Page 47 of Life, Love, and Other Messes

“I’ll drop you off at the door. Thank you for this. I’ll mention you in the credits.”

She waved me off, but I could tell she was pleased. “You’re very welcome, girl.”

I wanted to see Lisa before she left for the beach, but when I walked Ollie past her house, her car wasn’t there. As it got later, I thought about texting, but I knew she probably needed to pack and get ready. Instead, I did something crazy. With less than one hundred pages written, I sent in a proposal to my editor-in-chief for my romance. She had gotten used to receiving a couple each year back before I was on my meds, but she sometimes had to nudge me now. One way or another, I’d never sent one in without most of the book written, or at least an extremely clear sense of where things started, conflicted, and ended. I just felt this one. It felt so good. This had to be one of the best ones I’d ever started, and it was fleshing out so, so nicely.

Then, I freaked out.

Saturday morning, I let Ollie out to pee and paced my house over and over. What had I done? I could write the editor-in-chief and rescind my submission, but that would make me feel absolutely worthless. I had to do this, but how the hell could I? The date to deliver my manuscript was in just a couple of months. Years ago, that would have been no problem. Years ago, I could have had it done, tweaked, ready to go in six weeks. Sure, I could write with Lisa in my life, in my living room, in my subconscious, but what if that changed? What if she moved? What if I drove her away? God, what had I done?

By the time Ollie came in, I was desperate. Knowing full well what I was doing, I skipped the next step in my daily routine: pulling the pill sorter out of my cabinet and swallowing my handful of meds. I skipped it and went on to the shower, feeling guilty and ashamed and crazy excited all at once. After classes that morning, I didn’t have to be anywhere for a full week. It wouldn’t hurt anything. I could get so much done. I could get the whole damn thing done and spend the next couple of months refining it.

By the time I got to school, I’d convinced myself that I was doing the right thing. We had a lovely discussion about Gloria Naylor in Lit class and spent half of Creative Writing reading bits of our latest work and giving constructive criticism. It felt amazing to see the shy smile on Jasper’s face when people said his excerpt was remarkable. I’d had him in Lit class last year when he was known as Shon’te, and I loved watching him come out of his shell and bond with the other students. Mary, my senior citizen, had also gotten many wonderful comments on her story, and we walked to her car together embroiled in a conversation about pantsing versus planning. She admitted she was a compulsive planner who wanted to learn to write on the fly, and I laughed and said I was so completely following a wild hair on my current idea I didn’t know where it was going.

I was going to figure that out this week. It took a while for the drugs to get out of my system, so I knew I had to be patient, to work slowly at first. I went to the gym after class and then took Ollie to the dog park, where he and a white-muzzled lab mix named Montgomery romped around like they were six-month-old puppies. A doodle named Scooter also spent a good amount of time trying to hump him, so I cut our visit short and headed home, where I took my laptop and settled into my usual spot on the loveseat. I put up my feet, stared at the ceiling, pictured Lisa sitting on the middle pillow of the sofa. Nothing. I finally went to the cabinet and got a strip of chicken jerky, dangled it in Ollie’s face, and tossed it onto the sofa. He looked at me like I was being totally stupid, but humored me and lay down, a bit off center, to eat his snack.

Where was my plot going? I had scenes—oh, I had scenes—but did I have a way to put them together to get to the general gist of what I’d submitted in my proposal? I slowly began to knit two of the early scenes together, creating fascia, and felt good about it. At some point, Ollie slithered off the sofa and snuck off down the hall, probably to my bed, but I didn’t care; it was working. Tomorrow, I told myself, I’d find a calendar and a notebook and start planning for real.

Tomorrow came, and I skipped my meds again. I started feeling it, feeling the itch to write while pushing a cart around Kroger at noon. I had nothing to scribble on so I pulled over to the edge of an aisle and texted some ideas to myself. By the time I had my groceries, I was desperate to get home and flesh things out.

I’d meant to make myself lunch, but I spent a couple of hours writing instead. It wasn’t quite there, didn’t quite come so perfectly yet, but I knew within a day or so the floodgates would open. After eating a quick sandwich, I spent another hour going through what I had and writing each scene down on a sticky note. Then I sat on the floor in my office and made a huge timeline of little yellow squares, moving them here and there strategically until I had everything in the order it needed to be. I’d never done that before, but I’d seen Lisa writing activities on stickies and moving them over her lesson planning calendar like chess pieces. I was pleased to see that it worked for me, too. She was wonderful. She was so wonderful.

I sat back on my heels for a minute, thinking about her. I wondered if she was having a good time. I wondered if the weather at the beach was amazing and if the ocean was amazing and if her friends were amazing. I was sure June looked amazing in her bikini. I shrugged that off as quickly as I could, but a little bit of residual uncertainty stuck. I wondered if they were going whale watching and snorkeling and out to dive seafood restaurants. Part of me wanted to hope it was raining and they were sitting inside hating one another, but I knew I didn’t really want that for her. Then, for just a tiny little moment, I pictured Lisa in a bathing suit and I knew I needed to shut it all down.

