Happily Ever After: A Novel by Maxwell Elizabeth

Author:Maxwell, Elizabeth [Maxwell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2014-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

The laptop sits before me on the kitchen table. Beside it is a glass of Chardonnay with a few ice cubes. The night has brought no relief from the heat, and I think about dropping the ice cubes down my dress. I sip my drink. I stare at the ceiling. I pull on the hem of my Spanx suit.

On the way home, I gave Aidan a lecture on the inappropriateness of his kissing me like that in front of all those people. He laughed it off, told me I had nice lips and that I should not be so uptight. I asked him how a woman who writes about sex all day can possibly be uptight. He told me he didn’t know but I was giving it a good effort.

After chewing on that for a few minutes, I changed the subject to dark places in New York City where we might look for Lily, because I no longer wanted to think about kissing.

Aidan threw out Lily’s home address, her favorite coffee shop, a bistro where she has lunch. When I reminded him none of those places were dark, he gave me the silent treatment, which in turn, gave me time to focus on the pain lodged in my middle, as if someone had given me a swift kick with a steel-toed boot. Seeing Belinda and Jason together was not supposed to ruffle my feathers, and yet here I was with the bitter taste of jealousy in my mouth.

I move the cursor on the laptop and the machine whirs to life, but there are no new words. There is no chapter telling me exactly where to find Lily. The written story seems to have ended when Clarissa followed Aidan, who followed Lily. And my influence seems to have ended too. The characters I knew are hardly as they once were. They are like the difference between an eight-year-old huddled in your lap and a thirteen-year-old who will not let you enter her room for any reason.

All characters arise differently. Usually, before I start a new novel, I give myself a day off from suburbia and head into the city. I take an early train in and walk slowly downtown, following a slightly different route each time. I’m there to absorb the people.

I saw Lily in Grand Central Terminal. Of course, it wasn’t the Lily we search for now but the woman upon whom that Lily would be based. She walked onto the main concourse just as I popped a plastic lid on my hot coffee and stuffed a heavily cream-cheesed bagel in my jacket pocket. As I turned toward the Forty-Second Street exit, there she was, curly strawberry hair creating a halo around her Botticelli-perfect face. With a phone pressed to her ear and a leather briefcase in one hand, she gazed up at the heavens depicted on the terminal’s famous ceiling.

“Oh,” I said, drink frozen halfway to my face. “Perfect.”

I was prepared to take my bagel and hoof it

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