My Replacement Husband

My Replacement Husband (10) Speak Out

This chapter is dedicated to beloved reader AndreeaPreda042. Thank you for your amazingly insightful comments! I so so so love reading them. I could hang them on my wall honestly. They're great and so are you! <3 

"LOVE TRIANGLES ARE STUPID."

Yoona had marked up the entire page in red ink. It was stained on her fingers, comments scribbled in the margins, and there was even a random pen line drawn on her cheek.

"That's romance literature for you," I reminded her.

I wondered if we should have asked Mrs. Petras for the conjoined office space instead considering how much time Yoona spent out of her office and in mine. It wasn't like it affected our work, in fact, our many conversations about the work we were looking over had been the birthplace for best-selling revisions.

"They're cheesy and unoriginal," she deadpanned. "I love everything else about romance novels especially this one. The characters are so beautifully throughout. Their relationship is built on something more than 'your eyes are bluer than the sea' and 'look at my big, expensive car that's almost bigger than my—'"

She stopped when I glared at her. "Ego! I was going to say ego."

I nodded, knowing that was not how she wanted to finish her nearly vulgar sentence. You can take the girl out of the South, but you really cannot take the South out of the girl. I wasn't actively going to church anymore, but it wasn't like I was running around doing as I pleased either.

"Listen," she said. "There's no point to a love triangle. Everyone knows who the main lead is going to end up with. You'd have to be blind to not see it coming from a mile away. People act like they're surprised when Bella chooses Edward over Jacob. Hello! They're basically making out on the cover."

"Twilight is the mother of all clichés—and sparkly vampires," I told her as I send out another email to an editor.

"Even now they're all the same," she argued. "The point of a love triangle, if done correctly, is to have the readers on the edge of their seat wondering who the heroine picks. Usually, it's the new guy—all muscle and sexy smirks—cause who cares about sweet and sensible?"

"Hey! It's a modern era. You can have a six-pack, a three-digit IQ, and walk a girl home," I touted as if hidden in my office closet there was my male model boyfriend that I wanted to assure was more than just eye-candy to Yoona before I introduced him.

She wagged a manicured finger at me. "Then you fall into another trap of introducing a character only to throw them away. Aren't they just being used then? Characters are people too!" she shouted heroically.

I almost forgot she lead the peaceful protests for freeing Cambodian refugees at NYU every weekend for three months.

"Personally, I always root for the person who knows the heroine best. Wouldn't you want to be with the person who understands you?" I told her thoughtfully as if this was a real dilemma I had faced.

"All I know is, I love when it feels like even the writer doesn't know who the heroine is going to end up with. It's so satisfying in the end if it's the guy you've been rooting for but if the other guy is that good you have to give it to him too," she sighed. "All I know is Guillermo and Stella are the endgame couple. You'd have to be blind not to see it. Their chemistry burns hotter than California wildfires. Ricardo isn't just going to waltz in all shirtless and change that."

"It's not over for Ricardo until the story says so," I teased.

"Telenovelas can get quite wild," she admitted. "Watch Guillermo have a brain tumor or an evil twin or an evil twin with a brain tumor."