Three Hot Wishes (Fantasy Come to Life - Magic in the Real World Novel) (10 page)

Chapter 19

I didn't know where I was going, but at least this time I was wearing more than a bathrobe. David's car was parked on the street in front of my house, and I knew if I didn't hurry up and get the hell out of here that he'd just follow me.

Sure enough, as I climbed into the driver's seat of my car and risked a glance back at the front door, there he was, still shirtless.

Damn it. I already felt like I was on the brink of insanity. If I got pulled over by the cops because my shirtless, somehow apparently hunky editor chased me through the streets of Orange County that would be the end of me for sure.

"If you leave my house unlocked and everything gets stolen, I'm going to be pissed," I shouted at him, making him skid to a halt.

There. Take that
, I thought, watching him wrestle with the dilemma I'd dropped into his lap. I had the only set of keys to my house, and the door wouldn't lock without them. I'd locked myself out one too many times to buy a house with those stupid self-locking mechanisms. They were for people who could hold more than three thoughts in their head at once, and thus very much
not
for me.

As I gunned it out of the driveway in reverse, knocking over the garbage can I'd put out for the morning's trash collection, I saw him standing in the open doorway of my house, watching me with sad, confused eyes.

Too bad for him. Things had been about to take a turn in that bedroom, and I had a feeling that I'd gotten out just in time.

But now where was I going to go?

It was late, and I was tired. A hotel sounded like an ideal option, but I found myself turning instead south, heading toward San Diego instead of the upscale five star places that weren't that far from my house. I wanted to get away, and the closer I got to the border, the nearer Mexico, a whole new country was, the better I felt I'd feel.

I felt bad for David, but only momentarily. He'd work out something. If he didn’t, he'd be trapped in my house until I decided to return, or he'd leave and my stuff would most likely be safe. After all, it wasn't like thieves just went up to the front door of every house and tried to turn the doorknob to see if it was unlocked, was it?

I shrugged. I didn't know. David was such a goodie-two-shoes that he'd probably just get the locks changed at his own expense and secure the house that way, or something.

Yeah Beth, he totally seems like a bad guy. A real asshole. You dodged a bullet there.

I frowned. Back in the bedroom it really had felt like I was losing my mind a little. The voice in my head, my sassy, inner-monologue had sounded more and more like the person I had to pretend to be when I signed book after book after book at a launch, but now it seemed to be back to normal. Not nice, or friendly, or charming, mind you.

But normal...

The freeway was a blur. If I was smart, I'd have accepted just how tired I was and found a safe place to pull over, but other than me the road was empty. If I fell asleep at the wheel I was confident I wouldn't kill anyone other than myself, and it had been a very, very long time since anyone had accused me of making good decisions.

My phone started ringing. I slid my hand into my purse without taking my eyes off the road and held down the volume button with my thumb until it went silent. After a second I thought better of that and held down the power button too, turning it off. If David wanted to talk, he was just going to have to wait.

Everyone was just going to have to wait. Bad reviewers, editors, publishers, readers, Gina and Logan and Keller and whoever else wanted a piece of me, they were all going to just have to suck it up and take a number while I took some time and tried to work out what was going on.

Because the truth was that I was scared. Petrified. I'd been writing stories for as long as I'd been alive. Even before I could string sentences together with any purpose, I'd dictated little plays and happy little scenes to my parents. They'd happily transcribed them, and in my younger, far less jaded days I'd made a folder on my hard drive called Completed and scanned them into there.

I'd kept the folder throughout my career. Every finished story, sold or unsold found its way inside, and I hoped one day to give someone who meant the world to me a USB stick with its contents. It was as the only way I could ever show someone I'd let them in fully, and once they'd read all of it, the good, the bad, the naive and the cynical, they'd know me for what I was.

But now... Did I still want to write? Could I, with the threat of my creations coming to life and attaching themselves to me? And what about the reviews? David and Gina and possibly an army of angry readers had already descended on me, and I had the feeling that this was only the beginning.

How could I work, when all I felt was fear and dread?

Not for the first time, I wondered what I'd be doing if it weren't writing romance and drew a blank. The world just didn't seem to have a lot of room for snarky, sarcastic, reasonably well-red women with little to no career ambitions and a work ethic that embraced getting out of bed around noon and reaching for a glass of wine, unless they were doing what I was already doing...

Stupid world.

I drove for a couple of hours, succeeding in driving away some of my worries and most of the rest of my tangled, cluttered thoughts by playing the radio too loud with the windows rolled down all the way. The wind coming in tussled my hair. It smelled of the ocean, of places farther away than I'd ever been.

I wondered if the rest of the world had a place for me. Maybe I was just in a rut because it seemed like
everyone
in Southern California was in a rut. Yes, people were thin and yes they were beautiful, but the price they paid to have those things made their eyes desperate and their souls heavy.

Maybe all I needed to do to fix my life was to keep right on running.

By the time the sun started coming up over the mountains to my left, dragging itself out of bed at literally the crack of dawn so that it could lord a new day over the rest of us like some sort of sadist, I had already left San Diego behind me. The Mexican border was probably twenty miles away, but I was happy where I was.

I pulled of the freeway at the next exit so I could find a shitty motel and try to work out what to do next.

Sierra Vista, it was called, which my two years of skipping Spanish class in High School told me meant Mountain View, even though they weren't all that close at all.

