SEARCHING FOR MOORE

Schooner & Mia Special Christmas Scene

Attended by reality TV star wannabes and Southern California social climbers, Schooner Moore knows the party his wife is throwing for his forty-third birthday has little to do with him and everything to do with her social standing in Orange County. The evening turns out to hold more surprises than just his wife’s Botoxed friends groping at his privates, when a conversation with his old college roommate, Beau, reveals the biggest surprise of the night.

Beau has had contact on Facebook with Mia Silver. Just hearing her name sends Schooner into a tailspin, as he is now just a Friend Request away from the one who got away when she disappeared without a goodbye, leaving him wondering why she left.

A serial failure at romance, Manhattan boutique ad agency owner, Mia, gets a blindside of her own when a Facebook Friend Request from first love, Schooner, appears in her email. Going with her gut reaction, Mia hits accept, propelling her past to catch up with her in a New York minute, as a forceful Schooner is determined to understand what tore them apart and to explore the possibility of a second chance at love.

From a 1980’s Southern California college campus and a devastating first love to present day New York City, Searching for Moore explores how technology has eradicated the divide between our past and our present, and asks whether you would give up everything to reconnect with The One in a single keystroke?

Prequel: The Christmas Before…
Lying on the soft down comforter they had dragged in front of the fireplace, he held her tightly to his still heaving, muscular chest. Kissing the top of her head, the way he always had, Schooner Moore worked to steady his breath as he listened to Mia trying to regain hers. 
“Do you have any idea of what you do to me, Baby Girl?”
Looking up at him, her ombre green eyes glistened in the fire’s light, “It’s smoochal.”
She knew how to make him smile. They had a language all their own, as if no one else existed when they were together.
Wrapping his arms around her tighter, this was a moment he already knew would become a memory that would forever be held close. Silently, from where they lie, they gazed out the floor to ceiling window, watching snowflakes dance in the lantern-shaped streetlights below, gently swirling and pirouetting around the glass enclosures before scurrying off on a gust of wind. Schooner knew that on this Christmas Eve, he was finally, for the first time in his life, experiencing Christmas as it had existed in his dreams. For over twenty years, holding Mia Silver in his arms was the present for which he had wished and waited.
“You want to go out and play in it, don’t you?” Mia’s devil smile was daring him.
“The last time I was in snow with you, you threw a snowball at my head.” He pulled her naked body on top of his, grabbing her ass and pressing her down onto him, so that she could feel her effect.
“Yes, I did,” she laughed at the twenty-something year old memory from back when they were in college. Grinding herself down onto him, still so sensitive from making love, she gasped, her eyes attesting to both the surprise and delight.
“I fell in love with you that day,” he admitted, spellbound, as he gazed up into her eyes. He had dreamed of her eyes for so very long and now they were returning every bit of love he was telegraphing at them.
“Well, you were late to that party, Pretty Boy.”
Throwing his head back with laughter, he was in awe of this woman. Pretty Boy. Ha. She was never afraid to call him out on his shit and he loved her for it. She loved him for him. Not because he looked like a movie star, or because he was built like an Olympic athlete, and she certainly wasn’t fazed that he was rich as sin. She saw through all the masks and loved him for what was behind them. Masks were never needed around her. With Mia, it was so easy just to be. As it always had been.
Flipping her onto her back, he pushed the curls from her eyes. “I’m never letting you go again, you know that.”
Her simple nod told him everything he needed to know. Everything he had waited over twenty years to hear. 
She was his. 
And he would never lose her again.
********
” ♫… if only in my dreams …♫ ” 
That iconic, melancholic phrase, one that got to him every single time he heard it, snapped him out of his reverie, just as the song was ending. Taking a deep breath of sea air and letting it out slowly, he realized he was daydreaming of her once again. 
Shaking his head to clear away the leftover vestiges of his fantasy, he acknowledged that it had been a while, a long while, since she had last invaded his thoughts. He didn’t let himself go there very often anymore. There was just no point.
Tonight, on Christmas Eve, he felt particularly alone as he sat on the deck of his sailboat, the lights of home, and Newport Beach Harbor, in the not too far distance. I’ll Be Home for Christmas playing on the radio turned out to be the trigger, the thing that sent him hurtling back in time, back to her.
Reaching for the bottle of single malt scotch, he freshened his drink. He was actually glad that no one had wanted to go out on a late night sail with him. He needed to be alone and yet, he didn’t end up alone. Tonight she had found him.
Under the stars, in the dark of night, was always when he felt closest to her. Bringing back ancient memories, memories that always elicited his real smile and a sting at the back of his eyes. The whole world had been before them as they would lie on a blanket on the grass at the center of their college campus, picking out constellations, laughing at the irreverent names they made up for them, looking for “signs” from the universe and dreaming of what the future was going to hold for them … together. 
A future that would never come to pass.
Looking up at the stars, Schooner called them out on their treason, “Liars,” he pointed at them, scotch glass still in hand, “freaking, twinkling little liars.”
Shaking his head at the sky, he knew it was time to call it a night, as he stepped down into the boat’s cockpit and started the engine for his journey home.
What Schooner did not see that night, as he turned away from the sky, was the heaven’s almost immediate response to his harsh reproach, with a very clear answer of its own. As if screaming at him in a language all its own, ranting about miracles and hope and faith and second chances, a bright white blaze streaked over his head, slashing the night sky. 
The universe had finally rewarded him with a sign.
But, on that lonely Christmas Eve, as Schooner Moore focused on making his way back to safe harbor, he never saw the universe’s unmistakable message.

Author Julie A. Richman is a native New Yorker living deep in the heart of Texas. A creative writing major in college, reading and writing fiction has always been a passion. Julie began her corporate career in publishing in NYC and writing played a major role throughout her career as she created and wrote marketing, advertising, direct mail and fundraising materials for Fortune 500 corporations, advertising agencies and non-profit organizations. She is an award winning nature photographer plagued with insatiable wanderlust. Julie and her husband have one son and a white German Shepherd named Juneau.

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