You, with a View: An Enemies to Lovers Romance - Softcover

Joyce, Jessica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 059354840X ISBN 13: 9780593548400

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

"Jessica Joyce is a new and forever fave!"—Ali Hazelwood

A USA TODAY BESTSELLER!
One of Amazon's Best Romances of July

Two high school enemies must reunite for a road trip inspired by their grandparents’ broken engagement in this electric debut romance.

Noelle Shepard is unemployed, living with her parents, and grieving the loss of her beloved grandmother when she discovers decades-old photos of Gram and a smitten man, tucked alongside a love letter. She creates a TikTok to search for the mystery man, which goes viral, and she’s shocked when his grandson responds—a man who happens to be her high school nemesis, Theo Spencer.

Noelle refuses to let Theo’s annoying accomplishments in adulthood—or his sexy smirk—stand in the way of meeting his grandfather and unlocking the secrets he knew about her gram as a young woman. When she learns that their plans to elope were thwarted, Noelle decides to take the honeymoon road trip they planned but never got to carry out. There’s a catch, though: Paul, Theo's grandfather, asks to come with her, and he insists that Theo join them.

It’ll be a miracle if they make it through the trip without Noelle throwing Theo out of the moving car—or the bed they end up sharing. As the miles tick by, the tension simmers hotter between them...until she discovers that Theo’s hiding a secret that could cause their tenuous relationship to end before it can restart.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jessica Joyce lives happily-ever-ongoing with her husband and son in the Bay Area. When she’s not writing character-driven, realistic and relatable tales of millennials who are just Doing Their Best while falling in love, you can find her listening to one of her dozens of chaotically curated Spotify playlists, trying out a new skincare face mask, crying over cute animal TikToks, or watching the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice.

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One

I wake up to two million views.

I don't know it at first. With my eyes closed, my hand traverses the obstacle course of cups, food wrappers, and ChapStick tubes on my nightstand to find my phone. All I want is to know the time.

Or maybe I don't. From the sunlight piercing my screwed-shut eyelids, it's embarrassingly late.

My fingers wrap around the charger cord, and I drag the phone across the nightstand, knocking the ChapSticks down like bowling pins.

Whatever. Future Noelle can deal with that mess.

I finally get a hand on my prize and illuminate the screen. But instead of the time, my bleary eyes snag on an avalanche of TikTok notifications. Even as I blink at the astronomical number, it keeps ticking, growing by five, by seventeen, by forty-two.

"What the hell," I croak.

Then I remember: my video.

My already sleep-weak grip fails me, and the phone drops onto my face.

The door flies open at my pained howl. Through watery eyes, I make out the general shape of my mom. "Noelle, what in the world?"

If this were a sitcom, this is where it would freeze: on me, twenty-eight years old, rolling around in my childhood bed, blinded in a freak iPhone accident after going viral on a social media app meant for teenagers.

The only thing that doesn't make me want to die inside is how many people have seen this video. My heart skips a beat. Maybe even the right person.

I knife into a seated position, my fingers pressed against my aching orbital bone as I fumble for my phone. From the doorway, Mom watches in bafflement, decked out in Peloton gear instead of a power suit. Must be Saturday.

"Are you okay?" Brown eyes that match mine slide to the bike in the corner of the room. On the wall, a neon sign cheers be awesome.

I can tell she's dying to turn it on. I wish I could tear it down. Nothing like waking up to aggressive positivity every morning when you're a grown adult who had to move back into your parents' house after getting laid off from a job you didn't even like.

"Yes, Mom, I'm great." I sigh, a headache blooming. "Just dropped my phone on my face."

"Sorry, sweetie. Hey! Since you're up, I'm going to get a quick ride in."

She says all of this in one breath, already at the bike with her special, extra-loud shoes in hand. The number of times she's woken me clacking across the hardwood these past four months can't be counted on all my appendages. It's not her fault she turned my childhood bedroom into a shrine to her two-thousand-dollar bike, though. None of us anticipated I'd be here again.

"Do your thing." I burrow back under my duvet and pull up my account on TikTok, my heart pounding.

