Read more
Informationen zum Autor Karma Brown Klappentext "Two women's lives unexpectedly intertwine in this ... dual timeline novel"-- Leseprobe MARCH. It's pretty small," I say, before whispering, "What is that smell?" Seth takes a dramatic sniff of the air. "Eau de boiled broccoli and something pine-like? Are you getting the same notes?" I pull back the bedroom window drapes and look into a parking lot. "I miss California. And the ocean," I say. And I do-enough that it's almost a physical pain. Wrapping my arms around myself, I hold on tight. Try to keep it together, because there are far worse things than having to move back home and put your plans on hold. "There are worse things, Rowan," I whisper, tracing the frost patterns on the windowpane. "What's that?" Seth asks. He's on the other side of the bedroom, opening the side table drawer, being nosy. I shake my head. "I think it's cabbage." When Seth gives me a confused look, I add, "The smell. It's cooked cabbage." It's still cold here, and a recent light dusting of snow has left patches of white on the black asphalt of the complex's parking lot. Our old place in LA didn't exactly have a stellar view-it was mostly other buildings and side streets-but if you pressed yourself in just the right way against the wall and looked to the far right, you could catch a blue sliver of water. Technically it was an ocean view. Seth sits on the bed, bouncing a few times, and waggles his eyebrows at me as the mattress squeaks and the headboard hits the wall behind it. "Plenty of give. This could be fun, right?" "I wonder how many other people have had 'fun' on that bed?" "Good point," Seth says. "Probably want to get a new mattress." But we won't, because we can't afford it. He comes behind me and wraps an arm around my waist. With his other hand he points out the window at a small cluster of trees edging the parking lot. "At least we have a hint of nature?" I lean my head against his chest and hold back tears. "Hey, hey," Seth says, turning me toward him and tucking a finger under my chin. He kisses the tip of my nose. "This is temporary. A few months. Tops." I nod. "Temporary. I know." Seth pulls the drapes back farther, letting a wider swath of sunlight into the room. "And the light in here is good. Great, actually." He grins at me. "That'll make filming easier." I tense, as filming is the last thing I want to think about right now. "True," I reply quietly. Without enthusiasm. But he doesn't seem to notice-has conveniently never noticed, or at least paid much attention to, my animosity toward his burgeoning YouTube channel, which has occupied much of his time and focus of late. Or maybe it's that I haven't explicitly told him how I feel, so he's innocently clueless versus purposefully ignorant. Either way, it's a sore spot between us, at least from my perspective. Seth Wright and I met in 2017 in LA (he was doing his MFA; I was finishing film school), and we moved in together after our third date, which remains one of the most spontaneous things I have ever done. While I eschew the love-at-first-sight trope, it’s hard for me to explain what happened with Seth any other way. We met at a party hosted by one of my classmates, Tate Alton, whose mother was a moderately famous actor and had a stunner of a beach house. Tate introduced us, and as I shook Seth's hand, I looked into his dark eyes, framed by the most incredible lashes I had ever seen, and my world flipped upside down. We drank too much sangria and sat on the beach in the dark, alternating between making out and testing each other on ridiculous feats of strength and endurance, like who could hold the longest handstand (me) and who could skip a rock the farthest into the ocean (Seth, though we really couldn't see well enough to be sure). O...