Behind the Scenes, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Karelia Stetz-Waters
Cover design and illustration by Vi-An Nguyen. Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stetz-Waters, Karelia, author.
Title: Behind the scenes / Karelia Stetz-Waters.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Forever, 2023.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022026253 | ISBN 9781538709252 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9781538709269 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Novels. | Romance fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.T47875 B44 2023 | DDC 813/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026253
ISBNs: 9781538709252 (trade paperback), 9781538709269 (ebook)
E3-20230118-DA-PC-COR
E3-20221205-DA-PC-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Epilogue
Discover More
About the Author
Also by Karelia Stetz-Waters
Praise
To Fay. You are my happily-ever-after.
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Acknowledgments
First, thank you to all my readers. Thank you for reading. Thank you for taking a chance on sapphic romance when you hadn’t read one before. Thank you for writing to me to let me know how you connect with my books and for sharing your life stories with me. Thank you for inviting me to your book groups and recommending titles I should read.
Thank you also to all the podcasters, bookstores, TikTokers, and Bookstagrammers who shared Satisfaction Guaranteed with their fans. I can’t tell you how touched I am by your praise and how much I appreciate what you do for readers and writers like me. And a special shout-out to the Haus of Bad Bitches at the Bad Bitch Book Club, the Steamy Lit book club, Reader Seeks Romance, the Fresh Fiction Podcast, Powell’s Books, Jan’s Paperbacks, Grassroots Books, and The Ripped Bodice.
Thank you to all the friends who support and celebrate with me. Thank you, Liz, Liz, and Scott, for social-distancing in my winter garage. I thought playing the fireplace channel on the TV would warm us up but it was your hearts that did. Thank you, Shannon, for parking-like-police with me—that’s parking driver’s-window-to-driver’s-window—when it was too rainy to sit outside and too COVID-y to be inside. Thank you, Maria, for Zoom-crafting through the pandemic. Thank you, Terrance, for your wise counsel and for having no objection to lunch at Ma’s Dairy Farm Tavern. Thank you to my friends and colleagues in the English department for staying true and strong when we were apart.
Thank you, Cas Taylor @_olygirlfilms, for talking to me about the life of an indie filmmaker. Thank you, Ross Smith, for talking to me about sound production.
Thank you to my editor, Madeleine Colavita. And thank you to everyone at Forever. Thank you also to my agent, Jane Dystel, who has been with me throughout my publishing career, and to everyone at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.
Thank you to my students, especially my creative writing students in the Golden Crown Literary Society Writing Academy, for reminding me what a privilege it is to be a writer and how important it is to support one another.
Thank you to the queer community. I love your strength, your perseverance, your openheartedness, the way you approach challenge with joy. Thank you, Keith and Jerred, for making Pride happen in rural Oregon and for 3D printing me a clitoris-shaped cookie cutter.
Thank you to Willa the Pug for working from home with me. I think my students really appreciated your insights into technical report writing. I’m sorry you got so attached that whenever we leave the house now you have to sleep in the Grief Closet by the front door.
And the biggest thank-yous of all…
Thank you to my parents for instilling in me the love of reading, for supporting my dreams, for modeling a loving marriage, and for so, so much more.
And thank you to my wife, Fay. Thank you for fighting for social justice every day. Working from home with you these past two years, I see just how much you do, how powerful you are, and how many lives you touch. And you still cook me a gourmet dinner every night. I’m not sure that me doing the dishes and picking snakes out of the yard is an equal trade-off, but I will always pick snakes out of the yard for you. I am luckier in love than anyone could expect. Thank you, sweetie. You’re my happily-ever-after.
Chapter 1
Rose Josten sat at a table under a patio umbrella gazing out at a sea of pugs. She wouldn’t have been able to pick hers out of the crowd except for the Gucci dog coats her sister Gigi had given them in honor of Rose’s birthday. Thirty-eight. Rose was not in middle-aged pug lady territory yet, but middle-aged pug lady territory was visible in the distance. Her dogs were visible in the distance because they were wearing coats with bows that made them look like fat butterflies.
Rose’s three sisters—Gigi, Ty, and Cassie—sat around the table, sipping lemonade from commemorative Portland Pug Crawl pint glasses.
