Worth the Wait

Book 3: Out in Portland

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

Genres: Women's Fiction; LGBT Lesbian; Contemporary Romance; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

A second chance at first love . . . For fifteen years, Avery Crown tried to forget her best friend Merritt Lessing. The late nights studying, the whispered confidences, and the little touches that never turned into something more. Unfortunately, her efforts have not been as successful as her TV career as the queen of home renovation. So when she runs into Merritt at their high school reunion, Avery asks for one night with the woman she's always wanted . . . Merritt spent high school pining after Avery, but never made a move-their friendship meant too much. The one time it seemed things might change, Avery chose her budding career. So Merritt did the same, throwing herself into her remodeling business. Now Avery's back, and while Merritt still hasn't forgiven her for walking away the first time, they can't keep their hands off each other. But when their professional paths cross, and it seems like Avery is choosing her career once again, Merritt will have to decide if she's willing to let go of the past and give herself a second chance with her first love. "Highly recommended." -- Library Journal

Release date: June 19, 2018

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 370

Sample

Chapter 1

Avery Crown stood on the veranda of the Vale Academy Alumni House, looking out over the Hawthorne District. Nestled under its canopy of heritage oaks, it was not nearly as beautiful as Catalina Island, where she had just spent a month in a rented villa with ostriches (at no extra charge!). And yet this familiar view filled her with a feeling she hadn’t experienced in years: homesickness.

Beside her, her costar, Alistair King, lifted a flute of chardonnay to his lips. “You know,” he said, “part of going to your high school reunion is going to your high school reunion. Get out there. Talk to them.”

“I can’t.” Avery fingered her Bellito Bellatoni Gemstone Moments charm bracelet.

One of the reunioners hurried over, her young daughter in tow.

“This is Avery Crown,” the mother said. “She’s on TV.”

The girl looked up with large blue eyes. “Television is make-believe,” she whispered.

Her mother corrected her. “This is reality TV.”

Avery knelt before the girl. “You’re right,” she said. “Alistair and I are real, but we’re a little make-believe too.” She slipped a charm off her bracelet. The little silver pony had sapphire eyes, just like the girl. Avery handed to it her. “For good luck.”

The Bellito Bellatoni representative would be pissed, but that was the price of product placement. Things got lost.

“They love you,” Alistair said when the woman and her daughter moved away.

Really, the Vale Academy alumni were not the King & Crown set. They were more Oregon Public Broadcasting. But a recent Sentinel Survey suggested that every single human being in America had at least

In trailers in Appalachia, women stored buttons in old King & Crown paint cans. The problem, which was becoming clear to the executives at TKO, was that more people had used King & Crown paint than watched the show. And another survey said that 29 percent of viewers thought the show was a spin-off of the products.

“I can’t believe I’m back here,” Avery said.

“We’ve been everywhere twice,” Alistair said.

They’d been to the O’Hare Airport so many times they had the terminals memorized, and they were back in L.A. every three months to meet with TKO network’s latest producers. But Portland was different. She’d been a normal teenager in Portland. It was in Portland that she’d last seen tough, beautiful Merritt Lessing—the girl she had loved in high school. Fifteen years ago. On this veranda. She remembered Merritt sweeping her short dark hair out of her eyes, shy and cocky at the same time. Merritt had been so beautiful it had taken her breath away.

“What do I do if she’s here?” she asked.

“Say hello.”

“And if she’s not?”

“Say hello to someone else.”

They had been over the possibilities so many times Alistair’s eyes had glazed over, and he had propped his chin on his hand the way he did in their L.A. meetings. This is my listening-to-you face. But he had listened. He was that good.

“I was crazy about her.”

Avery had spent the last month imagining their reunion: how surprised she’d act when she saw Merritt, how they’d run into each other’s arms for a friendly hug, how Merritt would whisper, I missed you, Avery. She had spent three hours blotting and reapplying her makeup, not that it had helped. Every woman’s face: that’s what she had, the kind of face that made plain housewives think, Oh, look, even I could be on TV. But in her fantasy Merritt told her she looked beautiful.

