Finding Fraser (4 page)

Feet Forward…

4:30 pm, February 19

Somewhere past Cleveland on the I-90,
USA

I’m on the road, at last. The journey
begins with a bus ride. First stop: Philadelphia. Heading east, toward
adventure. Forward!

- ES

Comments: 2

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Philadelphia.
The city of brotherly love.

Why Philadelphia? Why not straight to New
York?

All because of one little pink flyer
containing one significant piece of information. Something that could change
the whole nature of this journey.

Some
one
.

I closed the lid to my laptop. The truth
was, adventure was less exhilarating than it was actually nauseating. The
original plan—admittedly made in the heat of the
just-been-fired-on-my-birthday moment—had been to grab the cheapest
flight I could find. That it meant a bus trip across four states (five, if you
count Illinois) didn’t even faze me. Part of the adventure, right?

And then Kindle Lady had come along and
handed me a flyer that essentially said “Yes, Emma—this is the right
decision. Follow your heart and you’ll find your Fraser.”

Amazing how reality can slide down your neck
like a trickle of winter sleet.

My stomach was in knots. An hour earlier
when I’d stepped off the slushy street and onto the bus, I’d remembered
Sophia’s jab. She was right, too. This trip would be the first time I had
traveled completely solo in my whole life. Pathetic for someone teetering on
the scary precipice of thirty years old, but true. Then the bus had pulled out
and it was too late to turn back. I was on the road.

To commemorate the event, I posted to my
blog using Wi-Fi on a moving vehicle for the first time ever.

That was kind of nauseating too, come to
think of it.

The only good part was that I hadn’t stopped
to call anyone. Not my mother, not my sister, not even my friend Jazmin. I
texted them all, instead. To say I was on my way. To say I loved them.

To say I was terrified.

I hadn’t actually typed out the last bit.
Sophia would have had the police searching for me if I had. As it was, I got a
cheery “Have a great time, check in when you can!” back from my mother.
Sophia’s text held lower hopes for me. “Don’t expect me to rescue you if you
get into trouble.” And Jazmin didn’t reply at all.

That was okay, though because, before I
left, I’d told her about the blog. She was a huge Jamie fan, too, and she’d
sworn she would have come with me if she’d had the courage. She’d even promised
to follow the blog. Now, I love my Jazzy-girl, but she doesn’t know an RSS feed
from her grass seed. (She’s a landscape architect. Really good, too.) But since
she is too much of a Luddite to even return a text, I have a plan. Once I get
off this rocking bus and into Philadelphia, I’ll find me some free Wi-Fi at a
coffee shop, and link the blog to my Facebook page. Jazmin will be able to
manage that, at least. She loves Facebook.

So yeah. As I sat on the bus rocketing past
the brown slush-guttered suburbs of Chicago, my laptop and the sum total of
everything else I brought was stowed in my backpack. I don’t think I’ve owned
so little property in—well, in my whole life. Growing up, I had all the
comforts a middle-class home could offer. Even as a freshman, I lived in a
college dorm packed with stuff: books, clothes and everything else. My hair
products alone filled an entire closet. In those long-ago days, my life would have
ended if anyone even suspected I had curly hair. What would the younger version
of me have thought if she knew I’d actually sold my flat iron to help finance a
trip to Scotland?

This was different. It felt real. It felt
really … scary.

I leaned forward on the seat, clutched my
stomach and closed my eyes. I tried talking myself through it.

Okay, Sheridan, focus. Selling everything
means a fresh start. It means you can spend two full months looking for your
Fraser. And anyway, it’s only Philadelphia—you’re not leaving the good
old US of A just yet.

Deep breath. Deep breath.

Where was that damn tuna sandwich bag when I
needed it?

The bus began slowing down, so I made a snap
decision to just step out a minute and get a breath of air. Real, clean,
not-very-far-from-Chicago air.

It had taken a few minutes, but in the
immortal words my sister Sophia stole from a far better cause, things got
better.

Really.

It had been a bit of a close one, though. I’d
never had a full-blown panic attack on a public vehicle before. Once the
screaming stopped, of course, things definitely improved.

That moment when the bus was slowing down? Well,
it turned out the bus had only been gearing down to take a curve, and the
driver had no intention of pausing to let one worried passenger out to breathe
a bit of fresh air.

And to clarify? It wasn’t me screaming.

