“Whatcha reading?”
I didn’t lift my eyes from the page but I lifted the ends of the paper so she could see what was written on the title page. “It’s amazing,” I muttered, unwilling to tear my eyes away from the typed words that cluttered the page.
I felt the bed shake and soon soft lips were touching mine. “I love you,” my wife
said, her head leaning over in front of mine, her hair lingering over the pages.
I stifled a smile and waved her away, “hon I’m trying to read.” Clare giggled and pulled the pages away from my face, and closed the cover. “My spot!” I whined, half-reaching towards the papers. “You lost my place!”
Clare kissed my mouth again, “You know I love you,” she said, barely pulling away from my lips before kissing me again. I wrapped my arms around her and knelt on the bed. I returned her kiss. “You really like it?” She asked, resting her forehead on my shoulder.
I nodded. “I really like it.”
She pulled away from me, “hey... where’d you get it anyway?”
I laughed and flopped down onto the bed, picking up the manuscript once again. I searched for the page I was reading before it was so rudely pulled away. I found my place and stuck my finger between the pages to mark my spot. “I believe someone threw it at me yesterday and said, ‘read this’.”
Clare giggled and flopped down onto my stomach. “I love you.”
I smiled and stroked her hair gently. “I love you, too.” I kissed her lips quickly. “You look very well rested now,” I commented.
Clare nodded and let her body fall off me and onto the bed. She reached her right arm around my stomach and let it rest on my abdomen, her head lying on my shoulder. I raised the papers back up to my eyes and started reading them again.
The papers belonged to Clare. Within these papers, a story was comprised, a love story, a passion she tampered with from time to time. My wife was an amazing writer and I told her she should try to become published but she claimed she didn’t have time to worry about the children and working at the same time. I told her that was ridiculous. She was an intelligent woman who had a bachelor’s degree in English and theater, but I think she was scared. Scared of what, I didn’t know. Perhaps of rejection, perhaps of success, perhaps both...
I could relate to that. My brothers and I tried so many times when we were younger to be signed to a record label, and we had been rejected many times. On our fourteenth try, we landed a deal with one of labels that had rejected us before. After being signed, I was still scared. This time it was of success. We had no idea what the future would bring and that scared me. Would we be accepted into the music scene? Would we be banished because we were young or because people would think we were bad?
Luckily for me, I had my brothers to talk to. Many years ago, my older, wiser
brother said to me, “Taylor, we can’t be scared of the future. We have to take it as it comes. We can’t guess what’s going to happen, it just has to happen.” I lived by that advice for as long as I can remember. Isaac had only been 15 when he said it, but to me he was ancient.
I flipped the page in the manuscript and decided to break our silence. I glanced down at my wife, her eyes were closed but she wasn’t asleep. “Clare?”
“Mmm?”
“This is extremely good. I think it has to be one of my favorites.”
Her eyes opened, excitement practically poured out of them as she looked at me, accepting my compliment. “Better than the one I wrote while I was pregnant that you talked about for days afterwards?”
I chuckled and nodded. “I loved that one. I think you should send these two to be published.”
Clare sighed and cast her eyes across my stomach. “Taylor-”
“No wait, hear me out,” I requested. I shifted up on the bed, getting into a better sitting position. Clare moved up with me taking her arm off my stomach and leaning her head against her pillow. “I think you should just try. I’ll be here for you each step of the way.” I reached over and took her hand, holding the papers in the other hand.
“Jordan, here’s the thing... I’m scared of what other people will think. You know
me, I can’t take negative criticism. How long did it take me to give you all of my stories? Years. I was never comfortable enough to give a person a full story. You were the first one that I let read my entire computer.” She gestured towards the computer in the corner. Her computer, the one that contained all the stories that she had written in the past, all the stories that she was writing at the moment, and all the stories that she would write in the future. She looked back up into my eyes. “When I write I let my feelings out and when I let you read my stories, you are reading a part of me. It’s exactly like your songs, but yet you can take criticism. I don’t know how, but you can.”
“It’s not easy,” I admitted. “It does hurt sometimes, but I just tell myself that for ever negative comment there are one hundred or even one thousand positives. The only comments that count are from you and my family. No one else matters. Well, the fans matter, actually, but I take your comments more seriously than anyone’s, even my brothers. If you said ‘Taylor, drop that chorus, it’s horrible,’ I would. So you can trust me if I told you to drop a page or two from your story, but I don’t have to. It’s perfection.”
My wife sighed and leaned back into my body. I put my arm around her shoulder. “I’ll think about it,” she said finally. “I just am so scared to let anyone but you read my work.”
“I understand.”
I went back to reading the story, holding Clare close to me. “How was the horse visit today?” My wife asked after twenty minutes, and ten pages.
“It went well,” I told her, closing the pages once again. “Zoë rode Molly for about fifteen minutes and spent another ten minutes brushing her. The twins slept through the whole thing.”
“Thankfully they’re sleeping now, too.” Clare glanced at the door as if she jinxed us and when she spoke the words we’d hear them screaming over the baby monitor. Nothing came. We smiled in relief.
“They passed out right after dinner,” I joked. “Just like my father after Thanksgiving dinner.” My wife and I laughed. I rubbed her shoulder gently and sighed contentedly. I put the manuscript down at the foot of the bed and told my wife, “I’m going to go make sure that Zoë’s in bed.” Our eldest daughter had went to her room right after dinner to do her homework without being asked.
“OK, babe,” Clare agreed sitting up straight. She patted my leg. “I’ll check on
Anya in a minute. I think Avery is in there with her.” I laughed. The dog had been sleeping on the floor of Anya’s room recently. It was almost as if she was in there to keep the toddler company. The puppy would come running into our bedroom whenever Anya dropped a toy or her bottle and relentlessly licked us until we got up. We’d usually hear Anya’s cries through her baby monitor by this point, which is how we originally discovered what Avery was doing. Whenever the dog would act that way, we’d hear the cries from the monitor and then we’d discover Anya trying to climb out of her crib, pointing at whatever it was that she had dropped, her arms reaching for it as far as they could go, screaming “Dada! Baba! Mama!” and crying. We put two and two together rather quickly. Our family had only owned the dog for a little over a month but already she and Anya had become inseparable. Anya’s floor was naked at night without the small puppy lying on the rug.
I smiled at Clare, “you’re not going to move are you?”
Clare smiled at me and shook her head. “Yeah, but after a quick look in I am going to get ready for bed, turn out the light, crawl under the covers and wait for you to come back.”
I grinned. “I won’t be long.”
“Don’t be too long,” she said, her voice alluring, her eyes tempting me to say “Zoë’s in bed” without checking and then hopping in next to her, but instead I winked and went to check on our daughter.