“Designer labels are part of the capitalist conspiracy.” Ty, the youngest, hopped up onto her chair, folding her skinny body—she hadn’t inherited the Josten curves—onto the seat like an elf on a mushroom. The comment wasn’t directed at Rose. “Resist the machine.” Ty pulled at her T-shirt, which read, conveniently, RESIST THE MACHINE.
Gigi waved her perfectly manicured nails and dropped her voice to a stage whisper. “Rose is turning thirty-eight and all she has are those two little mutants. I had to go big.”
“I can hear you,” Rose said.
“Gigi, don’t tease your sister.” Cassie had four kids, and it was hard for her to turn off her maternal instincts. “And thirty-eight is a great age.”
Thirty-eight was exactly 2.8 years less than half the average life span of American women. Rose had checked.
“They are not mutants,” Rose added. “They are the product of three thousand years of inbreeding. You’re looking at the birth of GMO. And I have everything I want.”
Her dogs. Her health. An Athena profile that got hits when she bothered to set her status to SEEKING. A townhome that looked like a page from the Pottery Barn catalog because everything had come from the same page in the Pottery Barn catalog. And a job that allowed her to buy seven-hundred-dollar end tables without thinking about it. And she’d bought the Artisan Hand Painted Earthenware Vases and
“But are you sure you don’t want to do more for your birthday?” Gigi asked. “I know how you feel about flying, but LA is just an hour away. I have Ativan.”
Like that would keep the plane from crashing.
Also the flight to LA was two hours and ten minutes. Rose knew. She’d just sent her assistant there to discuss supply-chain logistics with the Crestwell Transportation Company.
“Crush Bar is having a Pants Off Dance Off,” Ty suggested. “It’s a dance party where people don’t wear clothes. You might meet someone.”
“Naked wearing only my shoes,” Rose said. “Please tell me people wear their shoes.”
“So that’s a yes?” Ty asked.
“Optimist. That is an I celebrate YOU doing that. And there’s nothing better than hanging out with my sisters and a million pugs.”
The tide of pugs moved toward their table, swarming around Gigi’s chair. Gigi eyed them the way she eyed bad haircuts that she’d like to get into her salon for fixing up.
“This is all I want,” Rose said.
This moment. Rose took a deep breath, part of her mindfulness practice, and released it slowly. The spring sunshine. Ty and Gigi play-bickering and Cassie mothering them all. The herd of adorable dogs. The promise of dinner at her favorite Thai place. The three days she’d taken off work…to do what?
“I’ve got everything I need.”
She felt a familiar pang of longing. This was her life. And it was wonderful, and it should be enough.
“I think Cupcake’s eating out of the trash,” Rose said.
She wasn’t just deflecting her feelings. Her dogs, Cupcake and Muffin, had flapped their designer wings over to the banquet of delicacies spilling from an over-full dumpster. Rose hurried over.
There were ketchup packets and beer-soaked napkins strewn about. Cupcake and Muffin had never had anything so wonderful. It was Michelin-starred. They saw Rose coming. They loved her, but they had to make a choice: their mother and goddess or a paper tray that had once held a hamburger. With surprising speed, Cupcake picked up the tray and dodged left. Muffin, realizing the desperation of the situation, swallowed half a hot dog whole, then wedged himself between the dumpster and the warehouse building behind it. Rose knelt and reached for him.
“You bottom feeder. You living trash compactor.” She grabbed Muffin’s bow, but he slipped away. “I am very disappointed in your life choices.”
Muffin had the audacity to wag his tail cheerfully, just an inch out of Rose’s reach. The air behind the dumpster smelled like the underworld.
“I will not accept that it was your brother’s bad influence.” The calm, reasonable tone that convinced clients there was only one good course of action and it was the one she had suggested did not work on Muffin. “There is a shred of free will left in that walnut-size brain, and you could have used it.”
Behind her, she heard metal clang. She stood up quickly. A woman had emerged from a steel door in the warehouse wall.
“Can I help you find something?” the woman asked.