My jaws were locked together in terror, just
as tightly as my hands were clamped around the exit door, which apparently affected
the driver’s ability to control the vehicle, somehow. And maybe the radio to
his dispatcher transmitted his screaming? At any rate, in the end the police
were able to slow the bus down by maneuvering their cars in front of it.

The driver got the rest of the night off, so
no need to feel too bad for him. And afterwards, when everyone had calmed down
a bit, I had a nice chat with a very personable police officer, who told me he’d
had panic attacks in his twenties, too.

“Twenty-nine was the worst,” he said. “I
freaked out one night and beat the shit out of this teenage kid. Thought I was
going to lose my job. But, the kid turned out to be Muslim, so you know, in the
end all I got was sensitivity-training and a transfer, and here I am today,
helping talk you down.”

Strangely disconcerting and comforting at
the same time. Nothing like a cuddly racist to make a person feel better about
herself.

The racist cop sent the first bus on its way
once they’d dragged me off in Pittsburgh, and left me with his partner to wait
for the next bus. The bus station where we were sitting smelled of urine and
old socks, but it was pretty late and I was sitting with a cop, so I tried not
to think about it.

“So, why Philadelphia?” she said, over our
second cup of coffee.

I fished around in my pack and pulled out
the flyer.

“Love Is in the Air, huh?” she said,
glancing at the headline. “So, you’re a writer, then. Well, that explains a
lot.”

“Blogger, actually,” I said. “I’m on a bit
of a travel adventure. This is kind of a side-trip. There’s—well, there’s
someone at this event I really need to meet.”

The officer returned to reading the flyer,
and when she got to the bottom, her eyes snapped up to meet mine. “
Jeesely H Roosevelt Christ
,” she said, and
her voice filled with a sudden reverence. “Do you SEE who’s the Guest of
Honor?”

I nodded slowly. “So—you’ve read the
books?”

“Are you freaking kidding me? My husband
gave them to me the year we got married. I lost a whole summer to, well … to
mmphm.”

“Your husband? Whoah.” I was impressed. “My
ex wouldn’t read a book to save his life. Only had eyes for the Blackhawks,
that man. And his girlfriend, of course.”

She nodded at me sympathetically. “Divorced,
huh? Aw, you’re probably better off without the bum.”

“It only lasted a year,” I mumbled.

She leaned across the table and pointed her
spoon at me. “Well, in our case, that book is the recipe for a happy marriage,
I tell ya. A man who aspires to be like Jamie Fraser is one in a million. My
guy? Well, let’s just say that the year AN ECHO IN THE BONE came out, he didn’t
watch a single playoff game. And the Penguins were going for the cup that
season.”

The things you learn from cops in bus
stations.

She was one hundred percent right. I should
have known Egon was wrong for me the minute he said he didn’t read romances.

A.
 
Historical fiction is NOT romance.

B.
 
What the hell is wrong with reading
romance, anyway?

And C.?
 
He didn’t read anything at all, really.

I should have known.

When my bus pulled up a few minutes later, the
cop hugged me warmly and tucked an Ativan out of her own stash into my pocket
to ward off any relapses.

“You’ll love Philadelphia,” she said. “But
watch out for the ladies who are putting on your shin-dig. There’s a romance writing
group near here in Erie, and let me just say—we’ve been called out to a
few of their parties. Some of those chicks are decently hard-core.”

I waved through the window until she was
just a teeny blue dot in the distance. Nice to know that even a cop could see
the value of following a dream.

Fortuitous Fate…

3:30 pm, February 20

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

The most important news for today is that
I have mastered the comment anti-spam function. Because, there may not be many
actual readers out there, but holy crow——is my blog being followed
by a lot of bots.

Okay, I’m lying.

Because the
most
important news is that I have actually made it into a special
mini-conference, sponsored by an organization for writers of romantic fiction. Yes,
the very conference advertised on a certain hot-pink flyer handed to me in
Chicago.

Fate smiled on me that day.

Apparently, the conference has been
planned to celebrate Something Special. (Also? I note that the flyer tended to
Randomly Capitalize Important Items. Jane Austen, your influence has now
extended into its third century…)

This particular Something Special is an industry
award. And that it is an award given to someone who has never claimed to be a
romance writer (nor an Over-User of Excessive Capitalization) is what makes it
all the more interesting.

Yes.

It’s true.

I have signed up to attend a conference
where the guest speaker is the creator of the man I seek.

Herself.

Should I have skipped this event and gone
straight through to New York City? What would you have done?

- ES

Comments: 0