Plain Jayne (19 page)

This is working out okay. I’m not writing
exactly like I was before, but I think that has more to do with the fact that
I’m not used to being in the same room with another person while I write than
it does with the setting. It’s fascinating to observe someone else’s work
habits.

For the most part, Lucas… er, Luke… is quiet.
The only sounds he makes are the scratching of his pen and the occasional
fluttering of paper as he flips the pages of the manuscript from the large,
even stack in front of him to a smaller, more haphazard stack to his left.
Every thirty minutes or so, he straightens the smaller stack. A couple of
times, he’s abruptly pushed back from the desk, thrown his pen down, and
stalked from the room, only to return ten minutes later with a cup of coffee or
a bottle of water or—in one case—nothing at all.

After his latest storm-out, I’m shocked when I
look at the clock on my laptop to see that two hours have passed, and I’ve
hardly written anything. I guess I’ve been watching him more than I realized.
Time to focus.

When he returns this time, I don’t even pause
to glance at him in my peripheral vision. It doesn’t matter that I’m writing
stream-of-consciousness gibberish to try to get my thoughts flowing (in this
case,
I will not look at him, even though he’s nice to look at, but he’s
still a jerk, for the most part, although he has been a lot nicer here than he
was in Boston—
).

Before sitting down in his chair, he suddenly
whirls on me, points, and says, “Read the last thing you wrote.”

My fingers freeze on the keyboard. “Huh?” I
gulp and will the blood flow to return to my extremities.

“Read the very last thing you’ve written,” he
reiterates more specifically.

“No!” I automatically refuse.

“Yes,” he insists. “Read it. You haven’t taken
a break in hours. Read to me what you’re writing. Trust me.”

I skim up the page to something safe.

“No! Don’t choose the last thing you
like
that
you wrote. I want to hear the last sentence to leave your brain.”

There’s no fucking way on this fucking earth
that I’m reading what I typed. What’s he going to do, spank me?
Oh, yes,
please.

I blush at that rogue thought.

“Don’t be embarrassed. I don’t expect that
everything you write sounds great the first time it hits the page. Come on… be
a good sport.” He half-smiles.

I grit my teeth and read the second-to-last
thing I typed, while he was out of the room. “
Tissues with lotion are
gross.”
It’s inane, but at least it’s not humiliating.

He shakes his head. “That’s it. You need to
take a break.”

“No, really. I hit a wall, but I’ll get back
on track in a minute,” I swear.

Physically removing the laptop from my lap
while I frantically work to delete the embarrassing line at the bottom, he
mercifully closes it without glancing at the screen and sets it on the coffee
table.

“Up,” he commands.

“Do I get a Scooby Snack if I obey?” I
half-gripe, half-flirt.

“Maybe,” he flirts back. “You’ll have a
happier editor, who won’t have to weed through a bunch of freewriting garbage
after you turn in your manuscript, that’s for sure.”

“I’ll delete all that stuff!”

“Still… there will be some things that may
seem critical to the story that you’ll keep, but it won’t be your best work,
because you’re forcing it.” He yanks on my hand and pulls me to my feet.
“Writing a book is not like running a marathon. You don’t push through the
pain. If it’s painful, you stop and take a break.”

“It wasn’t painful.”

He scowls at me. “An analysis about facial
tissue is painful. Now, come on. I need a break, too. And not just a walk to
the toilet and back. A real break.”

Like a sassy teenager, I pull my hand from his
admittedly light grasp and say, “What are we gonna do, yoga?”

He pretends to consider it. “Not a bad idea.
But I thought we’d take a drive.”

“Where?”

“Who cares?” is his rejoinder.

I can think of at least one person who’d probably
care a lot. And oddly enough, that thought makes me readily accept his
invitation.

As we’re heading out the front door, he says,
“Don’t worry; you can compare and contrast name-brand to store-brand tissues
when we get back.”

