AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Unable to believe his sincerity, I defended myself. “I’m not some quack, you know. I lived years out there, in that world.” I gestured toward the ocean. “And I decided to unplug. A lot of people are doing it and we all have our reasons.”
“Again,” he said, taking another step up. “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I’m pretty sure you’ve labeled me the crazy lady next door.”
“No,” he said, taking another step and taking my cup away from me. “I don’t think you’re crazy at all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing a little soul-searching.”
Soul-searching?
Soul-searching.
I’d spent the last year inside myself, and at times questioned if I was losing my mind.
In mere seconds he had simplified it so… perfectly.
Soul-searching!
I chuckled at how naïve I’d been to expect that no one else would understand what I was going through and felt a weight lift from my shoulders. Ian had just put it all into perspective in seconds.
In that moment, I wanted to throw my arms around him in gratitude. Instead, I watched him as he took a sip of my coffee. “Oh, man this brew could kill a horse.”
“Like it?”
“Hell yes.”
I grinned, and he grinned back keeping my cup in his hand. He glanced at me over the lifted cup before he spoke. “In my creative writing class, I deal with a lot of saturated minds and half of their problem is they want to expand those minds past the walls they built
around themselves to become better people, better writers, but how do they do that? What tools could I give them?”
“You can’t, right? They have to experience things for themselves, figure out how to open their own minds.”
He nodded. “And that’s exactly what I tell them. Unless they want their intellectual palate to be the size of the box of knowledge they already possess, they have to get out there and gain some real-life experience to add to that imagination. It’s what makes the writing authentic and original.”
“Can’t write about a broken heart as well as a broken heart can?”
“Precisely. How do you ever really know true living if you do it vicariously?” He looked at me attentively. “And what if… what if that person sipping coffee in the background of your life, what if they,” he said pausing to take another sip, “are the next chapter?”
My heart galloped as I stuttered through my next sentence. “So, w-what you’re saying,” I managed to mutter keeping my door opened for his invitation, “is that you get what I was saying.”
He chuckled as he followed me into the house, and I pulled another mug from my cabinet pouring us both a fresh cup. We sat there wordlessly sipping for a few minutes. I glanced over at him, but his eyes remained fixed on the sea.
“This place,” he said low before shifting his gaze to mine, “I never really appreciated how beautiful it was until now.”
Heart hammering, I made quick work of changing the subject. Some part of me knew that I was seconds away from offering Ian more than coffee and small talk. The way he undressed me with his eyes, not only to my bare skin but deeper, had me squirming where I stood.
“You know, Ian, you said something to me when we were kids that stuck with me.”
“Oh?” The twinkle in his eye was gratification enough, but I still paid him the compliment.
“You were only, what, fourteen?”
He nodded.
“You told me even if I was mad, or humiliated, or scared to have fun anyway.”
He grinned at the thought, surprised. “I did?”
I nodded. “You did. Pretty insightful for a kid who told me I didn’t have tits big enough to be called a miss.” Ian chuckled and it made my stomach flutter.
