Total pages in book: 66
Estimated words: 61332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 245(@250wpm)___ 204(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61332 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 245(@250wpm)___ 204(@300wpm)
“All right, so we’re researching how to get out of a trespassing charge when that eventually happens?” she guesses again.
I snigger. “Nope. On my way home, after I came out of the weird hypnosis he put me in just by fucking speaking, it hit me I won’t have my weekly hit of plant-induced oxytocin, and that will not be good for my already overworked Prozac prescription.”
“Okay, I give up. Just tell me.” She leans forward, her tone conspiratorial.
I laugh. “Oh my God, Vi. It’s nothing crazy. I was just going to get on Reddit and see if anyone has some magical way of getting free plants that I haven’t thought of. Like maybe nurseries that give away overstock. I know Lowe’s puts their wilted babies on clearance, which is great, but I can’t even afford those any longer.”
She looks disappointed for a solid minute. Obviously, she was expecting something way more exciting.
“Woman, what could I have possibly been about to realistically research other than that? This is not one of my suspense novels. We do not live a life full of… I don’t know, secret vigilante heroes who rid the streets of rapists and murderers and make it look like an accident. We are not the sweet and quirky heroines in our stories who land the super-hot gajillionaires,” I remind her, and she makes a face I can’t quite translate other than uncomfortable, and then I remember. “Oh wait… you are the sweet and quirky chick who landed the super-hot BDSM club owner, so let me rephrase. I… am not the endearing weirdo who’s going to seduce the delicious, wealthy alpha male with her awkwardness. So I ask again, what did you think I was going to say?”
She puzzles over my question for a minute, and then her eyes light up as if the idea bulb inside her mind is a real thing. “What if…?” She lifts her hand to her face and taps her finger on her chin, pulling her pursed lips to one side. And then she looks at me with a challenge in her sparkling eyes. “Have you come across those girls on TikTok who are sugar babies?” she asks, lifting a brow.
Not thinking much about her question as I open my laptop and touch my finger to the unlock button for it to read my print, I reply, “Oh yeah. Those girls are geniuses. They join dating sites that hook up those ambitious, pretty young things with ‘sugar daddies’—super-rich loners who have so much money they don’t know what to do with it.” I pull up the Reddit site and log in to my account.
“Exactly!”
After a moment of silence, Vi not saying anything else, I lift my eyes to glance over the top of the screen to see her staring at me expectantly. “What’s wrong with your face?”
She frowns. “Nothing’s wrong with my face, ho. Sienna! Think about it! You should totally join one of those sites.”
My own face scrunches up to display the “what the fuck” that doesn’t need to be said. “Woman, I am a thirty-four-year-old divorcee who looks like Swamp Thing’s mother ninety-eight percent of the time. The girls on those sites are freaking Instagram models in their twenties. What rich bastard is going to pick me over one of them?”
She’s straight-up glaring at me now. “I’m not going to dignify any of that with even a second of acknowledgement. I’m going to move forward in the conversation to the part where I remind you that, one, a lot of those women have completely fake profiles and never once meet up with the men they get into a relationship with. They just chat with them on the internet or on the phone, and maybe they send them a sexy photo or something. It doesn’t even matter if it’s really them or not. And two—and the more honest and likely side—there are men who go on there to find an intelligent and mature woman to spend time talking to. Some don’t give a shit about twenty-year-old Barbies, especially if they’ll never meet them in person anyway. They want to have a stimulating conversation—whether that means naughty or not depends on the man, I guess—with a female who has a brain.”
When I don’t blow her off, she takes that as her cue to deliver her final argument.
“And what would be more exciting for a dirty old man who wants a stimulating conversation than a best-selling filthy romance novelist?”
I sit back in my seat and cross my arms, keeping my eyes on my best friend but not really seeing her. Instead, I’m visualizing what her suggestion could look like.
My mind takes many routes, and the longer it travels, a feeling I’d almost forgotten starts to fill me from my head to my chest, making my heart start to pound. I’m vaguely aware my eyes are making rapid movements as my thoughts start to align into a meet-cute, then they skip ahead to a happily ever after with an epilogue that may or may not include babies, depending on my mood that day. A few of the thoughts sprinkle over the timeline, landing as plot bunnies that start hopping in place, excited to be expanded on until they each form a scene. And eventually those individual scenes will connect when I fill the gaps between them with character development, making the hero and heroine and side characters feel real by having them do mundane, everyday activities mixed in with picking and choosing different foods and music and movies and hobbies they each love or hate.