I’m too relieved he didn’t see my comparison
and contrast of Marblehead Luke and Boston Luke to put any bite behind my
observation:  “You are such a dickhead.”

The weary way I say it makes both of us laugh.

“I’ve been told that so many times that I’m
starting to get a complex,” he jokes as he opens the passenger door to a
low-slung silver import and squints down at me through the rain before closing
it.

If I thought it were possible for him to care
about what anyone else thinks of him, I’d almost feel sorry for him.

*****

We wind up at an old-fashioned tavern, and
what started out as a having a couple of beers to unwind turned into drinking
several pints of beer (for me) and both of us eating a full meal, which
wouldn’t have been a problem, except…

“Paulette is going to kill us when we’re too
full to eat her dinner,” I say in the car on the way back to the house.

Gruffly, he replies, “Am I on Paulette’s
payroll as a professional eater, or is she on
my
payroll as a cook and
housekeeper?”

“Well, I know,” I reply incongruously, having
trouble articulating like an intelligent person. Fortunately, he seems to
understand what I’m saying, anyway. “But it’s still rude that we ate someone
else’s cooking behind her back.”

“She’ll get over it. Anyway… we didn’t
plan
for it to happen; it just happened.”

“Yeah, well we could have shown some
self-control. Or at least called her to tell her not to cook dinner for us.”

“I refuse to feel guilty about this,” he says
a lot less bravely than he originally seemed at the idea of disappointing the
housekeeper. “Anyway, she still has to cook for Caroline, so it’s not like her
efforts will be totally wasted.”

I bite my lip and stare out the car window,
feeling worse and worse the closer we get to home and Paulette’s possible
wrath. Not that she’s ever been anything but perfectly pleasant to me. But I
don’t want that to change anytime soon.

“Yeah, but… she enjoys cooking for
you
,”
I point out.

He laughs. “Don’t put this all on me! You were
the one who said you were getting drunk, because your stomach was empty.”

“I was. It was!” I giggle and then groan,
clutching at my belly. “But now it’s so full. And I’m still drunk.”

“Then it was all worth it,” he mutters
sarcastically.

“Wait! What happened to the tough-talker who’s
not on Paulette’s payroll?”

“I think he’s still sitting at the tavern,” he
admits sheepishly.

When all I can do is laugh at him, he rubs his
forehead and curses under his breath. As he pulls into the driveway and puts
the car in park, he says, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do… We’re going to
go in there and take small helpings of everything she’s—”

“No! If I try to eat another bite, I’ll seriously
throw up.” The mere thought of it is making me feel sweaty and nauseated.

“No, you won’t. You’ll be fine.” He
consolingly pats my hand. “Plus, who knows? Maybe dinner’s not ready yet. We
may have a while to let our first meal settle before we have to eat more.”

“Unless we’re allowed to wait until tomorrow
morning, it’s not going to matter. I’m stuffed.”

Using the same tone I recognize from when he
was first trying to convince Caroline to leave the house, he says, “Alright.
Then we’ll simply tell the truth and let Paulette know we’re not hungry,
because we already ate at the tavern. We’ll bravely suffer the consequences,
which may or may not be more severe than being uncomfortable from overeating.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “I know what you’re
doing.”

“Laying out our options?”

“No… Presenting our choices in a way that
makes
your
way sound like the best way.”

He stares through the windshield. “I don’t
hear you offering up any ideas, so technically both ways are my way. I’m
willing to do whatever you want to do. We’ll present a united front.”

I push on his shoulder. He smiles but refuses
to look at me.

Finally, I say, “It’s hardly raining anymore.
How about we go for a walk and accidentally-on-purpose miss dinner? ‘Oops. We
lost track of time.’”

He imitates Paulette, “‘Then you must be quite
peckish. I’ve kept everything warm for you. Here. Heaping helpings for everyone!’
That’s
how that scenario will go down.”

