The Worst Romance Novel Ever Written (13 page)

Johnny had to pee, so he did.

12

He is such a tortured soul,
Thais thought.
He is tormented. He is suffering. He is grief-stricken. He is beleaguered, beset, and besieged.

I am so alliterative, Thais thought alliteratively.

And we’ve only just met, Thais thought. He’s chockfull of angst, and he doesn’t even know me yet. How quaint.

And he loved his mama very, very much. I have to love a man who loved his mama very, very much. It makes him very, very manly.

Thais felt a jolt go through her like the time she put a fork in an electrical socket one night back at UVA because all the other undergrads there were doing it. Then her thoughts caught like a split toenail on deep shag carpeting.

O-M-G,
she thought, one letter at a time.
Am I falling in love? Am I? Am I really? Am I? Is this love? Is it? Is it really? Is it? Could it be? Could it? Could it really? Could it? Is he the one? Is he? Is he really? Is he? Am I the one for him? Am I? Am I really? Am I? Are Gunn and I a pair of star-crossed lovers in a dusty room covered with shattered Hummel figurines and the cremated remains of his mother, his most recent lover who I killed still somewhat warm and rotting in her grave?

Johnny thought he heard organ music. He felt the beginnings of an interesting turn of events.

He actually felt sleepy, but he kept on writing.

But why would Thais kill Cat? Johnny had no idea, so he let his character do some thinking for him:

Why did I kill her?
Thais thought.
Why? Why? Why would I kill Cat Mann? Why? Why? What possible motive could I have had? What? What? Why aren’t I thinking this all out loud with him in the room as they do on soap operas, which is so cheesy and retarded, I mean, who walks around telling their business to the world out loud? I mean, besides people standing in line on freaking cell phones talking loud enough to implode eardrums, then when they think you’re eavesdropping, they say something like, “Mind your own freaking business!” And you’re like, okay, wench, stop talking because you’re making your business everybody’s business, and no one gives a crap about Deron and how he done you wrong and if that skank keep comin’ on to him you gonna straighten dat—

“
Mama!” Gunn cried again. “Mama!”

So why did I kill Cat?
Thais thought.
Why? I could say that I hate cats. That’s it. I hate cats, her name was Cat, thus her death. Very, very logical. It’s not the truth, of course, but if they ever catch me, I’ll plead insanity and they’ll send me to a psychiatric hospital to inhale happy pills and allow me to help the FBI solve similar crimes. I’d like that a lot since I need a quiet place to keep all my secrets in one place. I mean, it’s a really big secret about how Cat and I were sisters in Slovenia a long time ago and how I sold her to the circus once.

“
Eureka!” Johnny cried as the man upstairs repositioned himself in his bathtub. “Oh no! Here comes the trombone …”

Blat.

“
Eww,” Johnny whispered, “he must eat a lot of chili.” He looked at the mice. “Just be glad that heat rises.”

What would Gunn do,
Thais continued to think for a long freaking time,
if he knew that I was actually Scorpion’s sister coming from Slovenia to America via Brazil to wreak havoc with my sexy heels and my very big police-issue gun? He’d probably kill me. I guess I had better not tell him that. What would Gunn say if he knew he had been hot for both sisters of his mortal enemy? He’d probably think some pretty vile thoughts, and then he’d probably wait until I vacuumed up his mother before he killed me in a senselessly violent manner.

“
Mama!” Gunn cried for the fifth freaking time. “Mama!”

I left no physical evidence,
Thais continued to think, evidently,
because I am an international terrorist and I watch CSI and Forensic Files all the time. I will never commit crimes in Miami, New York, or Las Vegas. The CSI techs in those cities are good, and they solve every crime in less than an hour if you ignore all the commercials, which I always do except for commercials that have clowns in them. Don’t ask me why. Clowns are good sales people. But why does the detective in Miami always stand sideways when he talks to a suspect? That would tick me off. I’d say, “Yo, over here, redheaded detective.” But here I am …

“
Mama!” Gunn cried for the umpteenth time. “Mama!”

Yes, here I am,
Thais thought yet again,
getting my thoughts interrupted by a manly man yelling “Mama!” like Marlon Brando yelled “Stella!” over and over until I just couldn’t stand it anymore. “Answer him, wench!!” I wanted to yell, but I knew she couldn’t hear me since it was an old movie and I know that movie people can’t really hear me. I am, after all, a UVA graduate who only once put a fork into an electrical socket. Yet here I am falling in love with Gunn even though he looks so pitiful covered in his mother’s bodily dust. What should I do? What should I say aloud? What can anyone say at a time like this? Do I confess my crimes, say, “I love you,” and expect Gunn to forgive me?

I’ve heard it happens in a
whopping
pile of romance novels.

I mean, the heroine catches the hero “bedding down a kitchen wench” yet forgives his cheating heart even when he says, “If you loved me, I wouldn’t have had to bed down the kitchen wench” and then he says, “I love you” to make it all better.

I guess I could go ahead, assassinate Gunn, and make it look like he fell in the bathtub. Or, I could smother him with his own chest hair. A simple up-do, and he’s done. Do I do right by my creepy brother, who is really a wimp, cries at chick flicks, and is afraid of moths, and make what’s left of my family proud of me, or do I turn my sexy Slovenian, Brazilian, naturalized American heel on everyone—except Cat, who’s certainly dead as a doornail—whom I hold dear? I feel so much angst.

