Page 27 of The Write Stuff

“Yup.” She grinned. “Their bad timing benefitted me greatly.”

I leaned back in my chair. Looking at her up close was … I couldn’t even come up with the words. For a writer, that wasn’t a good thing. She was breathtaking, though. The smattering of freckles on the bridge of her nose that I’d always thought made her look impossibly young now made her look ridiculously sexy. She’d pulled her long hair back in twin braids, Laura Ingalls style, but she somehow pulled that off, too.

When she was younger, I would have laughed at all of it. There was nothing laughable about how she looked now. In fact, she looked like the sort of woman I would ask out on a date. She was exactly my type.

Not that I would ever ask Wylie Dixon out on a date or anything. The mere thought of that was ridiculous.

I needed to steer this to a safe discussion because my mind had accidentally gone to a very dangerous — and very not happening — place. “What about you?” I asked, frowning when I realized the back of my neck was sweating. What the hell was wrong with me?

“What about me what?” she asked, seemingly perfectly at ease. That only served to irritate me more.

“Would you want to live in the historic district, or The Landings?”

“Well, I’ve never been to The Landings.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to invite her, but thankfully, she wasn’t done talking.

“Bella told me about it, though,” she continued. “Of course, I had to look it up because the things she was telling me were … weird. I couldn’t picture it.”

“And?” I prodded when she didn’t say anything.

“And I could never live in a place like that,” she replied simply.

Irritation bubbled up, and I let it. Anything was better than the other thoughts I’d allowed to take over, however briefly. “And just what is wrong with The Landings?”

She shrugged. If she’d picked up on my tonal change, she didn’t show it. “It’s like manufactured relevance,” she replied. “The people there are mostly — I stress mostly — interested in being seen as big shots. Why else live there when it’s so expensive? There are a lot of other places that are more affordable and have historic relevance in this city. Heck, Tybee Island has more culture in a single building than The Landings has in all 4,500 acres.”

How could she possibly know how many acres The Landings boasted? I didn’t know that. “So, basically you’re saying that I’m irrelevant and I need to puff myself out with a house.”

I recognized the moment she realized this was no longer a friendly conversation, and I wanted to go back in time and talk about something else. It wasn’t as if I was loyal to my lifestyle. I’d bought Bree’s house because it was nice, and I liked the basic setup of The Landings. I knew there would be politics in a place like that, a general soullessness. It didn’t bother me, though, because I wasn’t going to become friends with those people. A house was just a house.

My mother had moved us so many times when I was a kid that I never got attached to any house we moved into. We never stayed for more than a few years. When she changed husbands — which was often — we changed houses. The whole thing was annoying, but I’d become numb to it.

So why was I taking Wylie’s dislike of my neighborhood so personally? It wasn’t as if she was rejecting me. I wasn’t putting myself out there to be rejected. So, why?

“I didn’t say you were irrelevant.” Wylie wrinkled her nose and glared at me. “I just said that type of community living wasn’t for me. Why are you taking it so personally?”

That was a very good question. I needed to let it go.

Morgan Freeman’s voice invaded my mind. But he didn’t let it go, folks.

No, I doubled down.

“Just because you can’t afford to live there, that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with the lifestyle,” I insisted. “It’s a nice place. I get that not everybody has the money to pay for an environment like that. There’s no shame in it.”

Outrage flooded her eyes. “I am not ashamed of not living at The Landings.”

“It’s okay,” I insisted, hating how douchey I sounded. I was not this person. She just brought out the worst in me. She always had. “You don’t have to feel bad.”

“I don’t feel bad.”

“Oh, so you were just crapping on my house because … what?”

“I wasn’t crapping on your house!” She practically yelled it, causing multiple sets of eyes to turn in our direction. Her cheeks flushed red, and she lowered her voice. I could practically hear her counting to 10, and it almost made me laugh. She was so flustered.

Of course, she was hot when she was flustered, too. Man, this was a nightmare. Why had my mother been right about Wylie? I would have been happy to live my entire life thinking of her as that gawky girl speaking Klingon with the security guard. That was my favorite memory of Wylie, in fact.

“I think I should go.” Her hands shook a little as she packed up her tablet into a cute leather messenger bag. It said Cambridge Satchel Company on it, so I knew it wasn’t some cheap bag that she’d picked up at a big box store. It looked like something her mother had probably given her as a gift.