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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Chloe Liese
Read between
March 20 - March 25, 2024
“Juuuuules.” I’m that kid wailing in the grocery store. All I need is a smear of chocolate chip cookie on my cheek, a rogue untied shoelace, and I am typecast.
Oh shit. Now, thanks to my recent deep dive into hot historical romance, I’ve got even higher expectations for the guy, with a name like West.
He’s still scrutinizing me, this man I’ve decided most definitely doesn’t get to ruin hist-rom Wests and is instead getting called Jamie. Judgy Jamie suits him much better.
My black dress runs low, but unlike Jules, I was not blessed in the chestal department. The curse of fraternal twinship: similar face, different boobs.
So I wend my way through the crowd, searching for an isolated corner of the house to sit in, where I can pull out my phone and read. Just for a bit. Thank God for smartphones to sneak-read e-books.
But it’s those eyes I can’t stop staring at. His hazel eyes are a September night—bonfire-smoke rims, irises the color of golden firelight dancing on the last green leaves of summer. They are unfairly lovely.
I batten down the hatches. Gird my loins. Wear my scowliest scowl. “You are despicably pushy, you know that, right?”
Then again, he’s reading a book, and that’s always revved my engine. There are entire handles on Instagram devoted to candid shots of hotties reading in public. Humanity has spoken: reading a book makes a sexy someone even sexier.
“Excellent. It’s a deal.” She offers her left hand and I take it in my own, the hand I’ve been taught my whole life is the wrong one to offer. I try to ignore that it feels remarkably right. “Deal.”
This fake relationship is our shot in the sky, weapons set down. Now, somehow, Jamie and I are on the same side. No longer me versus you but us against them.
“Bea.” I step closer, dropping my voice. “I’m a physician. I’m not going to have a conniption at the signs of your menstrual cycle.”
As an autistic person, I work my ass off to function in a social system that is not intuitive. A system whose patterns I have had to learn and do my best to observe without breaking myself. It’s harder with new, unfamiliar people, but it’s even hard sometimes with the people I know and love. Some days, no matter who it is, I struggle, not unlike the way it seems Jamie’s struggling now.
Dammit. First, he’s a baby doctor. Now, he rescues zombie cats in their hour of undead need. Ugh.
I do not stare at his butt, tight and round and high inside his wrinkle-free dad slacks. Well, not too long. The gray cat hisses at me. I’m totally busted.
But prickly things often turn out to have the softest insides.”
I need honesty. I need you and everyone else in our social circle to respect that I live my life my way, and it might not look like yours, but it’s still valid.”
Our eyes meet, and if his smile turned my heart to gold-leaf glitter, his laugh makes me see stars. It’s honey warm and blazing bright, rich and deep and so unexpected, I throw my arms around his neck and crush my body to his.
JAMIE: I’m deplorable. BEA: Nah. You’re just freaked out because the best kiss of your life was your fake girlfriend.
I’m very quick to observe a person’s facial or vocal changes, but making sense of those shifts is a struggle. It takes courage to ask for help understanding them. I’m not quite there with him yet.
“Fine.” He sits back, hands folded across his flat abdomen. I really need to stop undressing Jamie with my eyes, but it’s hard.
Jamie immediately steps closer and slowly clasps my hand, squeezing once. Silence holds between us. The kind of silence that I’m starting to realize he likes as much as I like it, silence that makes space for daydreams, for time and patience to find the right words.
“If there’s anything I can do to make things easier between us, will you tell me?” My heart tumbles. Dammit. Why is my fake boyfriend so perfect?
“It means a lot that you didn’t act like you see me differently now.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear as the wind whips it across my face. “I don’t see you differently. I see you better.”
It’s quiet as we stand facing each other, seeing the other with fresh eyes. It feels like the first time in front of a lover, right after peeling off my clothes. Naked. Nervous. Thrilled. I’m as fascinated as I am self-conscious. I think Jamie is, too.
“Too often. People shouldn’t take on something to love and expect it to be convenient for them. You have to meet a living creature where they are, and love them for who they are, not who you want them to be.”
As I press on tiptoes, clutching him for courage, I wonder if what we share, this inversion of what broke me apart, might be the very thing that puts me back together.
