Page 14 of Guys Can’t Write Romance

Chapter ten

Beers, Sticky Tables and Calamari

Daisy should have known she was in trouble the minute Chad said to bring sunscreen to his ‘office.’ And now, as she stood outside the beach-front dive-bar, The Salty Siren, looking up at the sign on the roof of a smiling mermaid holding a mug of beer, she was already regretting every decision that led her to this moment.

Daisy groaned. Whatever this was about to be, it wouldn’t be writing.

She paused at the entrance, checking her outfit one last time: modest-length shorts, light blue blouse, a wide-brimmed hat to protect her fair skin, and sandals that were definitely not meant for sand.

She’d spent more time than she cared to admit trying to figure out what to wear to an ‘office’ that required sunscreen, eventually calling Chloe for advice.

Chloe’s suggestion of ‘tiny shorts and a push-up bikini top’ had been promptly rejected.

“Fields!” Chad’s voice called out from somewhere on the patio.

She looked around and spotted him waving his hand from a rickety old picnic table in the far corner of the patio.

With his tanned skin, t-shirt, aviator sunglasses, and baseball cap turned backwards, he looked completely in his element.

She, on the other hand, stood out like a pasty white sore thumb among the tanned crowd of surfers and girls in tank tops and cutoffs.

She made a mental note to buy a bottle of spray-on tanner on her way home.

She squeezed through the crowd over to his table.

His notebook and pen sat on top of it, next to a half-finished pint of beer and basket of fried calamari.

A couple of beach volleyball players at the next table were loudly recounting their recent tournament victory, complete with enthusiastic high-fives that came dangerously close to Daisy’s head.

“You made it,” he grinned from behind his shades. “I’m actually shocked.”

“That makes two of us,” she said, adjusting her hat to shield her eyes from the sun. “Did you know there’s no valet here?”

“Yeah. That’d be weird if there was,” he said, biting off a piece of calamari and washing it down with beer. “This place is like aggressively not fancy. I take it you figured that out.”

“Yes,” Daisy said, hugging her tote bag tighter as a man with dreadlocks halfway down his back squeezed past their table. “I pieced it together after circling the block twice, and finally asking some man trying to sell me weed for directions.”

Chad grinned. “Not in Kansas anymore, huh?”

“Nope. Not by a long shot.”

“Where’d you park?”

“A side street a couple blocks down. Where’d you park?”

“The bike rack out front.”

Daisy rolled her eyes. “Of course, you did.”

“Don’t knock beachside living, Fields. It’s why we live here.”

“You do know there’s a world of culture on the other side of 405.”

“I’ve got all the culture I need right here,” he said, gesturing expansively at the crowded patio. “I’ve got my beer food group, my bar food, the beach just down the block, and babes in bikinis. The five B’s of bachelor life. And I don’t even need a passport to get to it.”

Again, she rolled her eyes. “It’s starting to make sense now.”

“What is?”

“Why your books are the way they are.”

“My genius mind?”

“Your chaotic mind. So how is this place going to help our writing?” She eyed a seagull that seemed to be strategically positioning itself over Chad’s calamari basket.

“It’s simple, actually. There’s an energy in this place. The trick is to channel it into your writing to give it a punch.”

“I think you’re channeling too much of that energy into your writing.”

“There’s no such thing. That’s like saying a girl’s too hot.”

And yet again, Daisy rolled her eyes. “What if I don’t want my writing to have a punch?”

“You may not, but your readers do. They know when the writer had fun writing the story, versus just going through the motions.”

“You think I just go through the motions?”

“I think you limit yourself to something that feels safe.”

She studied him for a moment, surprised that he actually put some thought into this. A nearby table erupted in raucous laughter. Despite the noise, she found herself genuinely intrigued by Chad’s perspective.

“Let’s suppose for a minute that I have a massive lapse of judgment and try this, how do we do it?”

“For starters, you sit. The bench isn’t going to bite you.”

She looked down at the sticky varnish, flaked in sand and calamari crumbs. A suspicious dark stain marked one corner of the bench. “No. But it might not let me get back up.”

Chad slid her a stack of napkins that she used to wipe it off, methodically cleaning a small section of the bench with the precision of someone disarming a bomb. Then she slowly sat down like she was sitting on a hot stove.

Chad watched her with amusement. “You gonna be okay?”