Right there, on my latest video posted just over a week ago, is the number of views: 2.3 million. There are over four hundred thousand likes and sixteen hundred comments.

Holy shit.

What the hell happened? When I fell asleep at nine last night, I held steady at a paltry eighty likes. And, most crushingly, no comments.

My expectations were low, but they should've been lower. I created the account last September on a bored whim, then started posting my photography after seeing other photography accounts take off, though no one gave a shit about mine.

But hope starts with a seed, right? At least, that's what my gram used to tell me with a wink.

I keep all of the advice she gave me tucked in my pocket for when I need it, which was often before her death, and near constant now that she's gone. She was a fixture in my life from the start, the person I turned to when anything happened, good or bad. It's unconventional to call a grandparent your best friend, but Gram was mine from the time I knew what best friends were.

It took two months after she died before I could look at pictures of her without instantly crying. I have a voicemail of her singing "Happy Birthday" that I can't listen to, even six months later.

But this video-the one that now has millions of views-is as much a love letter to her as it is a question to the universe. Or a plea.

When you find out your grandmother had a secret lover when she was twenty, you want to know more. And when she's not around to answer the tornado of questions that kicked up the second you pulled those pictures out of a timeworn envelope in a box transferred from a dusty corner in her garage? Well, you have to find alternate means.

My dad was my first stop. I asked if he knew anything about Gram's romantic history, keeping it vague. I had to tread lightly-if he didn't know about the relationship, it might upset him. His grief was still as raw as mine.

"It was only ever Pop for her, and Mom for him. She always talked about how he was her greatest love," he told me.

His parents' relationship has always been a point of pride. Their love story set his own expectations sky-high, turning him into a hopeless romantic, and those expectations trickled down. It was a long-standing joke in our family-if it's not like Gram and Grandpa Joe, we don't want it.

Dad's eyes had narrowed with curiosity, maybe suspicion, at my ensuing silence. "Where'd that question come from?"

"Oh, nowhere," I said while a picture of her and another man burned a hole in the back pocket of my jeans.

So, Dad was out. And if he was out, everyone else in my family was, too. They'd just turn around and tell him.

I'd spent enough time on TikTok to know it was equal parts useless and transformative-insipid dance routines mixed with reunion videos that made me sob into my pillow at two a.m. If I posted the information I'd found and made it compelling enough, there was a chance someone would see it. There was a chance someone would know.

Maybe they'd know something about the collection of photos and the single letter Gram squirreled away for over sixty years. Maybe they'd know the handsome man in the pictures with wavy dark hair and a deep dimple named Paul-it was written on the back of the pictures in a steadier version of her loop-happy handwriting, along with the years: 1956 and 1957.

She married Grandpa Joe in 1959 after a whirlwind romance. I know their story by heart-Gram loved to tell it to me. But she never uttered Paul's name, not once, and that's strange. We played a game we affectionately called Tell Me a Secret constantly. I always told her mine, and she told me hers.

So I thought.

Before gathering up the nerve to look at the comments and confirm whether my answer is there, I decide to rewatch the video.

I press my thumb to the screen, and it starts up, playing the Lord Huron song I chose for maximum heartstring pullage. The text I added overlays each picture I hold up in the frame, the chipped mint polish on my thumb a stark contrast to the black-and-white prints.

There's a bite of grief looking at her face, which in its youth looked so much like mine. The architecture of our features is the same; people have always told us that. Twins separated by fifty or so years. Soulmates born in different decades.

The first picture is Gram and Paul standing in front of a house I don't recognize. The text on the screen reads: My grandmother passed away recently. I found these pictures of her and a man I never knew.

Then it's them at the beach, her looking up at Paul with a flirty grin on her face: The only info I have is his name is Paul and they knew each other in Glenlake, CA, sometime around 1956.

Next, it's a picture of them embracing, her cheek pressed against his chest, eyes closed: Her name is Kathleen, and I believe she was twenty in these photos.

The last is Paul sitting at a picnic table, his chin propped in his hand, gazing into the camera in a way that reveals who was behind it: This is a long shot, but if you...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059354840X
• ISBN 13: 9780593548400
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland