A Thousand Miles Read online

  Praise for

  LOVE SCENES

  “An endearing and entertaining read, Love Scenes is the romance all lovers of Hollywood need.”

  —Shondaland

  “Morrissey’s sarcastically humorous voice shines in her debut contemporary romance and her characters (including Sloane’s big, beautiful family) will absolutely charm the pants off you.”

  —BuzzFeed

  “Real, raw, and immensely tender, Love Scenes is a book about second chances: in love, in work, in family. Bridget Morrissey writes with the kind of effortless warmth and complexity that elevates characters to real people you know and love, with quirks and flaws you understand.”

  —Emily Henry, #1 New York Times bestselling author of People We Meet on Vacation

  “Love Scenes is pure joy from start to finish. With Hollywood antics, a simmering slow-burn romance, and a tremendous amount of humor and heart, this book makes even its most famous characters feel like friends. A love letter to the messy, wild, wonderful families who make us who we are.”

  —Rachel Lynn Solomon, author of The Ex Talk

  “Love Scenes is an enemies to lovers story set against a Hollywood backdrop, but it’s so much more than that. It’s the messy love of a complicated blended family. It’s the ugly parts of Hollywood, not just the glitz and glamour. It’s a heroine fighting to be her own person despite what the gossip sites and a songwriting ex-boyfriend say. It’s an earnest, swoonworthy hero doing his best to be a good man, despite his past. Bridget Morrissey has a voice that leaps off the page and invites you to join her for a page-turning good time. Good luck putting this one down!”

  —Jen DeLuca, author of Well Played

  “A fascinating peek at the on-set lives of movie stars. Nuanced characterization and an endearing ensemble cast make this one a must-read!”

  —Michelle Hazen, author of Breathe the Sky

  “Morrissey is at her best when she allows Sloane’s musings to shed light on the caprices of the entertainment industry. Even as Sloane’s bond with Joseph develops with charming ease, her evolving relationships with a diverse array of relatives illuminate the many peculiarities inherent to understanding, accepting, and loving family. A compelling and unique riff on the potential of second chances in love.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Jove titles by Bridget Morrissey

  LOVE SCENES

  A THOUSAND MILES

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2022 by Bridget Morrissey

  Excerpt from Love Scenes copyright © 2021 by Bridget Morrissey

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Morrissey, Bridget, author.

  Title: A thousand miles / Bridget Morrissey.

  Description: First Edition. | New York: Jove, 2022.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021061103 (print) | LCCN 2021061104 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780593201176 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593201183 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3613.O7769 T48 2022 (print) |

  LCC PS3613.O7769 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061103

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061104

  First Edition: June 2022

  Cover illustration and design by Vi-An Nguyen

  Book design by Tiffany Estreicher, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_6.0_140224943_c0_r0

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Love Scenes

  Jove Titles by Bridget Morrissey

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Illinois

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 03: Natural Disasters

  Chapter 4

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 22: Snack Time

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 171: Etiquette Lessons

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Iowa

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 64: Uh-Ohs and No-Nos

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Nebraska

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 100: Hundredth Time’s the Charm

  Chapter 21

  Colorado

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 08: Animals

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 125: Psychic Encounters

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Did I Forget to Tell You?: Episode 176: Name Redacted

  Illinois

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Illinois

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Love Scenes

  About the Author

  To all the roads that led me here. I remember every mile.

  ILLINOIS

  1

  DEE

  It’s very hard to break up with someone you were never really dating. Which is why a man named Garrett I met three weeks ago on an app is currently crying in my bathroom.

  He doesn’t know I saw the tears. It would probably embarrass him if I mention it, so I am sitting on my couch reading listener emails while I wait for him to finish up, wondering if I should put on a movie or put him out of his misery and suggest he leave.

  My extremely nonchalant request that I “take a little more time for myself” was met with the classic “that makes sense” from him—a veteran move that made me entirely too comfortable with the whole process. I skipped right past the usual assurances: what a fun three weeks we’ve had, how great it’s been to get to know someone new after a recent rough patch. We’ve been having sex in my apartment and sometimes ordering delivery. I’ve never even tagged him in an Instagram story. I truly thought he understood what was going on with us.

