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“Yeah,” I muttered with a forced chuckle while wondering how the hell I was supposed to continue this thing with a woman I used to hook up with when I very much wanted to do it again. “And I've never been friends with a fan before.”
“First time for everything, right?” she said, a smile in her tone.
I pictured it then—her smile. Her rosy lips and squinted eyes. Her long, dark hair, falling in waves around her shoulders. I imagined the dozens of kisses I'd planted on those lips in the months I had known her. How she’d whimpered and moaned in my arms, how she’d molded like putty in my hands and relied on my pathetic body to hold her up. How we had come together with wanton need, over and over again, until we fell asleep.
And then I imagined never kissing those lips again.
Over my dead, broken body.
“I'll see you soon, Lennon,” I said before hanging up and heading back to my room at the Ole Whaler’s with a purpose.
There was a song to be found in this moment, and I had to write it down.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lennon
It wasn’t much of a story, only six chapters of what was probably mediocre writing. But it was better than what I’d written in my youth, and it was more than I’d ever written in one project. For those reasons, I was proud.
Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually been proud of anything at all.
“What are you doing on that computer all the time?” Dad asked from the kitchen sink, where he was washing dishes.
Looking up from the screen of my laptop, I saw him glancing over his shoulder. What expression he was wearing, I couldn't tell, but the tone of his voice had been a little more condescending than I would've preferred. Like he had already made up his mind that whatever I was doing couldn't possibly be of any importance.
“I'm writing,” I told him as I hunkered back down behind the screen.
“Oh,” he replied, taken aback. “What are you writing?”
“A story.”
“What kind of story?”
Pulling in a deep breath, I resigned myself to the idea that I wasn’t going to get any more writing done at the moment. So, I saved my document and closed the laptop to sit back in my chair at the kitchen table.
“Um, well, it's a …” I wrinkled my nose, trying to find a simple way to describe the story that was so complex in my head. “It's a story about this toxic couple who buys a little old house.”
Dad turned off the faucet and grabbed a dishtowel. “Wow, that's kinda heavy, isn't it?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, nodding. “It gets even heavier when the ghost of the original owner of the house possesses the guy.”
“It's a ghost story?” He headed for the table and sat beside me. “So, it's scary?”
“I mean, it's freakingmeout,” I said, shrugging and staring at the black cover of my laptop. I already missed the characters I had just left, and I wondered if Dad would mind it very much if I excused myself from the conversation.
“So, what, you're gonna publish this thing?”
I shrugged again. “I'd like to. I mean, that's the ultimate dream. But I don't know if I'd be able to find an agent or a publisher—”
“Couldn't Tarryn help you out with that?”
“Dad,” I muttered with a groan, rolling my eyes to his, “Tarryn knows casting agents, not literary agents.”
“Ah,” he scoffed, slashing a hand through the air dismissively, “same thing.”
“I mean, they're two completely different things, but okay,” I said with a laugh. “Anyway, I might try to self-publish, but that has its own problems.”
“Like what?”