Chapter 20

After I paid the night clerk cash for a dingy room with a mattress that had more mileage on it than NASCAR, I locked the door behind me and slept.

There had been times in my life when dreams had helped me. I could vividly remember waking up one morning senior year and knowing, without a doubt, which of the guys I was going to try and coax into asking me to prom, for instance. And there was the time that I'd dreamed I'd been fired from the cemetery for not burying the bodies deep enough. They were getting out, you see, clawing their way to the surface. I went through the whole thing, the anger at being fired, the depression of having to look for another job, the acceptance that the one I had hadn't been a good one anyway.

I didn't actually work at a cemetery, of course, but when I got fired from my waitressing job at Denny's a week and a half later, I saw that the dream had helped me prepare.

No such luck this time around. It felt like I opened my eyes a split-second after I'd closed them. The light looked the same outside, too, and if it hadn't been for the digital clock glaring at me in disgust for sleeping the day away, I wouldn't have known that I'd been in bed for more than twelve hours.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes, checking the clock once more just in case. Yep, it was just shy of six in the evening, which meant that I'd missed my check out time by something close eight hours.

Not too shabby, Beth. You're lucky this place is a dump. A more upscale establishment would have dragged you out by your ear by now
.

For the second time in two days I grabbed my purse and upended it, spilling its contents beside me on top of the blanket so that I could inventory the contents.

Midnight rouge lipstick, half full or half empty.

Half empty.

Notepad, complete with a useless number for Gina and the list of story ideas she'd given me.

A black pen.

A wallet, containing the usual cards and ID, along with seventy eight dollars. Enough for something to eat and another night in the hotel room, which I no doubt already owed them since I had still been sleeping in their bed until five minutes ago.

A travel-sized packet of Kleenex.

My mobile phone, still mercifully turned off. I didn't have a charger with me, and the battery would certainly have been drained dry otherwise.

A key ring with some keys.

That was it. The keyring made me think of David and the way I'd left him, hanging the safety of my house and everything within it around his neck like an albatross so that he couldn't chase after me. I felt bad for what I'd done, but that didn't mean I was ready to pretend that it came
anywhere
close to his betrayal.

I mean, I trusted him with my words. They were the only thing that truly mattered to me, and he'd used them against me, posting those horrible reviews online, trying for one reason or another to bring my house of cards down around my ears.

Don't get me wrong. I was sure that he thought he had a good reason, but that didn't mean that I had to forgive him prior to his apology. Knowing him, he'd have thought that creating a public outcry may well get Wellspring to release me from having to write the sixth book of my contract, which would be great...

Except then I'd be homeless, penniless, jobless and hopeless. So not so great, come to think of it.

I should probably turn my phone on. There would be a ton of texts on there, and no doubt more than a few missed calls. David knew Grace, and through her he'd have set the Smut Slingers on the case. I'd be up to my ears in concerned emails too...

But all that could wait. Even paying for tonight's stay in the room could take a backseat to the thing that I had to do now.

The open road had called to me, last night. Driving down to parts unknown, the radio blasting and the wind in my hair had been a siren song that I was still determined to answer, and I was going to start right this instant. I didn't have much money, and it was questionable whether or not there was enough gas in the tank to get back home, but there was one thing I knew I could do well.

Write.

I plucked the pen from the jetsam that was the contents of my purse and scooped up the notepad, pushing a pillow behind my back as I leaned back against the headboard and tried to get comfortable. Finally, after a little bit of wiggling, I found a position that let my tired body forget about the crappy mattress beneath me, made with loving care from a hand-picked assortment of locally-sourced jagged rocks.

He was everything that men had once been and were no longer
, I wrote, already settling into a rhythm. I didn't normally handwrite anything, but I fell into a near-trance at the steady
scritch scratch
of the pen against the paper.
When the biker pushed open the bar's swinging door and stepped inside, I couldn't help but watch him. Even from here I could see the tattoos on his hands, the scar that ran from his right temple down to his rugged jaw. He was wild and free, everything that I needed and didn't know how to be.

The leather jacket he wore could have been a hundred years old, riddle with signs and symbols that held a secret meaning for those in the know. Over his heart he wore a patch that read GRAVEDIGGERS' UNION and on the other side one that read PRESIDENT.

Below it sat one with the word STINGER on it.

Stinger... Was that a nickname? A job?

I must have looked too interested, because he caught my eye and watched me watching him for a second, before I worked out what was going on and did what everyone else in the bar had already been smart enough to do; drop my eyes to the drink in front of me and find something extremely interesting about it.

The place was silent as I heard the clump of his heavy boots as he made his way toward me.

"Hey," he said.

I looked up. "Yeah?"

"You waiting for someone?"

I didn't know how to answer that. The truth was that I wasn't. I was stuck, with no money and no job and no great hope of finding more of either one in the near future. "I am," I said.

He planted his feet and looked around, making the men at nearby tables stare at their beers so hard I was surprised that some of the glasses didn't crack from the sheer intensity they were putting out. "Who?"

I swallowed hard and stood up. I didn't have much, but everything I owned was coming with me. "You."

He let himself smile. It was a lopsided thing, since the scare didn't let one of the corners of his mouth move all of the ways he wanted it to. I found myself grinning back at him, and when he reached out and put his arm around me, one hand already slipping down possessively to my ass, I was ready for anything.