She only has one rule...
[WATTYS SHORTLIST 2022]
A buttoned up bookworm agrees to a fake relationship with a surprisingly literate male model in order to save his career. She only has one condition: No kissing allowed.
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At age 27, Cora Glass ha...
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Cora stared at Jamie, part of her still wondering if the whole thing might be a dream. It all seemed so surreal. Jamie at her door last night... The way he'd kissed her, how her body had responded... and then waking up this morning to flooding that might last for days and days.
"Shelter in place." That was the advice from the National Weather Service. Here she was back home in her apartment, and yet somehow still stranded on an island with Jamie. The only difference was that they could have this conversation in the daylight. She could see him, casually sitting on the arm of her sofa, pouring out his heart. How was it possible that someone as beautiful as the man before her had never been told how lovable he was?
She had woken up this morning with all her resolutions back in place. Last night would be the final farewell. The exclamation point on the end of a satisfying episode in her life. It didn't change anything, as good as it had been. She would explain to him how her love was not a prize he wanted.
But she couldn't send him away now. For one thing, she didn't have a rowboat to lend him. She had no idea what mischief the universe might be up to with this latest trick...
But besides that, she felt like she was seeing him for the first time since they met. The true Jamie. The real person behind all the references to book characters and impersonations of other people. She understood a small part of what made him how he was.
No one had ever loved him? How could that be true? The only explanation she could fathom was that he'd spent his whole life playing roles, blending into backgrounds, and never letting anyone close enough to see the true colors underneath.
And now he spoke to her of stabilizing hammocks, as if he hadn't just upended her whole universe with that revelation.
It occurred to her he might be onto something with the hammock metaphor. Not that she just "needed to find the right person." That was garbage. The clichéd advice recited to her by relatives at holidays when she told them she didn't have a boyfriend. It was a lie she'd told herself for years when it came to her sensory aversions: maybe she just needed to find the right person... maybe she'd get over it if she kissed the right frog.
No, there was no right person. The other person in the hammock had never been the problem. Not Steven. Not Jamie. Not anyone.
She wasn't a princess, and none of those people were frogs. The toxic toad in every relationship was Cora herself. The faux-Cora she insisted on being all the time. Forever pretending to be something she wasn't. Putting up with stimuli that set her teeth on edge, in an effort to make herself more likeable... or lovable.
She had done that with Steven from the moment they met. She'd never told him not to kiss her. She went through the motions and accommodated herself to him, telling herself that relationships were built on compromise. But all that compromise had poisoned it in the end. Every time she kissed him, she lost herself a little more, and loved him a little less. When they got engaged, she had to face the prospect of keeping up the act for the rest of her life.