Then again, maybe Merritt was still angry. The reality of how she had left Merritt had been sinking in ever since her mother and agent, Marlene Crown, had suggested Avery attend the high school reunion. Merritt had been so young and so alone, so happy to have someone in her life after all the boarding schools she had been shuffled through. The more Avery thought about it, the worse it seemed. She wanted to race back in time, fling her arms around Merritt, and tell her, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.

“She hates me.”

Alistair sighed. “You stood her up at prom.”

“It was more than that.”

“Aves, you stood her up at prom fifteen years ago. If she’s still thinking about that, it’s not your fault. She’s regressed or something. You know what you’re supposed to remember about prom? The first five beers.”

“It’s just so real being back here.” Avery leaned into Alistair’s massive chest. He towered over her. “Don’t you think people remember things like that? That they make a mark on you?”

Alistair put his enormous (albeit beautifully proportioned) arms around her.

“What if she gets here and she rages at me? I was cruel to her. I would rage at me.”

“If she rages, she’s got more problems, and we’ll get Bunter to eighty-six her before she can get two words in.”

Alistair hugged her closer. She could feel the reunioners watching them. The perfect couple. All those women wished they had what plain Avery Crown and the dashing, blond Alistair King had, not realizing that what they were looking at wasn’t a romance; it was friendship.

“You’ve never been cruel to anyone in your life,” Alistair said. “And we get a pass on everything we do in high school. Your brain hadn’t grown in yet.”

A squeal of “It’s King and Crown!” startled Avery.

Alistair released her. He waved to a group of women by the wine bar. Avery lifted her hand reflexively.

“You didn’t sleep with her.” Alistair’s smile was fixed in place like a ventriloquist. He knew how to whisper so that only Avery heard him, and she knew how to listen.

“I wish.”

“You didn’t date her.”

“No.”

“You were just friends who had a falling out.”

“I guess.”

“And you haven’t seen her in the last fifteen years. She hasn’t called the show? She hasn’t stalked you on Twitter? Why would some woman show up at your high school reunion and try to mess with you? You’re fine.”

“I guess.”

Avery fiddled with her charm bracelet.

“Sweetie,” Alistair said, “you’re the best friend I’ve ever had and the only costar I ever want to work with. But you are not so fabulous that you break people’s hearts fifteen years in the past. She’s fine. You’re fine. And now”—Alistair turned Avery around, his hands on her shoulders—“you’ve got a high school reunion speech to give, and you’re going to be fantastic.”

A ray of sunlight cut between puffy clouds, illuminating the distant hills like a Hudson River School painting, all beautiful, unblemished Westernness. Avery took Alistair’s hand and walked across the courtyard and into the school. Like a scene from some Portland indie movie—the kind she had secretly always wanted to star in and which her mother not-so-secretly thought she didn’t have the talent for—she was back at Vale, once again holding Alistair King’s hand, once again scanning the crowd for Merritt’s dark eyes and her dark hair threaded with strands of mahogany, once again realizing it was too late.

Chapter 2

Merritt Lessing stared at her reflection in an antique French Victorian gold trumeau mirror, the patinaed glass reflecting the face of a woman who would soon be holding a plastic flute of white wine and fake-hugging women she did not remember. She turned to her friend Iliana Koslov, who was lounging in a wicker chair, her girlfriend curled up in her lap.

“I am the best friend you have ever had,” Merritt said. “I was not going to go to this thing, except for you.”

Merritt could be in her apartment, sipping a Sadfire Reserve whiskey and watching traffic on Burnside, but Iliana’s girlfriend, Lei-Ling Wu, was desperate to meet Alistair King and Avery Crown, the honored guests of the Vale reunion. No, it was more than that. Lei-Ling wanted Merritt to talk Avery into giving Lei-Ling and her food truck a cameo on King & Crown. It would be an awkward request even if Avery had not been the long-lost love who had broken Merritt’s heart into a million little pieces of adolescent misery.

“You”—Merritt nodded to Lei-Ling—“had better appreciate this.”

