“Don’t need to worry about some character’s love life, Hawklet. Got enough problems of my own,” Webb would say with an impatient grunt.
“But it’s fiction,” Emma would say, wrinkling her nose. “Why read about that stuff when the world’s full of catastrophes and people who need help?”
“You’ve been eating processed food again, haven’t you?” Drew would sigh, like perhaps my strange affliction would subside if I’d just commit to eating more quinoa.
They all missed the point entirely. Ofcoursethe world was full of real troubles—earthquakes and political upheaval and pre-calculus tests I was doomed to fail; guys who were too gorgeous and wonderful to acknowledge my existence, and others who didn’t want to take no for an answer; chores to do, and college to consider, and a sweet baby nephew who needed attention; and dealing with all of that while carrying the last name Sunday, which meant something when you lived in thegossipy confines of my beloved Little Pippin Hollow, a town so tiny they putLittlein the name.
Who wouldn’t want to escape into a world with a hard-won, well-deserved, guaranteed happily ever after?
And processed food is tasty, I thought as I shoved another cookie in my mouth.
“Poor kid,” Drew said sadly. “He has at least three nice young men who’d love to take him out if he’d just crook a finger in their direction, but Corinne Perkins told Dottie French she’d heard from Camille—her niece, you know?—that Hawk says he’s saving himself for something special.”
“I say he should spend more time with his friends,” Emma decided. “He’s got bunches of ’em.”
I rolled my eyes. Yes, I did, and I liked them a lot… but sometimes, it felt like my friends didn’t always understand me any more than my family did.
Feisty but perfectly polite Elizabeth Bennet, on the other hand… Now, there was a woman who understood what it was like to have expectations on your shoulders. Elizabeth Bennet knew what it was like to have high standards for one’s romantic partners. Elizabeth Bennet understood what it meant to have…
“Aha!” Emma yelled, snatching my blanket off my head triumphantly. “Gotcha!”
… really annoyingsiblings.
“Hey.” I blinked innocently, shoving my cookies behind the sofa cushion before Emma could see them. “Hi. Fancy meeting you here.”
“Hawkins, man.” Uncle Drew shook his shaggy gray head. “What are you doing?”
“Just… you know… chilling. Pondering life. Deep philosophical questions. Like, should your lacrosse team really be selling wrapping paper for their fundraiser again, Em? Because I tried my hardest last year as the fundraising volunteer,but the Hollow is really more of a ‘chuck it in a gift bag with some tissue paper’ kind of place. Don’t worry, I’ll come up with a better idea for this year.” I tapped my temple. “Best leave me to it.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” Emma set her hands on her narrow hips. “You think you’ll find the answer in…” She grabbed my hand and turned my book over to read the title. “Mr. Darcy’s Wild Ride: A Romance Novel?”
“Hawk.” Uncle Drew narrowed his eyes and leaned closer to me. “Why do you have chocolate dust on your mouth?”
“Uh…” I licked my lips. “Well, actually…”
“And you smell likeartificial mint flavoring,” he accused.
“Fine. Fine!” I jumped up from the couch and stood beside the sofa. “I was eating cookies andreading, okay? I admit it. Reading is not a crime, people! It’s not a sign that I’m bored or depressed. It is not a cry for help. I’m not secretly longing to run an errand or do a chore. I donotwant to slog through the snow to get ice cream—an activity, I might add, that runs contrary to millions of years of human evolution. I do not wish to eat quinoa. I have no desire to clomp through a snowy field, working up a sweat that will freeze to my body instantly while trying to keep up with Webb, whose legs are way, way longer than they have any right to be?—”
“Er. Hawk, maybe now’s not…” Drew began in a placating voice, looking over my head like he couldn’t even meet my eye.
“Now is the perfect time!” I insisted.
It took a lot to get me angry, but once I was riled up, my frustrations needed to be vented entirely before I could move on.
“Look, I could be spending my days doing truly terrible things. Like… like…” I searched my brain for the worst crimes I could think of. “Shamelessly pilfering someone’s precious boxes of baked goods, even though they’d taken the time to hide them in eleven different places throughout the house! Or, worse,toying with men’s affections, leading them into dalliances, and then ruining their reputations forever before casting them aside.”
“Hawk,” Emma said, low and insistent. “You need to chill.Now.”
But I was beyond chill. Chill had deserted me along with my peace and quiet.
“I’m not a monster, you guys! I’m simply a man attempting to read a library book in solitude. If I could,” I said passionately, “I would have a library of my own. A whole room filled with books. And a sofa. And cookies. A room whose function was specifically and solely to do my very favorite activity so that no one ever needed to look for me or wonder what I was doing because everyone would know.Hawk is in his reading room, you’d all say, and you’d say it respectfully, because when a whole room is dedicated to a task, suddenly we realize it’s important. But for now, I do what I must. And I don’t need everyone and their freaking uncle getting up in my face with theirdelightfulsuggestions for what I ought to be doing instead. Andyes,” I said, pausing long enough to draw a deep breath, “I’m using implied air quotes because none of your suggestions were at all remotely?—”
“Uh. So. This is my family, Jack,” Webb said from behind the sofa, startling the crap out of me.
Mouth still open, I whirled around, grabbing a pillow from the sofa as a makeshift shield.
There in the doorway stood the most enormous of my four giant brothers, looking amused and disapproving and a little embarrassed. Beside him stood a man—a man nearly as tall and broad as Webb—with blond-streaked hair, startlingly blue eyes that crinkled with intelligent good humor, and the most engaging smile I’d ever seen on another human being.
