Page 37 of Unromance

“Well, the plant has to come with us. It now knows too much.”

Sawyer bounced excitedly as an idea took hold. “It can be our Love Fern! Except, a love succulent because succulents are cooler and only—” She checked the price tag. “Eight ninety-nine.”

Mason hummed thoughtfully. “You do have big Kate Hudson energy.”

“Thank you,” Sawyer breathed, deeply flattered.

Mason laughed. “So, do we keep the Love Succulent alive or let it die?”

Sawyer frowned. “Feels like bad karma to purposefully let a plant die, but I can’t keep anything alive, so… maybe skip the Love Succulent?”

Mason ran his thumb over one of the green leaves, squeezing it gently. Sawyer had a visceral reaction to it, the memory of his thumb brushing across her lip, pressing down between her thighs.

He grinned mischievously at her. Could he tell what she was thinking? Plants. They were talking about plants.

“Let’s make it our Friendship Succulent.” He studied her out of the corner of his eye. “We’re officially friends now, right?”

Sawyer shrugged. “I mean, we do know each other biblically and still like each other, so yeah.”

Mason’s answering smile made her chest ache. Not with, like, feelings or anything, but, like, a heart attack maybe. He was too pretty. She was just reacting to his nice face. That she’d sat on, once upon a time. She curb-stomped that thought.

All her not masturbating had her feeling like a frayed nerve, and the close proximity had her sweating more than a Victorian woman catching a flash of bare wrist. She really needed to get out of this alcove that was making her all too aware of everywhere they were touching.

Mason’s face went back into mission mode. “Okay—” Pointing over her shoulder, he laid out their plan to get through the maze of couches and coffee tables as efficiently as possible. It was silly and possibly making a bigger hubbub than just strolling across the floor, but it wasfun.

Escape route plotted, they waited for the TVs to cut to a non-Mason scene. Both of them were so tightly wound, anticipation was a palpable thing between them.

The episode changed to another subplot and, miraculously, a gap in the crowd appeared, the two of them slipping back into the throng of holiday shoppers.

As they wove between Ektorp couches and Knarrevik nightstandsand more things with more consonants than Sawyer could phonetically parse, Mason grabbed her hand to keep them from being separated by a family with multiple crying children. The swooping sensation in her stomach was definitely due to her almost tripping on a stray table leg and not at the skin contact.

When they finally reached the base level, they were both flushed and breathing heavily.

Mason dropped her hand, and they grinned at each other like they’d just stolen the Declaration of Independence. Then they spied the ungodly long line. Nothing killed the mood like a warehouse packed with cranky holiday shoppers.

Not that there was a mood to kill, or anything.

“We don’t have to get it,” Sawyer announced. She tried to take their laughably tiny purchase from him, but he tucked it under his arm like a football.

“Oh, we’re getting it,” Mason said definitely. “And I expect you to be so goddamn inspired by this excursion that you dedicate your novel to our Friendship Succulent.”

“For Friendshipulent,” she crooned. “My steadfast companion through the murky drafting waters.”

“Are you writing again?” The way Mason’s face lit up was… something. Made her insides feel all weird and gooey.

Her usual nonanswer stuck in her throat. Talking about her books was deeply personal, and they’d agreed to keep things superficial, only sharing list-relevant information, but wasn’t breaking her writer’s block the whole reason she agreed to this weird mission-quest thing? She wanted him to know his efforts were working. Besides, her pitch to Emily was due soon, so this was good practice.

Before she could think twice, she told him the story she’d been hoarding inside her brain—and three different restarted Worddocuments titled “New Idea,” “New Idea_Take Two,” and “New Idea for Real This Time.” She told him of the guy and the girl who had fallen in love and let that love go by the wayside, of the guy’s terminally ill mother and the ring she’d gifted him, of the girl not being able to give an answer to his proposal, and their journey to honor his mother’s gift by trying to rekindle what they once had, one romance trope at a time.

Mason smiled softly as she spoke, the two of them shuffling closer to the checkout line all the while. “So, basically the opposite of what we’re doing. I love it.”

Sawyer nodded. She pulled out her phone to jot down the two new ideas she’d had while messily explaining the plot to him, the book seemingly unfolding in her mind as she spoke. He said nothing as her thumbs flew across the screen. By the time she finished, she had a wall of typo-riddled text, but it felt like a light at the end of the tunnel, tugging her forward to the next scenes she couldn’t wait to write. When she looked up again, they’d reached the front of the queue, and Mason had already paid for Friendshipulent.

“What? No!” she protested.

“Just make sure I get to play the lead when your book gets picked up for an adaptation.”

She raised her brows at him. “You know authors have no control over any of that.”

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