Second chance romance books, where the past will not stay put

“Um, y-yeah. I'm meeting someone. We should have a reservation.” I drag my eyes away from her to search the rooftop dining area again. “But I don't see him yet.”

She steps behind the podium and touches the tablet screen, her thick brows furrowing. “Which name would the reservation be under?”

“Holt. Canon Holt.”

Just saying the famous director's name triggers a full-body flush of anxiety. He's one of the most critically and commercially successful Black filmmakers of the past decade, and when my agent told me he requested a meeting, I nearly expired on the spot. I'm still trying to shake off the who me? energy and find the bad bitch bravado needed to conduct myself like the confident professional I'm supposed to be.

“Oh, Canon!” She looks up with a beatific smile so dazzling I almost say, Canon who? and ask for her number on the spot. “He's already here. They're in one of our private pods.”

She gestures to the discreet, striped-curtained enclosures lining the azure swimming pool at the rooftop's center and starts walking.

“They?” I follow her, distracted by the swish of long hair and the jiggle of her ass.

Damn.

After, when we’re eating delivery pizza off our coffee table, Kit decides it’s time to finally talk about it.

We’ve never addressed it, not since he returned to California for college and we slipped into each other’s pockets like we’d never been apart, right to the synced, steady heartbeat of us. Theo-and-Kit, Theo-and-Kit, Theo-and-Kit. It was so easy to find the pulse, we didn’t talk about where it had gone, or why.

Kit looks at me over a stuffed crust with extra jalapeños and asks, “Why didn’t you ever want to go to Oklahoma City?”

Because it’s Oklahoma City, I almost say. But the place was never what mattered; it was the promise. When we were fourteen, a year after Kit’s mom died, his dad decided to move the whole family to New York. Kit and I got out a map and found the midpoint between Rancho Mirage and Brooklyn. Oklahoma City. We promised to meet there every summer, but I always found excuses not to go, and they were never that good.

His brown eyes are so sparkly in the lamplight, framed by his stupid Cher wig, that I tell him the truth, partly: When he left, I realized I’d fallen in love with my best friend when I wasn’t looking. And then he was five hundred miles too far for it to matter, telling me about first dates over the phone, and it hurt too much. Oklahoma City would have broken my heart.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “It was shitty of me. I was shitty to you.”

“Oh” is all he says.

“I’m totally over it now,” I say, which is a lie. I’ve never been more under it. I thought living with Kit would be great exposure therapy, that nobody could stay in love with their best friend after watching them scratch their ass through sweatpants. If anything, I love Kit more now. “So you don’t have to worry. I’m not gonna make it weird.”

Kit sets down his slice and studies me, my stick-on mustache, hair braided back to fit under my bowl-cut wig. He bites out a smile, tucks Cher’s hair behind his ear, and says, “I was in love with you too.”

“You—what?”

“Back then, I mean.”

I nod, trying to keep my voice steady. “Right. Back then.”

And he laughs, so I laugh, and I put on Sonny & Cher to cover up how weird mine sounds. We dance around the living room with grease-slicked lips to “I Got You Babe” until my hand brushes Kit’s cinched waist.

I catch the ends of shiny, synthetic hair between my thumb and finger, touch him without touching him. He reaches up and peels off my mustache.

“What if we tried it?” he asks softly. “Just once, to see what it would be like?”

And then I’m in my best friend’s bed, kissing him dizzy. Just to see what it’s like.

At the bottom of my belly, I know this will change me in a permanent way. Maybe it’s wrong, maybe it’s completely fucked up to let him do this when I know how I feel and how he doesn’t, but it’s Kit. Kit loves to make people feel good, and when he buries his face between my legs, I feel good. I feel so good it’s awful.

He’ll laugh about it tomorrow, and every person I take to bed from now on will be fighting his ghost for my attention.

In the morning, the kitchen smells like cinnamon and butter and yeast, and Kit’s at the sink, doing dishes. He’s wearing the apron I bought him when we road-tripped up to the Santa Maria Valley to find out if the barbecue was worth the hype. It says, THIS GUY RUBS HIS OWN MEAT.

Sebastian and I were together for seven months, giving our relationship the distinction of being my longest-lasting one yet. In the end, he said he didn’t really know who I was. And he had a point.

Before Sebastian, the guys I picked were up for a good time and didn’t seem to mind keeping things casual. By the time I met him, I figured being a serious adult meant I should find someone to get serious about. Sebastian fit the bill. He was attractive, well read, and successful, and despite being a bit pompous, he could talk to anyone about almost anything. But I still found it hard to share too many pieces of myself. I’d long ago learned to tamp down my tendency to let random thoughts spew unfiltered from my mouth. I thought I was doing a good job of giving the relationship a real chance, but in the end Sebastian recognized my indifference, and he was right. I didn’t care about him. I didn’t care about any of them.

There was only the one.

And that one is long gone.

So I enjoy spending time with men, and I appreciate how sex gives me an escape ladder out of my mind. I like making men laugh, I like having company, I like taking a break from my vibrator once in a while, but I don’t get attached, and I don’t go deep.

I’m still fumbling with my key—seriously, is something wrong with the lock?—when my phone buzzes in my purse. Which is weird. No one calls me this late. Actually, no one ever calls me, except for Chantal and my parents. But Chantal is still at her party and my parents are touring Prague and won’t be awake yet. The buzzing stops just as I get the door open and stumble into my small one-bedroom apartment. I check the mirror by the entrance to find my lipstick mostly smudged off but my bangs looking pretty phenomenal. Suck it, June.

