When best friends Claire and Jo wake up trapped in a fantasy romance novel, Claire thinks it's a dream come true while Jo knows it's her worst nightmare - especially after they are almost killed by a monster and end up on the wrong end of a handsome...
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I BLASTED THE music from whatever radio station my mom already had on, which was almost always Top 40. At least it had been since my dad left. She couldn't stand grunge, rock, or anything with an electric guitar anymore. Whenever a hint of it snuck out of the speakers, she would change the station. "Come on, Jo, we get enough of that at home," she'd tell me whenever I protested. When she had to poke her head in my room whenever I practiced, her smiles turned brittle at the sight of an instrument in my hands.
But she never turned me away from music. One time she even said, "You're better than him." She hadn't meant anything by it, but those words swept me up in a fantasy of being a better guitarist than the shitty man who fled both our lives, surpassing him in every way. My real name was Joan Anderson, but after that day, I knew my stage name could only be Jo Austin – a direct call out to the man who left a prodigy and would fucking know it.
That probably wasn't the reason my mom encouraged me, and more because she was a good mom – from the lessons she scraped up enough money to pay for in the early days when we were on our own, and now offering to buy me a new guitar for my eighteenth birthday. I ground my teeth when I considered where she'd get the money for it.
"It was nice of your mom to loan us her car," Claire said, her voice barely louder than Doja Cat.
I turned the radio down. "She'd have done whatever to get us out of the house."
"Have you met this one yet?" she asked. Claire knew my mom jumped from man to man the way I could jump chords in a song. She just didn't know why most of my mom's flings didn't last long. The only consistencies about the men were the wedding rings they wore, I never met any of them, and they sometimes paid the bills. Mom didn't know I knew that part, though.
"No," I said. "It's been a couple months anyway. His time is almost up."
"Maybe this one's different." Her thumb brushed the spine of her old book affectionately. A hopeless romantic through and through.
"The only thing different about him is probably his name." But even that wasn't a guarantee. My mom used nicknames for the guys who held her attention long enough, like Coffee King, Paper Boy, Stethoscope. After one fresh breakup, my mom started talking to another guy with the exact same name as the last. She'd called him The Dupe. "Save all your fated soulmate crap for your books."
"It can't hurt to have a little hope," she said with a small smile. "What's that quote? Art imitates life? There has to be someone out there for everyone."
I didn't know what quote she was talking about. "You need to get out more."
"I do," she said, clutching her book dramatically to her chest. "Every time I read about Sir Ashwell taking Lady Heathwood to his estate."
We both laughed. "Case in point," I said. "We're about to go to a party, and you're holding onto that book like a lifeline."
"I know," she admitted. "But you do the same thing with your music. It's an escape. It takes you away from all this and transports you somewhere else less complicated and more... hopeful, I guess."
