Stuck With You: A Sweet Romantic Comedy

Part 1

Bianca

I don't usually drink, but after the week I'd had, I'd thrown my usual caution to the wind and ordered a second glass of wine. It had been a good idea, I decided, to come out for dinner with my two best friends. The cool evening breeze on the restaurant terrace, the hum of conversation, and the tinkling of cutlery against china were soothing to the senses.

I didn't know it yet, but I'd be the opposite of soothed by the end of the evening.

"I can't believe your apartment flooded, Bianca," my friend Liberty said. "That was rotten luck."

Liberty hadn't had a second glass of wine. She hadn't even had a first. She was sticking to herbal tea with lemon, which gets you weird looks from the waiter when everyone else in your party is drinking, but Liberty is impervious to weird looks.

Our friend Kat was making up for my moderation and Liberty's abstinence by drinking for three.

"Since you have to move out of your apartment, anyway," Kat said, slurring her words a little, "why don't you just come with me to Montana?"

Kat was leaving the next day to research the novel she had agreed to ghostwrite for her famous sister, who was a soap opera star, and Kat was more than a little conflicted about it.

Kat had just finished her doctoral thesis after toiling over it for the past three years (Chaucer's Monk and Shakespeare's Macbeth: A Comparative Analysis of Tragedy). If I'd spent three years writing a paper, I'd probably be inclined to overindulge on alcohol, too, or that's what I told myself when I started to judge Kat's lack of temperance.

Liberty, who's a big fan of Shakespeare, claims Kat's thesis is filled with fascinating insights. I thought it was deadly dull. I read some of it and fell asleep twice, although I'd never admitted that to Kat.

Somehow, Kat's sister, Val, had latched onto the idea that Kat was cut out to be a ghostwriter of romantic fiction. More or less out of the blue, Val had gotten an offer to write a cowboy romance, solely on the merit that she starred in the wildly popular TV drama "Double Bar Ranch."

They even offered Val a ghost-writer along with the book deal. I think Val should have taken the offer, but instead, she'd insisted that this might be Kat's lucky break.

I had to admit that whatever Kat managed to produce in the way of a cowboy romance novel couldn't be less readable than Chaucer's Monk and Shakespeare's Macbeth: A Comparative Analysis of Tragedy.

"What are you going to do if they want you to get on a horse?" Liberty asked. Liberty is the practical one. Liberty always has a plan, and I think she expected Kat to have one, too.

"I'll think of something," said Kat. "Seriously, Bianca, you should come with me. You'd love Montana."

"I can't," I said. "I have to work."

The eco-fashion brand, Pure Threads, I'd started with my (now ex) boyfriend, Chad, was barely off the ground. Now was not the time to be jetting off to Montana.

"Can't Chad deal with things for two weeks on his own?" Kat demanded.

She'd directed her question at me, but her attention was elsewhere. I followed her stare.

A man wearing wire-rimmed glasses, an enigmatic expression, argyle socks, and the sort of cardigan you usually see on someone over sixty sat down three tables away. He placed a literary-looking hardcover book next to the empty wine glass, which he directed the waiter to take away.

"If I leave Chad to deal with things on his own while I run off to some ranch, I'd never hear the end of it," I told Kat.

"Have it your way." Kat shrugged. "But I think you're far too easy on that ex of yours."