Over on Facebook, I’ve been talking a lot about exploring books that I started to write but abandoned for various reasons. One of those was a story about lost love and second chances that I conceived while floating in the lake alongside my sister. It started out with a simple premise, but I kept complicating it until I no longer recognized anything about my original idea. Last week, my husband and I spent time at a different lake, and I came back wanting to pull up that old manuscript to see if there was anything salvageable. Thankfully, there was. It was just a kernel, but it was enough to spark my creative juices. I immediately got to work, and in the days since, have plotted my booty off and written nearly 12,000 new words (after having cut more than that). Suffice it to say, I’m feeling inspired.
With that, here’s your #WIPWEDNESDAY for August 28.
BUILDING FOREVER by Rebecca Norinne Caudill
Chloe's shoulders slumped, and she looked away, but not before Jackson saw her eyes flash with what looked like guilt. “I was a mess, Jackson. I wasn’t emotionally equipped to handle everything that was happening. I was scared, and I didn’t want to burden you with it. I started to think that maybe you’d be better off without me.”
Jackson’s heart ached at the pain in her voice, but he couldn’t help the frustration that still simmered inside him. He wasn’t a monster. He understood her rushing to her friend’s side; what he couldn’t fathom was her complete lack of contact afterward. “You could have told me. I would have understood. I would have driven straight to Boston so I could be there for you.”
“I know you would have, but it was better if you didnt,” she said. “The things people were saying about Jessica … the things they said about me. That I was just like her and deserved the same fate?” Chloe shook her head as if to dislodge the memories of that time. “It was … . it was a lot, and I went to a pretty dark place afterward."
How dare anyone compare Chloe to that vapid, selfish waste of space Jessica Bradley. “You are nothing like Jessica, and to hell with anyone who says otherwise.”
Chloe's face crumpled. “But that’s just it, Jackson. She and I were two halves of a whole. She was my best friend, two peas from the same damn pod. Who I was when I was here with you was the anomaly.”
“Bullshit,” he bit out. “I knew you, Chloe. Knew who you were beyond the trappings of all your fancy clothes and this big fucking house. You were the opposite of Jessica in every way that mattered.”
“That’s who I was for you,” she practically growled, her voice lit with sudden anger. “But back home?” She shook her head, the action suffused with sad defeat. “Why do you think we came up here every summer and stayed so long? My parents didn’t want me in Boston. No, they didn’t trust me in Boston.”
Nope. Jackson wasn’t buying it. “Your parents bought this place when you were five, Chloe. It wasn’t some rich person’s institution for wayward youth.”
Chloe’s eyes flashed with something Jackson couldn’t name. If forced to put a label on it, he’d say it was defiance. “Oh yeah? Would you still say that if you knew that when I was thirteen, I was sent to boarding school in the south for lighting a girl’s hair on fire at a sleepover? That we showed up here two days later and stayed until the day before they shipped me off to Virginia?” She pushed to her feet, her chest sawing in and out as she stared down at him, daring him with her fiery gaze to say something, anything.
But he couldn’t. He didn’t have the words, and the shock of her confession rendered him speechless. He swallowed to try and moisten his suddenly parched throat. None of this made any sense. “What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why I never got my license?” she asked, her voice suddenly--eerily--calm.
Jackson found his head moving back and forth, seemingly of its own volition. “You always said you were afraid to drive. That Boston drivers were the worst.”
“Oh, they absolutely are,” she sing-songed. “Especially the drunk teenagers who crash their shiny new BMWs into mailboxes.”
His head was still moving. “No.”
Drunk driving was something Chloe had always been adamant about. It wasn’t hard to get beer around Balsam Lake—someone’s older brother or cousin was always willing to supply whatever you could pay for. Once, when Chloe was off using the restroom, someone had passed him a can of PBR that he’d drunk nearly half of by the time she found her way back to him. “No, absolutely not," she'd said, tugging it out of his grip and dumping it in the pine needles at their feet. "You drove us here, and you’re driving us back.”
"Yes."
“Why are you doing this?” he managed to croak out.
“Because I need you to understand that’s who I was back then, Jackson. I was a rich bitch who had everything I could ever possibly want handed to me on a silver platter, and I still wasn’t satisfied. I did shitty things to shitty people because I, myself, was a shitty person. But you were my escape from all of that. When I was with you, I thought I could be someone different. And mostly, I was. But then you told me you loved me, and my best friend tried to kill herself while my other friends said the only sad part was that she hadn’t succeeded, and I just knew that I was going to destroy you too.”