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“Yeah, well.” I shrugged my shoulders, smiling through the pain. The memories of how he felt toward her were some of the hardest of my life. “You can feel me now to understand just how badly you hurt me.”
Eventually, my heart did close off…
We both fell silent. He stared down at the table while I finished eating the rest of my brinner (breakfast for dinner, as I liked to call it). Finally, as I emptied my plate, Jamie spoke softly.
“Listen, we made a deal, so I’m going to let you get back to your writing,” he said. “But I’m not done talking to you about this. I know, Jemma. I know I made some huge mistakes with us. I’m not asking you to ever forgive me. But… what I am asking is for you to let me help you.”
Like tunnel vision, my eyes focused on the plate of food, nearly gone now except for a few scrapes of eggs and a half piece of toast. I didn’t know how to respond to Jamie. Catching up had proved to get more personal than I’d intended, and we had only said a few things to each other. I didn’t want to get personal. Not with anyone.
And especially not with him. It was one thing to write letters to a non-existent Jamie, telling him how much I missed him. However, I realized that what I missed more was the idea of a relationship that never existed in the first place. The same way he’d fallen in love with the idea of a person.
I’d fallen in love with the romanticized ideal of what we’d once had.
Before I uttered another word or lifted my head up again, a rush of energy dissipated into the air. Somehow, I knew Jamie had gone.
When I looked over to my left, where he should have been, his spirit was nowhere to be seen.
* * *
I spent the next six hours in that diner, writing my heart away. Four hours of words dealing with a young character who doesn’t know it yet, but she’s about to lose the person closest to her. Well, in the version I wanted to write, anyway.
At the end of my writing session, I glanced back at the Word document.
10,200 words down. 9,800 more to go.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Lies
“The book’s coming along great.”
My tone to Meghan had never been more ironic.
Stepping through my local Safeway with my cart, I pressed my lips against the mic of my headphones plugged into my phone. The white chord dangled around my left wrist while my phone rested in the area usually meant for kids or groceries. For me, this had unofficially become the purse, keys, and phone “pouch.” It’d become especially important to remain handsfree in moments like this when I awaited snarky remarks from my agent over the phone.
“Thanks for the word count update.” Meghan’s supportive voice came through the phone. Obviously, she hadn’t picked up on my sarcasm. She added, “I already know you’re working hard. That isn’t why I called.”
A faint buzz emitted from the electrical equipment. You would’ve thought there had been some kind of zombie apocalypse—minus the fact everything had been stocked—because of how quiet it was in here.
I jerked to a halt right next to a pyramid of oranges in the produce section and tossed five of them into the main part of my beige cart. I’d come right from The Roxy to the store. As I sat in the parking lot before walking into Safeway, watching the rain hit my windshield, I texted Meghan a screenshot of my word count as I sometimes did after a writing binge. She instantly replied that we needed to talk, and here we were.
“Ever go late night grocery shopping?” I asked. “It’s the absolute best. No lines. No crowds. Hell, sometimes they even stock the shelves at night, so you get first dibs on the fresh produce.”
I swooped up a few Red Delicious apples, juggled them between my hands to get a sense of their firmness, and then sat them back at the top of the stack. Too soft.
“Late night?” Meghan asked, a hint of concern in her tone. “Jemma. It’s 5 am where you are.”
“That it is,” I said. “And 8 am where you are just getting your day started in good ol’ New York.” I added the last part to be a tad facetious.
“When was the last time you slept?”
“Hmm.” I thought about that for a second. Truthfully? Even when I had been getting to bed this last week, sleep had been spotty. I’d fall into a deep sleep for a couple of hours, wake up, then fall back in for only a short spurt before waking back up again. I rubbed my temple. “I’ll be okay, Meghan. I’ll go home and sleep right after I get some groceries.”
“Alright, well, be good to your body, Jem. I get that you… I mean,we… have a deadline here. But there’s no sense in any of it if you die before you finish writing the book.”
I chuckled. “Die? From a couple of sleepless nights?”
I mean, obviously Meghan didn’t know that I was the invincible woman who always escaped death.