She was pretty, with curly dark hair shaved on the sides and pulled back in a ponytail. She was about Rose’s age, but she wore ripped skinny jeans and a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt faded enough to be a 1990s original, a look that should have been reserved for twenty-somethings in a band but looked good on her nonetheless. Ty would have fallen in love with her immediately. Rose could admit this wasn’t the kind of woman you wanted to meet while fishing around behind the trash, but she’d long since gotten over being nervous around attractive women…if she’d ever been nervous around attractive women. It was possible she’d missed that developmental stage. Maybe Ty had gotten all the nerves-around-women genes.
“Just getting this demon out of the trash.”
The woman blinked against the sunlight. She looked like she’d been up for days. The door closed behind her, the words STEWART PRODUCTIONS stenciled in gray paint on the metal. Excited to meet another human, Muffin bounded out from behind the dumpster. Rose scooped him up.
“Why are there so…” The woman lost her words. She rubbed her eyes, looking perplexed. “There’re hundreds of them.”
“It’s a fundraiser for the Humane Society,” Rose said.
The woman reached out and petted Muffin, who had never met anyone so wonderful.
“So you’re making bad life choices? But there was so much good stuff back there.” The woman ruffled the wrinkles on his forehead. “How could your mother take that away from you? How could she stand in the way of joy?” The woman shot Rose a friendly, albeit fatigued, smile. She tweaked the bow on Muffin’s coat. “Gucci.”
“How did you guess?”
“The G.” The woman showed her the pattern on the underside of the bow. “Is it this year’s season?” The quirk of her smile said that she was teasing.
“Probably. It was a birthday present.” Rose rolled her eyes. “For me from my sister. Does that make it better?”
“Better than what?”
Being 2.8 years away from middle age and the kind of person who owns designer dog coats?
“Better than taking them to Nordstrom and then having the coats tailored?”
“Oh, you should always tailor pugs,” the woman said to Muffin, ruffling his neck fat. He goggled at her adoringly. “They have such big, manly shoulders, and such little spindly waists. I had a hairless cat.” The woman looked up. “We had sweaters custom-knitted for him, but, to be fair, that was my ex. I would have been fine with off-the-rack.”
She grinned, and the smile made faint laugh lines around her eyes and creases beside her mouth. She was definitely attractive. Tall. Lanky. Braless (not that Rose noticed) in a way that said I forgot to put on a bra not I want to show you my nipples. She had the sexiness of a cool hipster without the annoyingness of a cool hipster because she wasn’t twenty-two and didn’t take herself too seriously.
Rose liked how quickly we turned into ex.
Which was none of her business.
She reached for a reason to prolong the conversation. Could you give me the name of your cat-sweater knitter? Do you come here often? I’ll buy you a beer? Can you hold this dog while I look for his evil twin? For a moment, with the sun shining and the city glowing with new spring, it felt like anything could happen. Maybe she’d walk back to her sisters and by the time she reached them, she’d be the kind of woman who went to LA and danced naked in sneakers.
The woman gave Muffin a parting pat.
“Remember”—she directed the comment to Muffin—“you’re not overdressed; everyone else is underdressed.” To Rose she added, “Have fun.”
Then she was walking away with a slight limp and two enormous laptops Rose hadn’t noticed before tucked under her arm. And Rose was Rose Josten, senior associate at Integral Business Solutions, faithful sister, fearful flier, thirty-eight, holding a dog in a Gucci coat covered in dumpster grease.
Chapter 2
Ash Stewart leaned forward on the couch, the only piece of furniture in her spacious, atrium-style living room. Buying furniture was so taxing. A television and Xbox sat on the floor in front of her. She blinked as she met an untimely demise. The rocks protecting her stronghold exploded as Amphib the Destroyer and his minions swarmed. Her health status dropped to zero.
“Go again?” Ash’s friend Emma sat cross-legged on the sofa, looking like a prep school boy in her rugby jersey.
“How do you do it?” Ash tossed the controller on the sofa. “You don’t even play Death Con Six.”
The game’s theme song played. The screen asked if they wanted to restart from the last chapter.
“You’re old.” Emma grinned. “I’ve been playing since I was in the womb. You got an Xbox when you were, like, an adult.”
Ash was forty. She should defend forty. Forty was prime of life. But she’d stayed up until four a.m. drinking Mountain Dew, which should have made her feel like one of Emma’s young gamer friends, but it didn’t.
