Page 68 of How to Write a Rom-Com

Liam,

Starting a text like a letter feels odd, but since you haven’t responded to my calls or messages for weeks, a bit of formality seems warranted. I know you don’t want to speak to me right now, and I understand why, but I just have to get this off my chest.

I know what you’ve been through this past year, and I am so sorry for being dishonest with you. I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness, but I care about you so much, and I would give anything to go back in time and tell you the truth from the very beginning

No matter what happens, I hope you’re happy, Liam Miller. I hope you watch a sunset every once in a while and think of me. I think about you every day, and I miss you.

Lucy x

*

July flies by.

My schedule beings to settle into something resembling normalcy, helped by the slower pace of summer in the publishing world, which all but dozes off this time of year. Instead of burning the midnight oil until a hungry stomach forces me to stop, I can leave the office at a decent hour. Elle and I even make the most of summer hours, embracing the season’s rare leniency with a sense of well-earned freedom.

Anne was right, and Ruby doesn’t make the decision to terminate her contract, which Anne says our contracts department would never allow her to do. She claims she’ll spend a month brainstorming a new series, and we’ll reevaluate at the end of the summer.

Meanwhile, I spend any moment I’m not working, eating, or sleeping, writing.

And I don’t tell Anne about it.

I barely touch my Instagram, because although I’m writing a romance novel, I can’t seem to face the fact that I’m no longer living in one. A few followers even message me, asking if I’d ever tell them the secret project I was working on. I don’t answer because I don’t reallyhavean answer.

Writing is not an easy process. And any Tom, Dick, or Harry who says they can “probably write a book” can go to hell. They can’t. And anyone who has written one deserves a medal. Deleting all the extraneous uses of the word “just” from a document should be deserving enough of a reward.

What makes the process even more difficult is the fact that even though these characters aren’t based onmypeople—therealpeople of Hudson Hollow— and even though it’s not exactlymystory, it certainly feels like it. I’ve changed the characters’ motivations and personalities significantly, especially the hero and heroine, but the experiences they have together, they all lead back to Liam for me.

Instead of a mountain top, I make the hero’s “Spider-Man spot” an inlet behind his house. It’s a piece of land that juts out into the lake, with a long, winding path that leads to a small clearing with a pebbly beach. I wrote about it one night after Elle had fallen asleep and I was sitting in bed, in the dark with my laptop on my lap. I didn’t realize I was crying until I wrote the last line of the chapter and a tear dropped on my keyboard.

Love scenes are the hardest. I can build tension between the couple, but when I try to get them together, I draw a blank. My fingers are incapable of moving across the keys. It’s not that I don’t know how to write about two people falling in love or depict them being intimate with one another. It’s that every time I try to write about the herotracing his knuckle along her collarboneorplacing his large hand around her ribcage and pressing her against a wall, all I see is Liam.

I see him leaning over me, his elbow on the top of his Jeep, looking down at me, his blonde hair blocking his eyes. I remember myself longing to touch my lips to his, just to see what he tasted like, to close the distance between us that felt like magnets at different poles.

I remember him reaching over and rubbing his thumb in circles on my knee while he drove me home from Nora’s party. I remember memorizing the rhythm of his fingers, matching my breaths with his circles to keep the nausea at bay.

I remember kissing him.

I remember his mouth covering mine so gently, that it barely even touched me. If I close my eyes, I can feel his tongue tracing the outline of my lips before he moved it in tandem with mine. I can feel the pressure of his hands against my hips, pressing me into the side of the house.

I can feel him.

I try not to write those scenes before bed anymore, because if I do, I don’t sleep. I toss and turn to the memory of him. I writhe in the guilt, the shame of manipulating his feelings, and the ache of missing him.

But still, I write.

Because if I don’t, what will it all have been for?

By the second week of August, I’m at fifty thousand words when my word tracker app expected me to be at thirty thousand. By then, Elle is also so sick of me refusing her invitations to go out on the weekends that she is ready to throw me out of the window just to get me out of the apartment.

But all the personal drama I impress upon myself with my writing dream and pining over Liam is nothing compared to the battle Josie has gone through. Stage Four pancreatic cancer can go fly a kite.

I rent a car and drive home every weekend. That is, in addition to the days that my mom and Josie spend at doctor’s offices in the city, or nights they stay at our apartment, when Elle and I get to sleep on the pull-out couch together like Joey and Chandler. By the end of July, we had a pretty good picture of how impossible her battle is. By August, she convinced us all that the only one who can decide to fight is her. And she is tired.

She tells me one weekend at the beginning of August, when we’re sitting on the deck at my parents’ house. My laptop is wedged on my thighs in a lounge chair, and Josie is sprawled out next to me in an over-the-top yellow cover-up with a wicker visor and sunglasses that are two sizes too big for her slowly sinking face. The sun is high in the sky, beating down on us like the world’s most powerful heat lamp. “Do you want some lemonade, Jo?” It’s so hot out here, it won’t take long for either of us to get dehydrated.

“Lucille,” she groans, not turning her head to look at me. “Please stop hovering over me like I could just evaporate into dust at any moment.”

“Okay, rude, Sassy Pants,” I say, flicking her arm. She gasps at me.

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