“You are the best!” Lei-Ling exclaimed. “You’re going to get me on King and Crown.”

Merritt turned back to the mirror. Behind her, the labyrinthine aisles of Hellenic Hardware rested in the glow of the skylights. In the center of the ten-thousand-square-foot warehouse, Merritt had installed a fountain. A Grecian woman poured water into a pool. Beside it a wrought-iron gazebo sheltered a pair of white wicker chairs. The white-painted gazebo had come from a Colonial house on Cape Cod. Together the chairs, gazebo, and fountain made their own landscape. For a second Merritt imagined sitting on a bluff or in an English garden with Avery by her side. She pushed the thought out of her mind. Beyond the gazebo was ephemera, windows and doors, tubs and sinks, kitchen, and the Land of Lamps, so named by her interns from the youth shelter. Perfect, uncomplicated hardware.

“But you’ll miss it if you don’t hurry.” Lei-Ling had been bouncing around the hardware store all day. “You have to go. You have to see Avery Crown. You have to tell her how much you missed her, even if you didn’t. Tell her I am in love with her and Alistair, and they have to put me on the show. Even if it’s just for two seconds. She won’t regret it. They want to film Portland, and nothing says Portland like my dumpling truck.”

Merritt couldn’t deny that. Lei-Ling’s bike-powered, Slipstream RV covered in papier-mâché dumplings kept Portland weird.

“You’ve been hot for Avery Crown for fifteen years,” Iliana drawled. “She’s a big star, and you know her in real life. Who wouldn’t go to the reunion? Go already.”

“I’ve not been anything for Avery Crown. I once said, ‘Avery Crown and I should have fingered each other in high school to get it out of our systems.’”

Of course, if that were true, she wouldn’t have been thinking about Avery every day for the last month, tidying the shelves of her hardware store and putting everything in the wrong place because she couldn’t shake the longing she thought she’d killed years ago.

“Did you do anything with her?” Lei-Ling’s eyes got big with delight. “Of course you did. She’s adorable.”

Lei-Ling and Iliana were adorable. They could not have made a more unlikely couple. Tall, muscular Iliana, still in her aikido gi, and tiny Lei-Ling with a rainbow stripe dyed in her hair and every single color on the RBG pallet (and gold lamé) represented in her dress and graffiti-printed jacket.

“She’s straight,” Merritt said. “That’s the show. She and Alistair King run around the country decorating houses to capture the spirit of the city they’re in and fixing dry rot.”

“You’ll seduce her!” Lei-Ling said, as though she had just won at Clue. It’s Miss Scarlet!

“Straight,” Merritt said again. “In love with Alistair King.”

“You’d just do that thing you do at the Mirage.” Iliana tossed her blond braid over her shoulder, a gesture that had always meant, You can’t fight this one.

“I play pool at the Mirage.”

“Oh, the thing.” Lei-Ling nodded. “Everyone knows your thing.”

“You lean up against the wall,” Iliana said. “You say, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’” Iliana imitated a deep alto. “Then you date her for two months, ghost, and repeat.”

She didn’t. She wasn’t the one who left, but no one seemed to notice. The last girl she had dated had text-dumped her. Merritt had called the girl, pushing down the lump in her throat. You couldn’t at least tell me over coffee? The girl hadn’t hesitated. You don’t care, she’d said. You’re fucking gorgeous, Merritt. And you use it to hook people. And you’re so goddamn cold. It was like being savaged by a puppy. The girl had pigtails. She knit socks for her nieces. She’d seen Frozen twenty-three times. And her niceness drove the words in deeper. You’ll always be alone. As if Merritt hadn’t already known that. She wanted to stand in front of Iliana and Lei-Ling and demand, Don’t you think I want what you have?

Merritt had thought she had it with Avery, not romantic love but a friendship so deep it erased all those nights Merritt had lain awake at yet one more boarding school, gazing out of the window above her bed, trying not to cry. And then Avery had left. Without warning. Without apology. Without one word to say that just a moment of that friendship had been important. Avery hadn’t been the first to leave or the last, but her leaving threw everything in sharp relief, like the security spotlight Merritt turned on in the hardware store when she heard a strange sound. Suddenly all the familiar shapes were cold and bright and lonely. Avery was why she hadn’t cried over the girl with pigtails even though she’d wanted to. Avery was the reason she knew if she started crying over lost loves, she’d never stop.

