Page 39 of The Friends and Rivals Collection

ROMANCE FUCK-UP

Hazel

I need to revise my prior statement.

You can never go wrong with a night in Paris… unless you’re sitting stupidly on your hotel bed, staring blankly out the window at the Seine.

Feeling empty. Sad. And utterly confused.

What the hell is going on?

I’ve played those last two minutes in front of the hotel in Copenhagen over and over. I replayed them on the short flight to Paris. I replayed them in the car on the way to the hotel. I replayed them when I ate dinner with the bookstore manager from An Open Book and she prepped me for tomorrow.

But alone again, as moonlight streams across the city, I still don’t get it.

Axel was so…Axel 1.0.

With a heavy sigh, I pick up my phone, checking the screen in case he’s called or texted or sent, I don’t know, a gift certificate for a lifetime supply of coffee. Or maybe a note that says he’ll always hold the tuna for me. Instead, my messages are empty except for a note from my mom.

Mama Valentine: You must really be having a wonderful time on your trip if I haven’t gotten a single note.

I’m a bad daughter. I didn’t reach out to her while I was traveling. But she ends her note with a smiley face, so I know she’s not really mad at me.

Maybe she knows I need her. Mother’s intuition. It’s late in Paris, creeping toward midnight. But it’s early evening in Connecticut, and she’s probably just starting to close up at the garden shop she owns in Wistful.

The ache in my chest is too intense to weather alone, so I call her.

She answers right away. “Hey, are you having an amazing time?”

My heart sobs. But I swallow the tears and choke out, “Mom, do you think I have a terrible track record in romance?”

A door squeaks. She must be shutting the door to her office. “Sweetheart. Of course not.”

What? How can she say that? “Have you seen the string of failed relationships behind me?”

She laughs softly, sympathetically. “We all have that.”

True, true. But doesn’t she get that mine is embarrassingly bad, especially given what I do for a living? I pick at unseen lint on the duvet. “But I choose cocky, unavailable men. I choose men who cheat on me. I choose men who care only about themselves.”

“And from each one, you learn something about what you want and what you don’t want. I certainly have from my string of mistakes.”

She makes a good point, but I’m not sure I’m ready to listen.

“I’m just such a shitty little liar.” I flop dramatically onto the bed, staring at the painting on the ornate ceiling in the hotel room.

Women in flouncy dresses swing languidly in gardens.

So French. “I peddle happy endings, and look at me.” I feel sad and foolish.

“How can I write these books with these fantastic romances when I’m flailing around at dating and love?

I thought I was getting better, but I’m clueless. ”

Today was a classic example. I was sure Axel was going to say something so swoony I’d melt, and then the moment shattered, and I couldn’t figure out what to do at the hotel in Copenhagen.

Did I read everything wrong?

Probably.

I got it all wrong with Max.

But really, it’s for the best. We made a promise on a train not to ruin our resurrected partnership. Does it even matter why I’m bad at love? We agreed we could go only so far, and we reached the last stop.

“Oh honey. You’re so hard on yourself,” Mom says, gentle and caring. Her voice feels like a hand stroking my hair when I was younger.

I squeeze my eyes shut. Tears well up in them. Her words hit straight in my bruised heart.

Someone else was hard on me. Someone else was hard on me my whole freaking life. The man who hurt my mother. The man who put her down. Who controlled her. I squeeze my eyes a little harder as I think of my mean, absent father.

I’m just like him. But… with me.

I can’t even speak, but Mom keeps going. “But maybe you shouldn’t be,” she continues, and the tears start to leak.

“But I don’t know how not to be,” I say, my voice breaking. Judging myself is all I know.

“I think you do. You’re just letting yourself believe that you have to be as hard on yourself as…” she stops, takes a beat, “As you saw others be.”

She’s careful not to blame him now. Maybe this is part of her healing. Her moving on. “But you don’t have to be perfect in romance or life,” she adds.

“I’m not even remotely close to perfect,” I point out.

“Hazel, you want to win everyone over. You want to make everyone happy—your readers, your friends, the people you date. But especially yourself. It’s the reason you write.

Every time you sit down to write a new romance, you recreate the world.

You remake it, ultimately, into something wonderful.

But you’re not broken. You have to stop telling yourself that you’re broken.

That you choose badly. You just choose, and then you learn, and then you move forward. ”

More tears fill me up then spill out, slip-sliding down my cheeks. “Why do you have to be so freaking right?”

She laughs gently. “Because I did the same thing. It took me a while to undo it. But I did. Stop telling yourself that you’re no good at this romance thing. Besides, there’s no requirement that a romance writer has to be in love. Don’t put that on yourself. It has to be a heavy weight to carry.”

My shoulders do feel leaden. My heart feels like concrete. Maybe she is right. I’ve spent so much time judging myself. Feeling like a fraud. Wanting to please the world.

But that’s only part of it. There’s another reason I don’t want to be hard on myself anymore. “I don’t want to be a romance fuck-up because…” My throat hitches. “Because there’s this guy, and I fell in love with him. And I don’t know what to do.”

Before I can give her any details, she asks, “Is he a good man?”

I’m surprised she doesn’t ask if he’s in love with me. She doesn’t even ask what’s happened.

Perhaps the only point is how I feel about the choice of him.

Deep in my heart, I know that Axel is good for me. I know, too, we’re great together.

And right now, I know something else. I’ve been hard on myself about Ten Park Avenue. About the rigid way I expect us to write it— without acting on these feelings for each other when I want to act on them, and I’m pretty sure he does too.

If I don’t have to judge every choice I make, maybe I don’t have to judge the act of falling in love with my writing partner. And maybe I don’t have to erect boundaries around that romance either.

What if we can have it all, try it all, do it all?

For the first time in ages, I see possibilities rather than roadblocks. Wide open paths rather than rigid rules.

My mother is right. Every chance is a new one. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn. Every day we can change.

And every story is a new beginning. Axel and I can start over in every way. We can rewrite the way we work. We can recreate our own world. We don’t have to ruin our partnership. We can forge a new one. We aren’t the first co-creators to fall in love. We won’t be the last.

That is, if he’s in love with me.

I hope he is.

Because I’m so in love with him.

At last, I answer my mother with a simple, “Yes, he’s a good man.”

We talk a little more, then I let her get back to closing up the store, and I stare out the window, feeling lonelier than I have in a week.

But I also feel like I understand myself a little bit more than I did when I walked into this room.

And like maybe, just maybe, I can see my future.