Meanwhile, Gunn wept sad and sorrowful tears of sadness and sorrow for his mother, for Cat, for the mess in his living room, for the gradual decline of democracy as a functional government in a world increasingly given to socialism, and for the free market economy stymied by governmental tariffs, treaties, an incompetent Congress, and the slow-footed and chaotic UN.

But when Gunn looked up, he saw Thais’s lips moving. It was a good thing he was once deaf thanks to a really bad job at a pharmacy with an old man named Gower, because Gunn could read those lips. “I feel so much angst,” those lips said. Thais, the cop with heels sculpted by warm Brazilian sands, was reaching out to him. Thais, the contortionist who taught him yoga position number thirty-four, was feeling angst. Thais, who had asked him lovingly to Wet-Vac his mother’s big-boned ashes, was crying for his help.

And then a thought hit Gunn like a freight train hitting those stupid semi-trailers that have gotten stuck on the tracks and someone had the sense to film it with his or her cell phone.

I love her,
Gunn thought,
because Thais Knotts makes me feel safe.

Johnny appreciated the irony of it all. “She’s there to assassinate you, stupid!” he yelled.

The mice shook their heads, too, and Johnny continued to type.

Thais Knotts makes me feel safe and secure,
Gunn thought.

But mostly, Thais Knotts made Gunn Adhamh Glendonwyn feel. He felt. It felt good to feel. It made him feel full of feelings that felt good. His feelings were strong. His feelings were virile. He couldn’t ignore the manly feelings coursing through his Scotch (or Irish, or both) veins.
Felt feelings must be released,
he thought. He needed to feel something. He needed to feel feelings for someone who made him feel.

“
I don’t know what to say,” Thais said, not knowing what to say.

And neither, again, did Johnny. He was exhausted, emotionally tapped out, and it was way past his bedtime.
What do other romance writers do when they’ve run out of meaningful plot?

Duh.

So Gunn kissed Thais. He kissed her so she didn’t have to say anything. He kissed her so he wouldn’t have to say anything. They kissed each other, not speaking, mind you, in a silence without words of any kind, so neither would have to say anything for a long, long time. It was really quiet except for a whole bunch of lip smacking going on.

Her lips felt good to him, and his lips felt good to her. They kissed each other hard, loosening teeth and even bruising the little spaces under their noses, those spaces that have a name that nobody knows except maybe anatomy students,
Jeopardy
contestants, and those nerdy kids in the national spelling bee.

Her tongue tasted like dusty Hummel figurines mixed with coffee and donut sprinkles. His tongue tasted like Tom Collins, Johnny Walker, Cuban cigar, and ash from his dead mother. But neither cared, because they weren’t saying anything, and saying nothing was sometimes a very good thing to say.

They were kissing fools. They swapped spit. They shared old saliva containing, as everybody knows, all known diseases and even some that had threatened to spread into a pandemic and cause the Centers for Disease Control to throw up their collective hands and cry, “We are so not in control of any diseases, but at least we’re safe here in Atlanta since we have all the cool antidotes.” They played tonsil hockey, Thais using a wicked slap shot to score again and again and again. They tickled each other’s uvulas into submission. They stayed in lip-lock while Gunn’s mother’s dust floated maternally all around them, and afterwards, Gunn’s little crooked tooth, the one that made him look most like an incorrigible rogue, had straightened out.

Johnny decided to use the “have ‘em shut up and kiss” method when he couldn’t think of anything interesting for them to say or do. He reasoned that fifteen pages of teeth-rattling followed by, oh, a sentence or two of plot and a fragment of character development would make his book become an instant bestseller.

Johnny looked at the clock. He noticed the sun for the first time. It had this habit of rising every single day. He had been writing all night and most of the day and was forty minutes from clocking in for his shift. He didn’t know whether to edit what he’d written or simply print it out, warts and all, for Gloria. He knew he was too close to his work to give it an unbiased edit, so he decided to print it all out while he showered.

The shower water startled Johnny awake several times, and when he stepped out of the tub, he realized he wouldn’t have time to separate all the pages of his manuscript. Instead, he rushed off to work, his manuscript an accordion of fanfold paper resting on the passenger seat.

“
You are late again,” Hector said, eying several orders on the counter ready to be delivered.

“
I was on a hot streak,” Johnny said.

“
With a lady?” Hector asked.

Johnny smiled. “With two ladies, actually.”

“
You?”

Johnny didn’t like the way Hector said, “You?”

“
You?” Hector said again.

Johnny didn’t like the way Hector said it the second time either.

He tried to ignore Hector for the first part of the night, collecting coupons, miniscule tips, and growls from one customer’s Pomeranian. He once again visited Randy, who pursed his lips this time and flexed some seriously hairy toes while wearing only some Lycra bicycle shorts, but Johnny didn’t care, even when the twenty was soggy this time, because someone was going to read his masterpiece tonight.

And she will be amazed.

13

By the time the Vega’s gas gauge dipped below the “E,” it was past eleven. Johnny rolled next to a gas pump at Quick-E Mart, and before he could get out of his car, the gas pump whirred to life.
Gloria is so efficient,
he thought. He pumped in five dollars’ worth, grabbed the manuscript, and walked inside.

“
Busy night?” Gloria asked, tapping her fingertips on the counter.

Johnny slid across five ones and looked around.
We’re the only two people in the Quick-E Mart universe tonight. Cool.
“Yes,” Johnny said with a sigh. “Hector and his two-for-one coupons.” He laid the manuscript on the counter. “This is a really rough draft, and I mean, rough. There’s bound to be a typo or two.”