“You have a fear of commitment,” Iliana added. “It’s because of your parents.”

“Your inner child,” Lei-Ling said knowledgeably.

If someone’s happy inner child sprang to life, it would be Lei-Ling’s. Her parents loved her. Her siblings were kind. And she had met the perfect girlfriend long before she could get jaded about love. It was annoying, but it made Merritt want to follow her around, moving sharp objects out of her way.

“This is closure,” Iliana added. “She’s going to have fake breasts, plastic surgery, that kind of hair that’s real but it’s not real. You’re going to get that body snatchers feeling, and then it’ll all be over. You can stop lusting after her.”

“I have never lusted after her.” The lie was big enough to bring a flush to her neck.

She had lusted after Avery. She had lain awake in her dorm room bed and touched herself for luxurious minutes she could never stretch out long enough, dreaming of Avery. Then she’d felt bad for fantasizing about sweet, straight, oblivious Avery. It was probably a form of sexual harassment. When the government invented mind readers, she’d be charged with something. She could still remember the details of each fantasy. And later, when her uncle learned she was at Vale and took custody of her and whisked her from the dorm into his spare bedroom, she had hung a framed photo of Avery beside her bed and gazed at the picture for hours. Yeah, she had lusted after Avery.

“Lust can be a substitute for intimacy,” Iliana said.

Iliana seemed to think dating a twenty-two-year-old waitress had given her insight into the human heart. Merritt missed the old Iliana. The old Iliana would have said, Hit that or not. Why are you telling me about it? Then Iliana would have pulled her baseball cap down over her eyes and sucked down a Montucky Cold Snack beer, and in her silence, Merritt would have felt Iliana’s sympathy because they both knew about wanting things and not getting them. Now Iliana had Lei-Ling and throw pillows that read, LIVE, LOVE, LAUGH.

“Emotional intelligence just isn’t your thing. That’s why you’ve got us,” Iliana added. “And I say if you still like her, that’s the longest relationship you’ve ever been in.”

It was a joke. Merritt the ghoster. The determined bachelor. She played along.

“Fine. I’m going.” Merritt adjusted her shirt one more time, opening one extra button, a little nod to lost hope. “I’ll go to the reunion, seduce Avery away from Alistair, dump her, get Lei-Ling on the show, and overcome my fear of intimacy through lust.” She checked her pocket watch. “That should take an hour. You want to get pizza afterward?”

Lei-Ling giggled. She and Iliana were going to make out on Merritt’s wicker chaise lounge under her gazebo, neither of which was intended for romantic purposes. The chaises were there so that customers could take selfies and tag Hellenic Hardware, so their historic-home-owning friends would come buy lintels.

“You two,” Merritt said, “are disgustingly cute.”

Chapter 3

The reunion organizers had set up a stage and chairs in the glass atrium that opened onto the three main hallways of the Vale Academy. Avery sat up front, like a valedictorian, rereading her speech on her phone. The class president, a woman named Olive, welcomed the group, gave a public service award, and turned to Avery.

“Next I’d like to welcome our distinguished alumni speaker.”

The crowd murmured.

“Avery Crown is the star of King and Crown. She and Alistair travel the country fixing houses and decorating them in local style. But that’s not all,” the class president went on. “The Hollywood Insider writes, ‘King and Crown sparkle on- and off-screen, their real-life romance reminding us that love isn’t just in fairy tales.’” The class president smiled at Avery. “What some of you may not know is that Avery and Alistair’s fairy-tale romance started right here at the Vale Academy.”

The class president delivered the story almost exactly as it was published in the press kit. Avery had been living with her father in Portland but frequently visited her mother in L.A. She had met Alistair King at a Save the Children fundraiser. Although the press was clamoring for photographs of Alistair, he was mesmerized by the bubbly brunette in the blue dress. It was love at first sight. Avery was eighteen. Alistair was twenty-five. But Alistair knew he had to see her again. He took her to her prom, and they knew it was true love.