I begin to unfasten the strappy gold sandals I’m wearing, a dark sheet of hair falling over my face, when my phone starts up again. I dig it out of my purse and, one shoe off, make my way toward the couch, frowning at the “unknown name” message on the screen. Probably a wrong number.

“Hello?” I ask, bending to take off the second sandal.

“Is this Percy?”

I stand upright so fast I have to hold on to the arm of the couch to steady myself. Percy. It’s a name nobody calls me anymore. These days I’m Persephone to almost everyone. Sometimes I’m P. But I’m never Percy. I haven’t been Percy for years.

“Hello . . . Percy?” The voice is deep and soft.

When Eva Mercy was little, her mom had told her that Creole women see signs. This was back when Eva’s only understanding of “Creole” was that it was vaguely connected to Louisiana and Black people with French last names. It wasn’t until junior high that she realized her mom was—what’s a fair word?—eccentric and curated “signs” to justify her whims. (Mariah Carey released an album called Charmbracelet? Let’s blow rent on cubic zirconia charms at Zales!) Point is, Eva was wired to believe that the universe sent her messages.

So it should’ve occurred to her to expect a life-altering drama after Tridentgate. After all, she’d had a near-death experience before.

And that time—like this one—she woke up to her world forever changed.

“A TOAST TO OUR SEX GODDESS, EVA MERCY!” HOLLERED A CHERUB OF a woman, raising her champagne glass. Eva, whose throat was still raspy from yesterday’s gum incident, coughed back a snort at “sex goddess.”

The forty women crammed around long dining tables cheered loudly. They were bombed. The book club, composed of rowdy, upper-middle-class white women on the business end of their fifties, had traveled from Dayton, Ohio, all the way to Manhattan to celebrate Eva with a brunch. The occasion was the fifteenth anniversary of her bestselling (well, formerly bestselling) erotica series, Cursed.

Lacey, president of the chapter, adjusted her purple witch hat and turned to Eva, who was at the head of the table. “Today,” she bellowed, “we celebrate the magical day we met our bronze-eyed vampire, Sebastian—and his true love, the badass unwicked witch, Gia!”

The tables erupted in squeals. Eva was relieved that Times Square’s deliriously cheesy S&M-themed restaurant, A Place of Yes, had provided a private room. And oh, what a room. The ceiling was awash in red velvet, and a web of bondage ropes and riding crops decorated the walls. Goth candelabras dangled dangerously low over the black lacquered tables.

The Menu of Pain/Pleasure was the tourist attraction. Depending upon your selection, waitstaff in bondage gear would lightly flog you or do a lap dance or whatever. If you so desired.

Eva did not desire. But she was a good sport, and the Real

Housewives of Dayton had traveled such a long way. These were her people—the rabid fandom who kept her afloat. Especially recently, as the vampire phenomenon (and her book sales) had cooled off.

So Eva chose “Cuffs + Cookies” off the menu.

Love could burrow into the loneliest places in your heart, but its absence would leave bigger, misshapen holes that are impossible to fill.

I'd learn how love could give you things you never dreamed of having, then trick you into wanting more.

“Shit.” I spot the time on the microwave and toss my pen aside with a growl, then haul ass back to my room to finish getting ready. Guess that's as far as I'm going to get for the time being.

Beginning this little project right now was probably not my best idea, not when I'm already running behind for a date—regardless of how apathetic I feel about the date itself.

Alas, I woke up this lovely spring morning with an otherwise free day ahead of me, and naturally proceeded to start (emphasis on start) about twenty-nine things that were in no way dire or pressing until I continued my lollygagging and landed myself here, direly pressed for time. I succumbed to Waiting Syndrome. I had the day to dick around, and I overdicked it. Insert another colloquialism for poor time-management skills.

It all began with one of my earlier footles of the day: my trip to Athena's Bookshop. I was greeted by the smells of new books mixed in with secondhand, the sight of a big bouquet on the register counter—chamomile flowers mixed with tulips and tiny strawberries still on their vines. I smiled and let a finger tickle one of the blooms as I passed. My best-friend-slash-ex-sister-in-law, Sage, has been running a floral business on the side here in our small town of Spunes, Oregon (not to be confused with Forks, Washington), for the last few months, and that bouquet is just one of her many whimsical creations adorning our local stores.

I said my hellos to Athena and went on to meander among the shelves, where I quickly slipped into Bad Feelings over my dawdling and guilted myself into the self-help department. Ironically enough, I found that most of the books in that particular section were used—something I'd never noticed before, despite visiting this place multiple times a week and co-owning the bakery three doors down. A testament to how often I go anywhere near self-help, I guess.

But I got hung up on the “used” aspect of the books. Did this mean that these people got the help they needed? That's why they'd turned in the books, right? Because they'd been successful? They must all be Untamed Badass Highly Effective People who've Mastered the Power of Now, presumably after they Washed Their Face?! Was that it? Did they wash their fucking face??!

“What is it you're looking for, Wren?” Athena had asked when she found me sitting cross-legged on the ground a while later (seven open books and a general air of despondence around me). I looked up to answer, and my gaze caught on a poster behind her.

“Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.”—Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

The words practically glowed—a marquee sign lit up in a darkened room.