  We have a similar dry humor. It’s how we connected in the first place. But tonight, for the first time ever, we went out to dinner together. He was so rude to the server in the name of being snarky that I thought I might walk myself straight to Lake Michigan and take up boat living. In the middle of a rainstorm, no less.

  My choice to continue our breakup conversation by saying, “We clearly aren’t the kind of people who should ever go out in public,” did not land as I’d hoped. He let out a hollow, wounded kind of laugh that made me immediately backpedal, even though what I said was true. In front of an audience of restaurant patrons, our connection had dissolved like cotton candy in water. All that sweetness between us vanished into nothingness. But I dared to call attention to it, and next thing I know he’s telling me he has to go to the bathroom, and tears are rimming his eyes.

  He doesn’t even have my number saved! Just three days ago, I texted him a meme while he was taking a shower, and from my nightstand I saw my full ten-digit phone number flash up on his screen. How could he not feel the straining awkwardness throughout our meal tonight? Is it really possible that my empty yeahs and colorless wows came off as anything other than detached? It’s all so absurd it makes me cackle. By the time he’s back in my living room—tears dry and brow furrowed—I am laughing louder than the thunder that booms outside.

  “What did I miss?” he asks.

  Everything, Garrett. You missed everything.

  “What’s my last name?” I prompt.

  “Um . . .”

  “Do you know my job?”

  “You record a podcast or something.”

  “How many siblings do I have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your name is Garrett Matthew Robertson. You work i
n finance, in an office near the Hancock building. Your little sister Hannah just graduated from college. Communications degree from DePaul. Send my congrats, by the way.”

  “Okay, so you’re a stalker. Good for you.”

  There it is. The darkness that always comes out at the first sign of real trouble. A bruise that blooms from whisper-soft pressure. It’s amazing how quickly it happens. How little effort it requires on my part.

  “I’m a stalker?” I ask.

  Predictably, he has no follow-up.

  “We’ve been hooking up for weeks and I follow you online,” I continue. “Your full name is in your bio. You post a skyline shot almost every day. I watched part of your sister’s commencement ceremony when I accidentally clicked into your graduation livestream.”

  Garrett glances forlornly at my door. He pushes back the top part of his hair—a truly aspirational sandy blond, if I’m honest—then lets it fall again down his forehead. “Look, this clearly isn’t working.” He says it with such finality, you’d think it was his idea. If it gets him out of my apartment, he can keep thinking that for the rest of his life.

  Still, it’s hard to resist a comeback. “Good observation.” I give him a thumbs-up.

  “Dude, why are you so fucking mean? Like what the fuck?” At once, he gets teary again.

  Now I recognize it for what it is: a manipulation tactic. No one gets the upper hand over a handsome man who is crying.

  “I’m mean?” I ask, incredulous. “For asking if you know my name?”

  “I don’t have time for this shit.”

  He picks up his overnight bag and huffs to my door. He’s still wearing his shoes, because no matter how often I ask, he never takes them off right when he enters. It’s such an irritating little detail that I almost throw a pillow at him, but he exits too quickly for me to react, slamming my front door shut with an aggressive theatricality my nosy neighbors will certainly register. Add it to their long list of grievances against me.

  It devastates me to realize my heart is racing—that Garrett Matthew Robertson the finance bro has gotten any kind of reaction out of me at all. In an effort to release every last ounce of residual adrenaline, I slip off my bra and lean back into my couch, letting the green velvet cushions hug the sides of my face. Not the most orthodox of calming methods, but it gets the job done.

  I can’t believe I put on nice clothes for this. What a waste of a powder-blue halter jumpsuit and teardrop earrings. I could feel myself overdoing it when I was getting ready. It’s been months since I bothered to curl my hair into long copper waves. In spite of every piece of evidence to the contrary, there was a part of me that wanted to believe that Garrett and I had the potential to be something more than hookup buddies.

  No choice but to incinerate that part of me to dust!

  Three minutes later, he’s knocking. He may not know my last name, but it’s nice to see he remembers that my apartment door automatically locks and he can’t just barge back in and yell, or whatever it is he thinks he needs to do to prove this was all a part of his plan, not mine.

  “What do you want?” I call out.

  He doesn’t answer.

