Let me let you in on a little secret about FYA headquarters. We get pitched to review a lot of books. Most of that comes from publishing houses, some of it comes from independent publishers just starting out, and then there's the self-pubs.
If you ever meet a book blogger ON THE STREETS, ask him or her their policy on self-pubs. If anything else, the ensuing rant will give you time to duck into a nearby coffee shop and get yourself a latte, because I have never met a book blogger who doesn't have a strong opinion on self-published authors. Some want to support the little guy and will read anything well-pitched; some may have gotten a bit too big for their britches and refuse to have anything to do with self-published authors, and some, like yours truly, just enjoy laughing at the hilarious emails we receive that ooze desperation.
But once in a while, you get a gem. You get someone smart, hilarious, quick and bright. You get someone who self-publishes because she wants to maintain control over her work and she wants that immediacy and intimacy with her fans. You get someone whose books are laugh out loud funny, touching, a little bizarre, and all too real. You get Alysia.
From Alysia's first email to us, I knew she and I were going to be kindred spirits. She has a weekday boyfriend (it's Thursday; Friday is too flashy.). We trade cocktail recipes. If she didn't live on the West Coast, I'd force her to trade clothes with me. I'm pretty sure she'd be down for a Tuesday night Law and Order: SVU marathon on my couch. We're bosom friends, is what I'm saying.
Which is why I'm so excited to be bringing y'all the first chapter in her new book, Stay Awhile! If you've been following the series that started off with Wilfair and has since given us Redwoodian, you know what it's about, but for the rest of you, in brief: Fair Finley, age 20, is heir to a hotel fortune and manager of the Wilfair. Her parents want her to take, by any means necessary, her neighbors's motel (because it has a pool), leaving poor Montgomery 1 and Montgomery 2 out of a home and out of a job. Except Fair adores Monty and Gomery (but Gomery especially) and doesn't want to take their motel away. When weird things start happening, the trio team up to investigate!
Sounds fun, right? IT IS. Which is why, if you haven't yet read these awesome books (and what are you waiting for?), Alysia is being super generous and offering TEN FREE EBOOK COPIES of Wilfair and Redwoodian to some of our FYA readers today!! So, the first ten people to comment on this post saying they want a copy of the books (they're available in ebook form only) will get free copies! (And for the rest of you, they are super inexpensive.)
And now, without further adieu, the first chapter of Stay Awhile:
Two people sitting on a rug inside a mountain lodge in the state of California aren’t terribly unique. At least I didn’t feel terribly unique to be sprawled in front of the fireplace at The Redwoodian with Montgomery X. Overbove, the lovely and complicated young man I needed to put out of his motel home so I could prevent my parents from selling The Wilfair, my own home and hotel. All I needed to do was nab this wonderful human’s swimming pool, blow apart his universe, crush his tender dreams, and chuckle maniacally.
In that order.
Perhaps I would even rub my hands together and glower, for emphasis. But my victim-to-be would not let me play the heavy. He knew what I intended to do and that I might actually do it, if I ever got around to deciding how, in the end, I could ensure everyone could win and nobody had to be sad.
I was under some major pressure, which is nothing to chuckle over, maniacally or not.
And I felt as though that pressure might, at any moment, make me burst in a thousand directions. But rather than smoke and sparks shooting into the air, surprised onlookers might see a snood, evening gloves, and a vintage movie-goddess gown aloft. And trailing those key parts of me? All the other components that comprised my physical being: cake frosting, cheese dips, a heart brimming with glitter and a brain full of folders – folders I could never keep properly filed or neatly labeled. The Be Extremely Near Gomery Before I Kick Him Out of His Home folder jostled against the Don’t Disappoint My Parents file which was wedged next to Prevent My Little Brothers from Turning into Old Children, Like Me folio. And under that? The Be a Kind Friend, Always Help Others, and Work Super Hard files.
Not all of my brain folders were quite that noble or high-minded, of course. I had two dossiers dedicated solely to Gomery’s notable forearms – one for the right, one for the left – and on top of the whole teetering pile sat the Save My Own Hide file. Its ugly red label proved that, for all my heart glitter, ruffled dresses, and mostly good intentions, I had a secret selfish streak and a will to win.
Pressure.
But pressure to do the right thing, even though it meant some people would lose, wasn’t the only feeling I’d faced since I’d started hanging out with my motel-running neighbor and his cocky cousin three days earlier. I had felt, quite simply, the keen and persistent pressure of the all. Or The All, rather, to be a bit more annoying and self-important. The entire planet seemed to lean heavily against me, and all the things on the planet, and the places that hold those things. Some might call what I was experiencing a revelatory moment, or a sudden sense of a connection. In short, during my short time with Gomery, I had discovered a plug in my pocket, a plug I stuck into the socket of the world.
