Page 20 of The Perfect Rom-Com
Finally Amelia’s animated face opens even further as she spreads out her hands. “That this,” she repeats with a high and attention-demanding tremor, “is . . . what it’s all about.”
A hum of awe goes around the room.
“What is she even saying?” I hiss. “This is what this is all about?!”
Her hands rise slightly toward the heavens, and she bows her head with a humble smile, and it’s at this exact moment the room goes mad. People are clicking their cameras madly, fingers tapping on the little red circle on their phones twice as fast as they were before. People drop down to their notebooks, hastily scribbling her words in their journals with heavy-handed exclamation points. Somebody to my left circles the words “This is what this is all about” in red pen at least five times.
Oh my gosh.
Could there be any fewer brain cells in these people’s heads? They’re mindlessly following along! Mindless, I tell you!
The cover of the book twists in my hands like it’s made of tissue paper. A low squeak escapes through my clenched lips. I’m a teakettle about to explode.
I see Amelia’s publicist’s eyes shoot to me from her station at the front, then watch her discreetly send a text on her phone.
Jack’s phone dings.
And suddenly, I’m enveloped as he wraps his arm around me. Gently taking hold of the book with his free hand, Jack whispers in my ear, “Ooookay, Bryony. Let’s remember why we are here, shall we?”
“I don’t know why we are here,” I snap. I look like a little turtle underneath Jack’s wing. An angry little turtle that some kid keeps as a pet and shows other kids, saying, “Look at Gus! Isn’t he adorable?”
I am not adorable.
“In the spirit of comradery,” Jack supplies, completely unfazed by my temper tantrum. “We’re here to prove how well we can work together after the incident.”
(So I threw Amelia’s cup of lemonade in the trash can a little “aggressively.” And in the aggression, the lemonade flew on her face. And I laughed. But to be fair, she told me to put her lemonade in the trash can because there, and I quote, “weren’t enough fresh lemons in it.”)
“Let’s go over this again,” Jack whispers. “What is Amelia’s job?”
He moves to pull the book out of my hands, but I cling to it like a stubborn child.
“Being the stupid face,” I whisper.
“And what are you?” He ignores my jab.
“The big brain inside the stupid face,” I sputter.
Mona, Amelia’s publicist, is blinking furiously at the both of us now, and despite the warning code from his coworkers and how “serious” he’s supposed to be at this “serious” event, the side of Jack’s mouth has slipped up into a sideways smile.
“Fascinating.” The interviewer beside Amelia nods like a trained seagull with her poised head bouncing in time with her poised bouncing heel. “That’s a point that’s right on target with what I said in my own novel Make Way Through Havana’s Scarlet Wind in the Quick of Night.” She flashes a hopeful look at the audience. A look that screams, “Are you going to buy? Are any of you going to buy my book now?”
“So tell me,” the interviewer continues, “in case there is anyone here who is possibly the last person on earth to read your latest”—she pauses to laugh at her own joke, and a couple of good souls chime in around the room—“how would you sum up your book? What would you say is the heart of this story?”
“Oh, goodness.” Amelia laughs as if this is the first time this question—the question that has been asked approximately three hundred times at the last three hundred stops on this tour—is completely out of left field.
She pulls back several strands of her shiny hair. “I don’t think I could sum up this book even if I tried. There’s just so much. You know? But you know what? Why don’t I hear from you? I hear myself all the time, but I would love to hear firsthand from my fans.”
“The Seven-Year Holiday is a heartwarming rom-com,” I whisper furiously, “about two people who run into each other in a café bookshop on summer holiday, exchange life-changing advice, and agree to meet every year—without ever talking in between—to give and receive life-changing advice all over again. It’s about laughter and love and healing wrapped in the powerful bond of trust between two people who come to rely on each other more than anyone else in the world. Not about ‘holidaying with my rich besties’ and that ‘THIS’ INEFFABLE ‘THIS’ IS WHAT IT’S ABOUT.”
Mona’s making wild Morse code at Jack with her blinks now, her brows shooting up and down in a mechanical motion.
“Okey dokey,” Jack whispers. “Time to go.”
I can feel Jack’s chest shuddering with silent chuckles while he grips me tighter and pulls me to standing. It’s not a choice here. He’s got me in a vise grip and I’m moving. Not that I would choose to stay.
I’m still clenching my book to my chest as I whisper, “And another thing!” when his hand covers my mouth as he wheels me around. He waves over his shoulder to Mona—who looks like she’s about to keel over that moment—and pulls me through the doors into the sweltering heat of an evening in June in the middle of Somewhere, Manhattan.
The air is thick and sticky, with both the smell of macarons from the pastry shop next door and the scent of gasoline from a city slick with sweat in the midst of an unusually hot summer. It’s crowded and loud, painfully loud, as it always is on a Wednesday night when half the city is on their way to dinner and the other half of the city is serving it. And my ears, the ears of a Florence citizen unaccustomed to being in the center of the City That Never Sleeps, pound with the sudden onslaught of honks and sirens and conversations in passing.