“That’s yet to be determined. So, if I’m going to participate in this lab experiment you call an office, let’s set some ground rules.”

“Buzzkill.”

She smirked. “Rule one. Keep your snacks on your side of the table. Rule two. No obnoxious burping. Rule three... actually, let’s just start with those two and see how long you last.”

“It won’t be long. Want some calamari?” he said, nodding to the basket of questionable-looking calamari. “It’s mostly fresh.”

“Rule one?” she reminded him.

“I’ll keep the basket on my side of the table.”

“My stomach would never forgive me.” She eyed the golden rings suspiciously. “In fact, I think it just filed a preemptive restraining order.”

“How about a beer?”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

“And that’s bad because...?”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon.”

“Which makes it the perfect time for some liquid creativity. Hemingway wrote in bars, you know. And I’m pretty sure Jimmy Buffett did too.”

“Hemingway also chain-smoked cigars for breakfast. And before you ask, no, I don’t want a cigar either.”

“Your loss. But there’s a method to this madness you’re missing out on.”

“Enlighten me.” Daisy leaned forward, unconsciously avoiding contact with the sticky table. A group of surfers walked by, tracking sand onto the patio, and she winced internally.

“Beer gets you out of the self-critical stage. You know that feeling when you’re just staring at a blank page and can’t think of what to write, so you don’t write anything?”

“Like you in the library?”

Chad nodded. “Exactly like me in the library. Beer gets you past that. You just start writing whatever. It lets your conscious mind get out of the way so your subconscious can do its thing and start creating.”

Once again, Daisy found herself studying him. He had actually thought this through; and something about it made the slightest hint of sense. There was a method to his madness that she hadn’t expected.

“What?” Chad said, unable to read her expression. “Do I have calamari stuck to my nose?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. You just surprise me.”

“I do that a lot to people.”

She grinned. “I don’t doubt that. I’m still gonna pass on the beer, though.”

“Boring Banker wouldn’t approve?”

“Don’t you start too,” she said, her smile fading. “It’s bad enough I have to hear it every day from Chloe.”

“I noticed she’s not a fan.”

“Nope. And you’ve only seen her on her calmer nights.”

The waitress passed by, depositing another beer in front of Chad without being asked. Clearly, he was a regular. This observation did not surprise Daisy in the slightest.

Chad grinned. “Okay. I’ll call a truce. You were brave enough to come here, which I never thought you’d do in a million years, so I’ll cut the guy some slack.”

She eyed him suspiciously. “That’s surprisingly human of you.”

“I know. It feels weird.”

She chuckled. “I shouldn’t get used to it, should I?”

“Probably not. Ready to get started?”

“Yeah. Let’s do this.” She reached into her tote bag and pulled out her laptop, then looked for a clean spot on the table to put it. After a moment of futile searching, she sighed and settled for balancing it on her knees.

“You’ll probably want to write on paper, unless you want your laptop smelling like a bar.”

“I didn’t bring a notebook.”

“Here,” he said, ripping several pages from his notebook and handing them to her. The edges were slightly ragged, and he’d already doodled what appeared to be a surfboard in the corner of one page. “Do you need a pen?”

“I have one,” she said, pulling a pen out of her tote bag. “But thanks.”

For the next thirty minutes, Chad scribbled away in his notebook, in between gulps of beer and calamari rings.

His writing process seemed haphazard at best, sometimes pausing mid-sentence to people-watch or tap his pen against the side of his beer glass in time with the Beach Boys song playing overhead, other times hunching over his notebook in intense concentration, oblivious to the increasing noise level around them.

Meanwhile, Daisy stared at her page, doing her best to drown out the ‘creative energy’ from the other tables.

It was like trying to compose a symphony in the middle of a rock concert.

She’d managed exactly three sentences, all of which she’d crossed out.

The sun had shifted, casting a glare on her paper that made her squint.

She adjusted her hat, rearranged her position, and tried again.

From time-to-time, she saw Chad look up from his notebook to watch beach-goers walk past the patio’s rail (especially when those beach-goers were girls in bikinis).

These ‘mini-breaks’ would last for only a few seconds, and then he returned to his writing with renewed vigor, scribbling down words as fast as he could.

Something about his approach to this piqued her interest. He seemed to be having fun, even laughing on occasion at something he’d written. And from what she could see, he’d written a lot. In the time it had taken her to mull over one poorly structured paragraph, he’d written over two pages.