Rewrites
of the Heart
by
Terry Newman
Genre:
Paranormal Romantic Comedy
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JJ nodded. “Exactly. If no one else can talk to you, then I can be pretty comfortable that I’m the one going through this, well, whatever it is. But, if everyone can talk to you and see you, then I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. Up until now, you were my personal, private hallucinations. I’m just not sure what to call you now.”
“Try calling us real,” Alex said, one hand on her hip.
“But real is impossible. It defies all the currently known scientific laws. What if everyone could see you, not just me, as I just naturally assumed so far?”
Alex sat on the arm of the couch, near JJ. “I’m still confused. I don’t get what the big deal is.”
Blake paced the room, his head down, hands behind his back. “Aside from your conversation with JJ’s sister, love, we haven’t had an occasion to have contact with anyone.”
“Right,” JJ agreed. “I assumed you couldn’t interact with others. Now, I wonder if others could see you, too.” She rubbed the back of her neck.
Blake rose and padded to the front door. Alex watched as he unlocked and opened the door. Then he turned. “Alex, let’s test out my theory.”
“Me? What are we going to do?”
“You’ll see.”
Alex shot a quick glance at JJ, who only looked amused by her perplexity. She figured she had little choice and met Blake at the door. He took her hand and they stepped on onto the small porch. She scanned the neighborhood. Everyone had at least a little patch of yard.
One house sported the stereotypical white picket fence. The house directly to the right wore a shiny metal flowerpot of purple petunias, yellow and purple pansies, and a few tall dark pink snapdragons. A few houses down she saw that one house had a wraparound porch with baskets of red geraniums adorning it.
Finally, she saw an older gentleman who lived directly across the street. He was out with his golden Labrador retriever.
“Good afternoon,” Blake called out to him, waving as if he were the proverbial friendly neighbor.
“I’m Bob Higley, and this is Moses.” The man gave the dog a good rub.
“I’m Blake Teesdale and my fiancé, Alex Zurich. She’s JJ’s cousin from Kansas and we’re here on vacation.” Alex smiled meekly and gave the man a tentative finger wave. She was amazed at his ability to create an entire backstory on the spot.
Mr. Higley took off his baseball cap and scratched his head. “You don’t sound like you’re from Kansas.”
“No, no sir. You are right. Mine is definitely not a Midwest accent. British.”
“I’ve always loved England.”
“Thanks, I love your country too.” And then Blake gave Mr. Higley a friendly good-bye wave and he and Alex went back into the house.
Once inside, he rolled on the balls of his feet, a small, smug smile slowly forming on his lips, hands in his pockets.
“We just passed the can-they-see-you test with flying colors. And yes, they can see you—I mean, us.”
“Yes, you two did and I’m amazed.”
****
“I’m having a problem dealing with this. Up until yesterday the two of you were only alive in my imagination. You weren’t physically living in my office. No offense.”
“None taken.” The couple looked at each other to ensure they were in agreement on this one. Apparently, they were.
“But now, suddenly you literally pop up out of nowhere claiming to be characters from my book. You can see how this would skew a person’s view of the world. Fictional characters are just that, fictional. They only reside in a person’s mind. They just don’t spring to life one day on a whim.”
“Claim? Claim?” Blake took several steps toward JJ’s desk. “You said we ‘claim’ to be characters from your book. You don’t believe us?” He waved his arms, his hair dancing around his head. He certainly resembled the hero of her book, she thought, staring in amazement at the similarity.
“Who do you think we are if we aren’t from your—I mean, our—love story? Where do you think we came from?”
She didn’t need this. Hell, she hadn’t even had her first cup of coffee yet. Surely even they had to admit this situation was at best a bit bizarre. At worst, it was totally unbelievable. How many more times did she have to try to process this?
They appeared frighteningly real. Perhaps she should visit a psychiatrist? She rubbed her temples.
“Coffee!” Blake suddenly and loudly announced as if it were the start of a race. “Coffee. That’s what’s missing from your morning. Let me make us, uhm, you, your morning coffee. You’ll feel one-hundred percent better once you get that ole java flowing through your system. I know I’ll feel better.”
She waved her hand motioning him to go. He bounced out.
“I’m confused,” she confessed as she looked at Alex, now on the loveseat. “If you two didn’t leave, what did you do last night after I left?”
“Stayed in here, read some books, surfed the net, took turns sleeping on the loveseat.”
She pursed her lips tightly. “I guess I just assumed that once I left, you would, well, go away. I assumed you were the result of my thoughts. Like a dream or a hallucination triggered by a lack of sleep and overwork. Either way, I just thought you’d go away.”