What was this, anyway? I’d fallen in love with every best friend I’d ever had, that wasn’t anything new. We’d just become so close so fast I didn’t know what to think. We got along so well, had so much in common, but we were in such different places. I hadn’t been single for that long in the grand scheme of things, but she’d been officially divorced for only days. I was ready to date again and crushing hard on her, and I had no idea who she would be interested in if she ever even wanted to date again. Maybe she was so done with being in a relationship that she’d stay single forever. Maybe she’d find someone cool three years from now. Maybe hot June would turn out to be bi and they’d live happily ever after. Fuck June.

I could feel the ugly stuff creeping back in through the crevices, whispering doubt and self-hatred behind my ears. I knew this was why I took the meds. I knew my head would be screaming with it in a few days. I could just go to the cabinet and take them right now. I could stop this whole awful deluge of suck.

Instead, I sat there on the floor, brainstorming how everything fit together, the tendons I was missing between scenes, the blood flow from beginning to end. I slapped more sticky notes down, scribbled, wandered around the house thinking, came back and added to my story map. Ollie woke up from his nap, found me sitting at his level, and started licking and leaning until I fell over. Even at my worst, he could still make me laugh. “C’mon, dude. I need a break. Walkies?”

I did a little bit of dictation to myself, but I spent most of the walk worrying. Lisa hadn’t texted. Was she waiting for me to text? Should I text? Or was I just a distraction when she wasn’t with other people, doing other things? It wasn’t like she texted me during nap time at school or anything. Maybe I should text her something businesslike, like did she want me to water her lawn? It was October and her lawn didn’t need watering. Maybe she wanted me to take in her mail? No, she would have asked me to do it. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and text a hello. Maybe something generic.

Ollie had followed a squirrel up a squat tree and was standing on his hind legs with his front two on the trunk, straining to see where it had gone. I wrapped his leash around my wrist and took out my phone.

Hey…Hope you’re having a good time! Just walked Ollie past your house and was wondering if you need me to take care of anything?

I hit send before I could talk myself out of it. “I think it’s gone, buddy.” I squinted up into the tree myself and even rustled one of the branches, but nothing scurried. Ollie came down on all fours, but shot the tree one more look before we continued along our way.

I nudged my thoughts back toward my book. I had a decent conflict and plot working up to it, but since I was me, I toyed with adding a dead body somewhere along the way. Maybe a stalker? One of my characters was already getting over a stalker situation, so maybe she could return? Saving your girlfriend’s life was always a good way to say I love you.

Or maybe the new girlfriend could pretend to move to Alaska and fuck everything up. And then the protagonist could turn a bit antagonistic and stalk her. Shut up, shut up, shut up. I was very aware that Veronica had ignored my text the other day. Now Lisa would probably ignore—

My phone buzzed and I grabbed at my pocket. Ollie wasn’t at a stopping point, but I didn’t care, just kept walking, eyes fully on my phone.

OMG it’s so gorgeous here. We just got back in from the beach and I’m definitely going back out after dinner just to walk. I don’t think I need you to do anything but I’ll let you know if I come up with something. Say hi to my old man!

I let my breath way out, so far my chest felt concave. I snapped a picture of Ollie walking along, then promptly tripped over a break in the sidewalk. I didn’t fall, but Ollie gave me a wry look anyway. I sent the photo, waited for Lisa to send a heart back, and pocketed my phone again. All the fuss was for naught. Everything was okay.

Chapter Twelve

Writing romances, at least when I wrote romances, meant writing sex scenes. In my first few books, which were thrillers with romantic subplots, I used the fade-to-black technique, leading up to it with tension, then ending the scene before getting too far into the act.

My fifth book was my first real attempt at a romance with no death or dismemberment, and by then I’d happily come to terms with the fact that my mother wanted nothing to do with my writing. Without the threat of shocking her and embarrassing myself, I plowed ahead and wrote the graphic details. My nerves still kicked up when I thought about how my friends had read those scenes, but I assured myself that they’d probably read or watched worse.

I’d officially scrapped the murder idea for this book. I wrote in a stalking ex-lover after all, but the crux of this story was the building relationship, so there had to be plenty of sexual tension. The chase was my favorite thing to write, and sooner or later, things ended in bed. Well, or somewhere else, with the same results.

Bed was not the easiest thing to write, although as Lisa had teased, I’d written plenty of it. I was still shy after all these years, and what was worse, the medications I took seriously dampened my libido. Ninety-five percent of what I’d come up with over the past several years was complete creative writing. Even before the meds, I’d never come close to writing verbatim a scene from my own history, but I always thought it might be worse that my friends were thinking Jesus Christ, this shit lives in her head.

Tuesday morning, I sat trying to work my way through the first sex scene of the book, the most important one. I sat in my backyard, feet up on a second lawn chair, laptop on my thighs, while Ollie sunned himself in the grass. I wrote a little, deleted, wrote a little more. It somehow felt weird writing such words out in the open, but it was so beautiful and the clouds were fluffy and perfect and pretty soon it wouldn’t be shorts weather anymore.