In reality, Avery had first met Alistair in the bar at the Four Seasons, Los Angeles. Like a first date for an arranged marriage, they made small talk under the watchful eye of Avery’s mother and one of the executive producers at TKO. If they offer, we’ll say yes, Avery’s mother had said on the drive over. You’re not A-list. No shame. Fact. No one expected King & Crown to last past the first season, but it had, perhaps because it was true love. It just wasn’t prom-queen love.

Now Avery rose, offering a wide smile to the audience. She cradled her phone in one hand, her speech glowing on the screen.

“I love to travel,” she began. “There is nothing I like more than being on the go. You know what Alistair and I say. ‘Never the same port twice.’”

Speeches didn’t make her nervous. She had spoken at more award ceremonies and fundraisers than her Google calendar could remember. Half the time she didn’t write a speech. But she had worked on this speech for days because Merritt might hear it.

“But that doesn’t mean that the places I go aren’t important to me. Vale has always been so special to me. You are special.”

The publicists liked it. She was supposed to look directly at the crowd while she spoke, cementing the audience connection. She wanted to speak the words to Merritt. She had imagined the moment as she practiced her speech, how their eyes would meet, how everyone else would disappear. Even if Merritt were furious, there’d be that connection. But Merritt wasn’t there, and the publicity department had also decided on a .5-second quote they wanted to use for a craft adhesive commercial. Avery glanced at her phone. Here it was.

“When I think about Vale, I think about the friends I made, bonded together by memories and united by the magic glue of dreams.”

Gould, the cameraman, twirled his finger to indicate go again. He hadn’t gotten the right angle.

“I think about the friends I made, bonded together by memories and united by the magic glue of—”

Detroit MagiGlue. That was the name of the product.

Gould nodded, but another movement caught her eye. The tinted glass doors to the atrium opened. Evening light flashed across the linoleum. The door eased shut. And Avery Crown, who had chatted cheerfully while she tripped over two-by-fours and knocked over garden sheds, found she was speechless. The latecomer stood backlit by the windows. Avery knew that graceful, sullen slouch. The head bowed slightly, hands in pockets. Then Merritt stepped into a beam of light from one of the skylights in the atrium, and Avery was sixteen again, staring across the biology lab at the transfer girl sitting alone, wondering if she could work up the nerve to sit next to her. She had looked around at all the other Vale girls. They were all cool pansexuals who wore Doc Martens and snuck into shows. Avery wasn’t cool then. Merritt’s wry, disapproving smile said Avery wasn’t cool now.

The moment lingered. The crowd shifted in their seats. Avery realized, too late, that her pause read as disapproval. How dare you arrive late to my touching speech about glue and friendship? She hurried through the last lines. Everyone clapped. The class president concluded, “And even more exciting news! King and Crown is filming their next season in Portland, right here in the Rose City!”

When Avery sat down next to Alistair, he asked, “Is that her?” his lips moving so little it might as well have been a telepathic message.

“Yeah.” The word caught in her throat. After all these years, that was her.

*  *  *

Avery walked slowly across the courtyard, past the people enjoying the wine bar and the perfect, eighty-degree twilight. Merritt leaned against a concrete pedestal. Her short, silky black hair fell over her eyes just as it had when she was eighteen. Her dark eyes and dark hair made a striking contrast with her pale skin. She was wearing tuxedo pants, suspenders, and a crisp white shirt that revealed the lace edge of her black bra. She looked at ease in the flock of women in pastel linen suits. Just like always. A half smile played on her lips, saying, I’m better than this, but I don’t care.

Olive, the class president, appeared at Avery’s side, leading her toward Merritt.

“Do you two remember each other? Merritt transferred in our junior year.” Olive fluttered a hand over her frizzy hair. “Merritt Lessing was our alumni speaker two years ago.”

Merritt had always made the Vale girls nervous, and even the straight g. . .