“If it’s any consolation,” her heroine said, “I thought once you left the room, Blake and I would do just that—leave the room, too. I figured we’d just float back into our world again.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I’m not sure how these things work. While coming to help you was a great idea, I guess it was one we didn’t think through. And I didn’t think returning to our world would be so difficult.
“And I know you have troubles of your own, with us just showing up uninvited, but I’m a little worried I may never get back to my world. I admit we really haven’t investigated all avenues yet. But quite frankly, we made this journey on a whim. At some level I even doubted leaping into your world would work. But it did. And here we are.”
She bit her lip and added, “I’m not sure about anything at the moment.”
She gazed at the forlorn Alex. Yes, that’s how she had envisioned her in one scene when Blake tells her they could never be together, that they weren’t right for each other. It actually made her feel guilty for creating that emotion in her heroine.
“I hope you don’t think I’m saying this because you literally gave me my world, but I really love it there. It’s not that I don’t love you, but…”
She fully believed Alex was about to cry. The scene really touched her.
“We’ll get you back,” she promised her. “There must be a set of rules that could provide us with guidelines of what to do. In the meantime, we’ll try to make you as comfortable and as at home here as we can. Okay?”
Alex shook her head meekly, like a little kid who had just been consoled over a loss of a toy by a parent.
“Coffee for all.” Blake burst into the room, carrying a tray of three cups, milk, and sugar. His hair flipped outrageously from side to side as he jauntily stepped into the office. “I found some biscuits—oops, you guys call them cookies—for breakfast.
“But the food situation is looking a little pitiful down there, Ms. Spritely. I know you don’t want to hear this, but we do need to eat. We may be fictional characters, but it appears we’re equipped with some very real needs. And one of them is food.”
****
“I’m a full-time romance author now, but I think you already know that.” She gave him the sweetest smile she could muster. And that was it. She vowed she wasn’t going to speak a word about her novels or about the subject of her nonfiction book.
But Kenn evidently had other plans and plowed on with the topic.
“Why would women even bother reading fluffy novels like that?” The tone of the question seemed sincere, but it must have struck a chord with Rob, who was pouring gravy on his meal. He dropped the gravy boat, splashing hot gravy over himself and his wife.
He hurriedly tried to clean himself up as he and Nan left from the room. JJ and Kenn, however, were only getting started on their literary discussion and didn’t even notice it.
“Why would anyone want to shut their brain down like that?”
She slung the biscuit she had in her hand on her plate. It bounced into the middle of the table.
“Because in a romance novel not one person worries about how they’re going to pay the cable bill this month. Not one person winces when the price of milk creeps up another couple of cents.”
As she talked, she saw how Kenn looked at her. His gaze appeared more than just cursory. His eyes were riveted on hers—not on any other part of her or anywhere else in the room. It was as if he listened with his eyes.
As she explained the attraction of romance novels, she knew she had his full attention. She wanted him to feel the full force of her anger, but she discovered his gaze calmed her.
“I’m glad we men don’t have to read stuff like that to feel better about our lives.”
That was all it took. She suddenly forgot about Kenn’s incredibly kind eyes, the sensual attraction that she felt when near him, the scent of his cologne. Once again, he implied that men were somehow superior based on his independently derived idea that romance as a story was trash.
“Oh, and you don’t think you guys have your own version of feel-good books and movies out there. You men have a category of movie that’s the equivalent of our romance novel—it’s called the action movie.” She waved a hand as if she were demonstrating the wealth of the genre.
“Pick your favorite action hero or your favorite cowboy. The movies these heroes star in are nothing more than flights of fantasy for the testosterone set.”
Two things you should know about me: I have an offbeat sense of humor and characters are constantly talking to me, trying to get me to tell their stories. Other than that, I’m a normal person.
I’ve spent most of my adult life writing in some fashion, from small-town reporter, to editor-in-chief and ghostwriter for a national natural health publishing firm. The last decade and a half I’ve worked as a freelance writer, penning ebooks that range from starting a doula services business to Native American herbs.
I’ve finally took the plunge to fiction after pushing oh, so many doubts aside. My first novel with The Wild Rose Press, Heartquake, won a 4.5 crowned heart review with Ind’tale Magazine.
All my books are set in fictional towns in northeast Ohio, where I grew up, and I write about things I love—like coffee.
I have a daughter, a son-in-law, and a grandpuppy and live in North Lima, a real town in northeast Ohio with all my characters. Yes, it does get crowded.
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Thos looks likeca fantastic book. Thanks for the giveaway opportunity!
ReplyDeleteYou make my heart smile – thank you so much for sharing!
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