  It infuriates me to imagine him waiting for me, ready to unleash a list of grievances he made up on his walk toward the train station. I gave him a chance to go quietly, and he’s not taking it. Neighbors be damned. I want a fight.

  With as much gusto as possible, I swing my front door open and bark out one loud, aggressive “What?”

  It is not Garrett Matthew Robertson the finance bro waiting on the other side.

  Instead it is the last person in the world I ever thought I’d see again.

  Ben Porter stands in front of me.

  It takes me a second to orient myself. Surely this is an alternate reality intersecting with my current one, and Garrett accidentally got swapped for Ben, and soon the ceiling will become the floor and I will learn that we all speak colors and smell numbers.

  He has one battered duffel bag slung across his taut midsection and three dark beauty marks dotting his left cheek. Those moles are my very own Orion’s Belt, because that’s the only constellation I ever bothered to learn, on the only face I’ve ever cared to memorize.

  His eyes are still brown and bashful. His hair is long enough to curl at the ends, soft brown waves ringleted by the rain, contrasting with the new sharpness in his cheeks. A stipple of scruff further accentuates the angles. No more worn-out Chucks and rumpled band shirt. No more baby face. He looks steady. And well aware of how good a drenched navy blue tee looks clinging to his skin.

  “A promise is a promise,” he whispers, soaking wet and breathless, dripping puddles onto the carpeted hallway of my apartment complex.

  My hands lose feeling. My mind insists on running a highlight reel of memories for me, making sure I haven’t forgotten that this is a person I’ve slept with, and dreamt of, and written intensely embarrassing Notes app poetry about that I’ve already asked my cohost, Javi, to read on our podcast in the event of my untimely demise. Just so Ben would really feel my absence.

  Now I feel his presence, and my first instinct is to close the door, lock myself in my bathroom, and stare at myself in the mirror until the pores on my nose upset me for a week straight. But as impulsive as I can be, I am occasionally great at silencing my first instinct and waiting for a better one to emerge.

  It turns out in the event of my high school best friend arriving unannounced in the middle of a thunderstorm—after an entire decade of complete silence between us—my second instinct is to intimidate. I fold my arms across my chest, mostly because I am furious at myself for daring to answer while not wearing a bra. Lucky for me, the gesture lends to the steely mood I’m hoping to strike.

  “What does that mean? What are you doing here?” My foot taps against the floor as if my time could be better spent looking anywhere but at Ben Porter’s face.

  If he’s expected a kinder greeting from me, he doesn’t show it. Instead he smiles. A heartbreaking, earth-shifting, choir-of-angels-singing kind of smile.

  “Hi, Dee.” He pauses. “It’s good to see you too.”

  At once I’m flooded with the same bone-deep nostalgic longing that makes me open YouTube at three in the morning and watch all the videos we posted together back in the day. I’ve made all of them private so my listeners don’t stumble across them and uncover the one thing I refuse to directly discuss on my show. The first time Ben was ever mentioned while recording, I made Javi bleep out his name in post. Now Ben is known on the podcast as Name Redacted, an infamous, mysterious side character in my otherwise very open-book life.

  One of our YouTube videos is ten minutes of us walking around our hometown. We spend the first half coming up with an elaborate undercover identity for our science teacher, Mr. Davis, all while navigating the aftermath of the previous night’s snowfall. The video takes a turn when Ben steps into a snow pile that’s not sturdily packed, and he ends up chest deep. Instantly, the two of us are nearly heaving we’re laughing so hard. I can’t grab onto him tight enough to pull him out because my arms are getting a tickle sensation. It’s so cold his cheeks are flushed berry red. I set the camera down on another snow pile, and for the rest of the video, all you can see is his face and my back. And the way he’s looking at me. It’s like I created the universe with my own bare hands.

  Here’s that very same Ben Porter. And the way he’s looking at me right now—it’s really not that different from the old clip of us. Even though everything is different. Down to the shade of red in my hair and the city we’re in and surely every single thing about our lives.

  “Can I come in?” he asks, because I have been standing here waiting for the sky to fall through the roof. “I can explain everything once I’m inside.”

  “I don’t know if I want you to,” I accidentally admit.

  Ben backs up until he’s against the wall across from my door, a trail of rainwater marking his path. He slides down until he’s sitting, all the while never breaking eye contact. “I understand. This is a lot.”