I just finished listening to Joshilyn Jackson read her most recent novel, Someone Else’s Love Story, and I’m stuck in her voice. It has earwormed its way into my brain and will remain there, earnest and Southern and sweet. I want it to remain there. I want to keep hearing her voice reading her words and I want to just sink into them. But I am about to join my husband for a viewing of Outlander and the voice is about to be chased out of my head.

I sort of don’t want it to. I love the show, and I’m excited for the episode but I still want to live in this space for a while yet. Have you ever experienced this phenomena, where you are in a story and it fills up your eyes, and ears and nose with its world and then the story ends and you can’t quite figure out how to handle it? I feel as if some limb has been cut loose from me, or a past experience sliced out, or like I moved houses in the middle of the night and woke up in a new one. Even writing this I hear it read in Joshilyn’s voice. It is her cadence and inflections and I’m just repeating them.

I absolutely love her books, all of them. But this one spoke to me in new ways. I’d read it when it first came out.

ASIDE: My husband bought it for me for Christmas and I found it while innocently! putting away laundry. So, I started sneak-reading it. Just bits and pieces of it, when he wasn’t around and marking my place with a teeny-tiny fold so I could find it but he wouldn’t notice. I hadn’t finished it by the time he wrapped it so I didn’t feel too guilty, and was also really excited to finish it so it wasn’t like I was lying when I enthusiastically thanked him for the gift. I’m pretty bad at showing my excitement for gifts and didn’t want to fake it, as I already look like I’m faking it, even when I’m sincere.

Back to the present: This reading was different because I knew what to expect and could pay attention to the rest of it more closely, and god, was it sad. It does end in a positive, we can assume HEA, but man, it made me feel a lot of feels. And I’m sort of mourning for the characters’ pain as well as my own pain at having finished the book. This book is not a romance novel. Not in the sense you might imagine. But it is a whole lot about love, about all kinds of love, and about how to keep love. And about what happens when love is not always enough. God, it was good.

But now I have to go and try and pay attention to a really great show when part of my brain will be thinking about how much I adore William Ashe and his rational, odd and loving brain. And Shandi and Walcott too. Goodnight guys, I’ll miss you.