw her.

I had to leave. I had to get the fuck out of there.

Because I was going to tell her all of it.

How I fell for her over a letter, how I went to her apartment, how disappointed I was when I thought she was her roommate who I felt nothing for.

“And what would she say to that, eh, boy?” I murmur, turning and kneeling down next to Boxcar.

He props himself up on my knee, pressing his forepaws against me, as he smiles up. The acceptance in his eyes will never stop amazing me, will never stop making my chest tighten with affection.

But that tightness, that emotion, it’s something I never dreamed I’d share with another person. Boxcar is an exception to the rule.

“How would she react if I told her she belonged to me, forever? I can tell you how, little man, she’d run for the goddamn hills.”

That’s why I had to step away from her – because I was dangerously close to letting out the whole crazy mess.

And I can’t do that, not unless I want to lose her forever.

I clench my hands into tight fists, dropping onto the floor and letting Boxcar leap into my lap.

I can’t risk it. I can’t lose her.

But do I really think I can keep my need to myself, especially if I see her again?

And I have to see her again.

There’s no goddamn way for me not to, no goddamn way for me to live in a world where I don’t claim her.

I have to do it cleverly, take my time unless I scare my shy sassy beautiful perfect woman away.

Chapter Eleven

Maddison

“So he just walked away?” Kelly asks, sitting up on the armchair with her legs crossed, a cushion hugged to her chest.

I bite my lip as the memory returns to me. Or perhaps returns isn’t quite right, because it never left me. It’s been hovering in my mind ever since it happened, an endless cycle on repeat.

The shape of his back, his stride, the way his head was slightly bowed as though he wanted to get away from me as quickly as possible.

“But then he said he’d see me again for lesson two,” I muse, clasping my hands around the mug of hot cocoa as music drums through the paper-thin apartment walls.

But that’s nothing new. Sometimes it feels like we spend our whole freaking time in this place with music pounding through the walls.

That’s what happens in a city with rent as high as ours, with two waitresses on a minimum wage, with no parents to help them out. Well, Kelly has parents, but they aren’t very wealthy.

“Yeah, he sort of shouted it at me over his shoulder.”

“That’s so… weird,” she murmurs. “And he was just talking about writing, or what?”

“No, he was talking about his childhood, stuff he’s never really discussed publically before,” I murmur. “I don’t want to say exactly what because I don’t think he’d want me to talk about it. But yeah, then he was gone.”

She looks closely at me, eyes wide like she doesn’t believe me for a moment. I can read the doubt in her eyes. Even with the lights turned low – the curtains drawn and the night dark beyond them – I can read her.

---