The Imperfects by Amy Meyerson

Author:Amy Meyerson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2020-05-04T23:00:00+00:00

* * *

At his apartment, Jake finds Kristi on the couch. The television is off. Her book lays closed on the coffee table. Light from the table lamp illuminates the profile of her troubled face.

“Sorry I’m so late,” he says, kissing her cheek. He left her a message and texted, but he doesn’t try to argue his case.

On the coffee table beside her mystery novel, his computer is open, the screen black. Jake doesn’t remember leaving it there. He closes it before sitting on the couch next to Kristi. She doesn’t look at him, even when he takes her foot and begins rubbing her arch. He racks his brain for what might be wrong. Their next checkup isn’t for another two weeks. It’s not her birthday or their anniversary.

As he continues to rub her foot, he tries to act normal even though his heart is racing. She must have found out about Trader Joe’s, that he’s been lying for almost a month and a half. What can he say? He didn’t mean to lie, it just happened. It just happened? What kind of bullshit excuse was that? Does it make any difference that he now knows, at least in part, what his script is about? After his conversation with Mr. Frankel, he can picture Helen’s voyage to the US, and now that he can envision it, he can commit it to scene. Does it help that, in six months, he’s confident he’ll have his script completed? That he knows it will sell, and when it does, Trader Joe’s and the man in the leather jacket will all be a distant memory, maybe even a funny anecdote?

Kristi winces as he accidentally digs his thumb too deeply into her arch and jerks her foot free of his hand.

“I wasn’t trying to snoop,” she begins as though she’s the one who should apologize.

“Kris, I can explain. I didn’t mean to—”

She cuts him off. “My computer died and I really needed to pay my credit card, so I used yours. I wasn’t spying on you.”

Did Randy email? One of his other coworkers, asking how he was holding up?

“You can use my computer whenever you want, you know that. I’m the one who screwed up, not you.”

Something inside Kristi snaps. “I asked you not to, Jake. I asked you not to write about my mother.”

It takes Jake a few moments to realize she means the script he started outlining about Mrs. Zhang’s escape from China. Jake almost laughs, he’s so surprised. All this over some script he didn’t even write? A partial outline that would never see the outside of the Bad Ideas folder?

“It’s not funny,” Kristi says. “What, you can’t ruin your family any more than you already have, so you thought you’d have a go at mine?”

Jake’s done worse, made stupider, more damaging decisions, but he sees this one cuts to the core of something he doesn’t understand.

“Kris, I never wrote it. I outlined a few scenes, then realized it was a bad idea.

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