Yes & I Love You (Say Everything #1) - Roni Loren Page 0,21
writing than real life. She could rock Jasper’s world in writing. Her thumbs hovered over the screen. She took a breath.
Hollyn: See u in the morning.
Jasper: :) Mr. Handsome Decaf looks forward to it.
The smiley face was everything. Hollyn walked over to her desk chair and collapsed into it.
Holy. Shit.
She’d flirted. And hadn’t died.
She didn’t know who this version of herself was, but she wanted to find out more. Maybe tonight when she went out for her Miz Poppy assignment, she’d try to talk to someone at the bar. She didn’t want to lose this momentum or overthink it.
With that plan in mind, she went to her desk, set Jasper’s coffee-cup drawing in her line of sight, and worked for the rest of the afternoon with a smile on her face.
Chapter Five
Jasper hustled through the side door of the Shifty Lizard bar, his backpack almost sliding off his shoulder as the door slammed behind him. There was a sharp stitch in his side from the jog he’d made after parking six blocks down the street. He checked his watch. His sister had given him the thing last Christmas because she was convinced he wasn’t aware that time existed. She was wrong on that. He was aware of it. He just wasn’t very good at keeping track of it.
After his shift at the coffee bar had ended, he’d driven over to that theater that was up for sale. That hadn’t been his plan, but somehow he’d found himself heading that way, parking, and getting out. The building had been closer to the apartment he’d lived in with his birth parents than he’d thought. Only a few blocks from the theater was the spot where he’d been found at age seven, caught stealing food from a convenience store and wandering the streets alone. He could still remember the fear he’d felt when the store’s owner had grabbed him by the arm as he’d tried to slip out of the store, then the look of pity when he’d seen how thin Jasper had been, his pockets stuffed full of Snickers bars.
Instead of getting hauled off to jail like Jasper’s mom had been the year before, he’d ended up with child protective services. His parents had gone on a bender, shooting up heroin somewhere for days, and had forgotten they had a kid at home to feed. He’d never lived with them again after that. And they hadn’t tried to get him back. Kids were real inconvenient for keeping up a drug habit apparently.
But the neighborhood had changed a lot from what he remembered—new shops and restaurants mixed in with some of the older places, clean streets, and just a more positive vibe overall. He’d found himself sitting on a bench in front of the boarded-up theater, imagining the box office with a poster of the Hail Yes group hanging in it. A line at the door. Jasper’s name listed as owner. Something that was truly his.
The ache that had settled inside him was a dangerous one.
He was really good at fantasizing. Those early years with his birth parents and the rough ones in foster care had given him a penchant for weaving better versions of reality in his head, pretending things were different or could be different. Dreaming. Always dreaming. What he’d gone through should’ve made him cynical. Growing up without food to eat should’ve made him want a steady job with lots of stability. But his mind had taken a hard left onto a different route, one that had more potholes and cliffs. He idealized. Of course he and his girlfriend could succeed in Hollywood even though hardly anyone did. Of course he could be on TV one day. Of course their love was real and forever. Of course reality wasn’t an actual thing that would get in the way.
He’d been smacked in the face with that blind spot in LA when he’d blown his audition and gotten dumped. He’d sworn when he returned home that he wouldn’t let it happen again. He wasn’t ready to ditch his aspirations, but he wasn’t going to be some head-in-the-clouds idiot about it anymore. Eyes wide open. Be methodical. Grind.
Thinking he could woo investors and own a theater was not grinding. It was a fairy tale.
He needed to let that shit go and focus on what he was here to do, what he was capable of doing. In-the-trenches improv, playing the dives, teaching classes for extra money, building a following from the ground up.