While laughing at his inevitably spot-on
logic, I consider our three choices and decide, “Yeah, but at least with my
option, we’ll be getting some exercise that not only buys us some time but
could help with digesting meal number one.”

“Good point.”

“Thank you.”

“Walking in the rain, it is.”

*****

When Luke’s prophecy comes true almost
word-for-word, it’s all I can do not to crack up. Then I stifle my giggles all
through the meal as I watch him choke down every single bite of food Paulette
sets in front of him. I take advantage of her not knowing much about my eating
habits and push away my plate after a few torturous mouthfuls, with the claim
that pasta always quickly fills me up.

I can no longer hold back my laughter,
however, when she takes one look at Luke’s empty plate and says, “Oh, but Luke
always has seconds of my spaghetti and meatballs,” and starts to load him up
again, oblivious to his bulging eyes and sick grimace.

“What’s so funny?” she wonders, looking from
him to me.

He pushes her serving spoon away from his
plate. “Paulette, I can’t eat another bite. I… I think I may be coming down
with something. I’m not very hungry tonight.” He suppresses a burp behind his
fist and rests his head in his hand.

When I continue to laugh at his misery, she
gently scolds me, “Now, it’s not nice to make fun of someone who’s feeling
under the weather,” as if I’m about a quarter of my age.

As ludicrous as the situation is, I sober at
her rebuke and mutter, “Right. Sorry. My bad.”

“Perhaps you should go lie down for a while,
Luke,” she suggests sweetly. “I can bring you something for your stomach. Are
you feeling feverish? It probably wasn’t very wise to go walking in the rain
for so long.”

“Good God, woman, I’m fine!” he snaps before
obviously thinking better of it and saying more softly, “It’s probably stress.
I’m sure I’ll feel better in the morning.”

With that, he rises from the table and trudges
up the stairs. I try not to smile at the sound of his slow progress.
Swish…
clomp. Swish… clomp.

When he’s gone, Paulette shakes her head at
me. “He works too hard. And as if that’s not enough, he has to deal with Her
Royal Highness and all of her demands and shenanigans. It’s no wonder he’s
short-tempered sometimes. I can’t help but want to mother him, though.” She
carries our dirty plates and the serving bowls into the kitchen, muttering to
herself under her breath.

Abandoned, I’m at a loss for what to do next.
I go into Luke’s study and sit on the couch for a while, but for the first time
in a long time, I don’t feel like writing anything. I do, however, delete what
remains of the embarrassing sentence I wrote before we left for the tavern (
“I
will not look at him, even though he’s pretty nice to look at—”
is still
there for anyone to see). Then, on a whim, after I back up my work for the day,
I password protect my computer and my manuscript files. I’ve been meaning to do
it since Luke suggested it after admitting to reading my document without
permission. I just keep forgetting. But if we’re going to be working in the
same room, and I’m going to write stupid, mortifying things to pass the time
when I run into a spot of writer’s block, then I’d better protect myself from
abject humiliation.

After I shut down my computer for the day, I
consider Luke’s earlier idea to read a book. I search through the library
across the hall for nearly fifteen minutes before finding anything that
remotely interests me (I knew Tom Ridgeworthy was prolific, but holy shit! I’m
assuming Luke has a full collection of the man’s books; unfortunately, not a
single one of the nearly two-dozen novels about political intrigue is my cup of
tea). I eventually select a Toni Morrison book I read in college but wouldn’t
mind reading again, now that I have some more worldly experiences under my
belt. Ha! It’s probably still going to blow my mind.

All the food and alcohol I’ve consumed in the
past couple of hours has made me sleepy and sluggish, so I decide the safest
place to read is in bed, where I can pass out and not have to move any more
than to pull the covers over myself when I get chilly in the middle of the
night. It’s a few minutes before 9:00, but as I make my way up the stairs, the
book in one hand and the banister in the other, I’m eagerly anticipating a full
night’s deep sleep on the heavenly mattress.