And when plug met socket – thwick – it was then I understood sensing the nearness of the world is the very first harbinger of love.
Love doesn’t announce itself via a greeting card or a song dedication. It has nothing to do with splitting a dessert or sweet cooing or absurd pet names or staring out your window at his window, trying to determine if he likes you by how open or closed his curtains might be. It’s no less than the fleeting feeling that, for a moment, you’ve exchanged a single atom with everything, with all things that are things, and with all creatures that are alive, before
trading it back for your own atomic matter. It’s the wordless knowledge that you’re the person you’re falling for, for a flash, before you’re once more yourself.Then I realized this was the romance before the romance.
I now stood inside the waiting room of happily ever after.
I had entered the lobby of a mysterious building, a building with many floors and stairwells, a place that had long remained locked to me, regardless of how hard I tugged at its doors. And when I’d stepped over to the wall map, to find the “You Are Here” icon and orient myself, I discovered I was not the first person to have arrived but the second.
“How’s the fire?” Gomery smiled. He put his hands behind his head and leaned against an armchair, crossing his long legs in front of him. Behind the chair, shadows moved in time with the flames, filling The Redwoodian’s deepest recesses.
You are here.
Never before had three words seemed as apt or as urgent. It was a bold claim, I knew, living in a world where “I love you” was unleashed, somewhere, approximately every two seconds, to varying results. Certainly, though, “you are here” made a fine “I love you” before “I love you” could actually be uttered. It was a proxy with moxie.
“Fair?” he asked. “Fire?”
I nodded, indicating the heat level was optimal. Then I stretched out alongside the hearth, taking care to tuck my feet away from my companion, for modesty’s sake. I was still in the gown I’d worn the day before, and my longtime foe and maybe new friend still wore the same corduroys and necktie. The only thing that had changed about our outward appearances was the shredded cheese speckling our chests. My chest was heavily cheddared due to my overly enthusiastic cheese grating the evening before. His chest, because I’d pressed a great deal of the cheese stuck to me onto him.
Not on purpose, of course. We’d been whispering about the strange building that had apparently followed our group from Los Angeles to the Sierra Nevada mountains. We’d whispered, very closely, because Prior Yates, the world’s most famous actor, had lingered nearby in full eavesdropping mode. And all I needed was my first true romantic moment showing up in some future blockbuster after the movie star decided he was inspired by it. Though, on second thought, perhaps the “very closely” part of our whispering was simply the desire to be extremely near each other without admitting that we wanted to be extremely near.
It had been the nuttiest night in my not-much-doing, watch-the-world-go-by life.
Literally watch the world go by. Managing The Wilfair Hotel, while my parents took care of their other properties, meant I’d met just about everyone there was to be met. I’d hosted dozens of weddings at the LA landmark. I’d shown giggling honeymooners their suites and watched countless people act out the little fabulous and unfabulous dramas that make up our daily lives. And all in my own home, too, which truly filled me with joy. But it was a borrowed joy, an emotion I took out on loan, again and again.
Relaxing before a toasty blaze, across from someone I’d forever found attractive, definitely fell under “fabulous” in the little drama department. I wasn’t borrowing on some stranger’s pleasure, for once, but rather growing my own. Meaning that the hole I’d dug with Gomery over his motel was perhaps in the end, the perfect place to plant the tiny, leafy sprout of friendship.
Love Blossoming Analogies brain folder opened, labeled, and stored.
Shimmying closer to the fire, I mulled over everything that had transpired. “I’m not sorry,” I blurted suddenly.
“About?”
“That, like, I’m here, at The Redwoodian, and not back at The Wilfair, asleep, like I’ve been at this time of night, over the last million nights of my life.”“Million nights?” He pushed up his glasses. “You’re almost twenty, Ms. Finley. Your total number of nights is closer to, oh, seven thousand.” Gomery closed his eyes, put his finger in the air, and did invisible addition. “Seven thousand, three hundred. Which makes my nights, er, seven thousand, six hundred. Or thereabouts.”
“Numbers,” I breathed, staring at the aspiring architectural physicist. His collar curls formed sixes and eights, as they often did, but they seemed to be sixing and eighting madly at the moment. The further away he got from his last shower, the more his dark brown locks sproinged.
What would the theorem for that look like? Minutes since Gomery’s most recent shower +,moisture in the air + heat in the room = how hard his curls sixed and eighted?
Math, you are sexy.