Art can only reveal, only make us more truthful. It’s just that sometimes being truthful feels like it’s made things worse. Because when you face the facts, then you have to live with them. Eventually, you have to do something about them.
“Fair, but let us be clear,” Toni says. “ ‘Romance’ means happy endings. ‘Love story’ means they took a romance novel, cut out the back ten percent, and replaced it with misery.”
What else does 10 Things I Hate About You teach us?” “That the bad guy always gets the girl,” I tell her. “Patrick Verona is a duplicitous jerk to Kat Stratford for far too long. And we wonder why toxic masculinity thrives. We romanticize it!”
Bea shoves her phone into my hand, well on her way to shouting. “We’re being Instagrammable!” A man gives us a concerned look and herds a group of children away.
Somehow, it all looks quite romantic. It makes me wonder how many photos of couples on social media are complete lies.
The real question is, James, can you canoodle?” “Oh, Beatrice, I can canoodle.”
When I glance Bea’s way, she’s watching me. “You wear a baby well, James.”
MY OVARIES
“I’m happy to handle it. I’m used to soiled diapers.” She blinks at me, like I’ve stunned her, then turns toward Bea. “If you don’t marry him, I’m talking to Sula about being a trio.”
We engage in a stare-off before I finally drop down with a sigh, then tug Bea onto my lap. Time suspends for a moment as she nestles on my thighs and stares down at me. My hand wraps tight around her waist.
Someone thinks they’re funny and puts Barry White on the sound system, as a fresh wave of laughter breaks through our haze.
Maybe it’s the tequila or our Pictionary victory, but I’m all shaky limbs and nervous laughter. Jamie slides my coat up my arms, sets his messenger bag across his body, then bends and throws me over his shoulder, whipping open the door.
“My fake boyfriend isn’t supposed to ruin me for everyone else,” I whisper. Jamie’s eyes fall shut as he drops his forehead to mine. “Sometimes, Beatrice, I want to ruin you for everyone else.”
His laugh dances over my skin. I wrap my arms around him, a smile lighting up my face. I can’t see how bright it is, but I know from how he looks at me. I am incandescent.
You give people permission to be themselves rather than what the world tells them they should be. Maybe that’s not summed up on a résumé or a test score the way my strengths are, but you have gifts, Bea, and gifts like yours matter.”
“You know it’s okay, right? For someone to see the best in you. For them to like the things you’re way too hard on yourself for.”
“Feel what way?” His fingertips trace my jaw, slip through the wisps of hair that tangle toward my face in the wind. “Like I’d take a cocktail to the chest, a half-dozen glasses of champagne to the pants, a hundred thousand times if that’s what it took to end up here. Like I’d never trade our meet-disaster for anything because it set everything into motion.”
“I’m saying, you’re the best kind of chaos I’ve ever met. And while chaos used to terrify me, you make me crave it. I’m saying, even though this is an absurd situation we’ve backed ourselves into . . . I’d do it again in a heartbeat because it’s given me you.”
“I thought I gave myself away, too. But I was scared it wasn’t what you wanted.” “How could I not want you?” He bends and gives me the gentlest kiss, then whispers against my lips, “You’re everything I never knew I wanted.”
“When we’re together, I don’t want other people around, Beatrice. I want hours and hours, and plenty of privacy for you to be as noisy as you want.”
You’re the best thing in my life, I want to tell her. You’re safe and real and perfectly imperfect. We started as a lie, and now we’re the truest thing I’ve ever known.
My sister’s voice startles me, and I jump, nearly headbutting Jamie. After a month of my shenanigans, he’s developed excellent self-preservation instincts and jerks away just in time to avoid what would have been a nasty bloody nose. “Look at you,” I tell him, patting his chest in reassurance. “Reflexes like a mongoose.”
Hurt swallows up my worry. “Oh, like you let me handle myself? So you’re allowed to meddle in my life, but I can’t tell off your boyfriend for being a biphobic twat muffin?”
I love her. Oh God, I love her. With each pound of my heart, the swell of the string quartet as the music builds, that’s the only thing I hear and feel—I love her. When haven’t I loved her?
