Hush Life

Janna Rawlins' literary dreams have finally come true. At 26 years old, she’s relocated from small-town Florida to New York City where she’s sold her first novel. In the midst of her big break comes the deathbed revelation by her adopted mother about Janna’s biological origins, threatening Janna's new life and love in the big city.

* * * *
Chapter 11
The boy is smitten. Distracted. Aroused by a firm plushness captured with intensity in a grey pencil skirt, a charcoal tank top. Breasts, waist, lips. He’s been aroused since the end of spring semester in May when for him summer began. He was patient. Not like the boys at school always doing it with girls or claiming. Those girls were silly. She was a woman.

Bernard was his middle name. Sheila preferred to call him that because his first name was so seriously bloodline, adult. At boarding school, some of the boys called him “Bernie” because they knew it rankled him. Bernard – she respected the line he drew at “Bernie” – was more playful, relaxed. That’s how she saw him, his light side that he felt safe enough to shine with her.

She referred to herself as a nerd. To him, there was nothing nerdy about her. He preferred effortless beauty and once tutoring was finished she would finally set free the bush of dark wavy hair she was always trying to tame. Only a math wizard, he laughed, would have ordered glasses so exacting: not square, oval, round or rectangular but a soft trapezoidal shape that made her look artsy, more sculptor or photographer.

Her syllabus covered essential topics he needed for his final year: differentiation, integration, inverse trigonometry, matrices, probability, relations and functions, pre-calculus, calculus and linear programming.

Sheila tried not to smile whenever Bernard edited word problems. “So far” she said, trying not to grin, “we’ve looked at simple problems whose solutions required the use of, at most, two variables.”

Bernard leaned in toward Sheila’s neck. The warm flutter of his breath tickled. She struggled to maintain professionalism as Bernard traced the inside of her thigh with his index finger. Sheila felt a rush of heat and frisson in her depths.

“In these equations,” Sheila said, brushing his touch away and crossing her legs, “we’re going to review the solution of problems that require three variables.”
Bernard’s eyes rode atop his index finger, following a trajectory along Sheila’s left elbow, which was bent on his father’s desk. She tapped the eraser of her mechanical pencil on her workbook as she spoke.

Up the slope of bare shoulder Bernard navigated a path only he could see toward the middle of her neck tracing the trellis of vertebrae.
* * * *
Hush Life Q&A with Gina Greenlee:
Where did you get the idea for Hush Life?
A friend challenged me to get out of my “non-fiction rut.” I said, “You give me an idea, I’ll write it.” I laughed out loud at her one-sentence prompt it was so far afield of anything I would have considered. That’s how my debut novel, Hush Life, came to be.

Describe the plot in one sentence.
A contemporary romance with a twist.

Do you relate to your lead character in Hush Life?
My friend’s prompt deliberately included a protagonist I could relate to: a woman writer living in New York (I’m native to Manhattan). As I began to know Janna through daydreaming she became increasingly relatable because I tapped aspects of my personality to shape her.

Is the story based on true-life events?
Not at all. Janna is adopted, I’m not. She is from small-town Florida. I was born and raised in Manhattan. I loved seeing New York City through Janna’s eyes. It was fun to relocate her to that daunting metropolis where she finds an apartment, makes new friends, launches a career and falls in love.

* * * *
Gina Greenlee is the author of nine nonfiction books. Hush Life is her debut novel.