The Stories We Tell by MD Blaylock

Author:MD Blaylock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: small town romance, literary fiction, contemporary fiction, enemies to lovers romance, no spice romance, women's fiction, contemporary romance
Publisher: MD Blaylock
Published: 2024-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

10 Days Left

Lily wanted to flay herself for wasting time on a movie, but she had to admit she felt a lot better in the morning. Energy was high, and the bitter aroma of coffee from her French press nearly made her float. I really need to sell that stupid Keurig.

Curtis knocked before entering, yanked his laptop out of the backpack and said, “All right, I’ve had four Pop Tarts and a Mountain Dew; I’m ready to roll!”

Lily observed the eye twitch and said, “Maybe I should type.”

Type she did, until the laptop bled ink, and her fingers went numb. Lily hammered out any idea, any string of words, just to get the word count back up. Editing could come later, she reminded herself. Just get the ideas out there.

Lily forgot that sometimes, words don’t come in any form. Writer’s block? It felt more like writer’s constipation. She could only glare at the screen, clenching her brain muscles until, mere seconds before the aneurism, she could type a five-letter word.

“We had a whole book,” Lily griped at ten a.m. “Why can’t we make this work?”

Curtis replied, “You said you wanted to start over.”

Lily didn’t dare answer. This was his fault, and she might just let him know it. She let the keyboard do the talking instead. She still couldn’t get more than snippets of a scene, but she could at least plan out all the ways she could cleanse Curtis’s old ideas until they became her own.

Jed the Rancher went from a power-hungry homophobe to a jolly, Santa Claus stand-in who loved filling his snow-hardened fields with festive partiers dancing around colossal evergreens, swinging glasses of eggnog in one hand, and courting with the other. Maria the Doctor no longer leered at her patients with a smile of icicle teeth as she discussed payment first and medicine second. Now, she worked long hours to research the auto-mechanic’s chronic pain, then went home and shed weary tears on her soft-armed husband, who seemed to solve all life’s problems in half an hour of cuddles. Xander the nineteen-year-old no longer mooched off his dad’s money while pretending to be an Ivy League elite. He used that money to take care of Mom after her stroke, selling fan art online to give the income a little boost.

“Fan art?” Curtis read over her shoulder.

Lily’s eyes flicked to him like switchblade. “Yeah. Like characters from movies or TV shows?”

“I know that, but is that realistic?”

“People buy it.”

“Not very—”

“It’s all he can do! He was just drawing for fun when the car crashed, killing Dad and crippling Mom.”

“I thought it was a stroke.”

“I’m changing it! It’s allowed!”

The tendons in Curtis’s neck bulged, thick as guitar strings and just as tight. “I’ll get us some lunch.” He left halfway through the sentence.

She checked the clock, then her word count. Ten thousand and two. Lily grabbed the chocolate box from her desk and popped a victory snack into her mouth. Her tongue tried to wriggle out of her mouth when it tasted the sunscreen tang of coconut.

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