Read Option

Name: Read Option
Author: Reese Carrow

by Reese Carrow

Heat 4/5 26 chapters · 5.5 h read

An injured NFL quarterback hiding out on Cape Cod meets a fiercely private MFA student who has no idea who he is.

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The story

An injured NFL quarterback hiding out on Cape Cod meets a fiercely private MFA student who has no idea who he is. As forced proximity and quiet intimacy pull them together, his hidden identity and her deep-rooted fear of becoming her mother threaten to destroy what they've built. A story about what happens when two people who've been performing their whole lives finally find someone worth being real for.

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Where it gets hot

Heat, chapter by chapter. No spoilers, just warning.

The world

Know your way around

Character

Caleb Morrow: The very large man who rents the gray house next door in November, with his right knee in a brace and his music loud enough to make Isla's coffee mug shake. He is smiling before he has registered her, and when the smile gets nothing, something sharper shows underneath.
Dr. Sato: Isla's MFA advisor, whose word for the thesis novel is 'unflinching', where Isla's is slow. Dr. Sato has the first fifty pages and wants the full draft by March, ahead of the defense in April.
Isla Brennan: An MFA student who works the morning shift at the Harbor Bean, writes her thesis novel in the afternoons and has her Wellfleet cottage through May. She notices everything, and she grew up watching charming men walk into her mother's life and walk out again, the longest of them after two years.
Meera: Isla's friend and lifeline by text, who checks in to make sure Cape Cod hasn't swallowed her. She is driving up on Saturday to take Isla to dinner, and by Isla's ruling, she's buying.
Ruth Okafor: The owner of the Harbor Bean, sixty-three and thirty-five years behind the same counter, in a navy apron with the logo she drew on a napkin the year she opened. She has a talent for silence that makes what she does say count double, and she asks a thing once and leaves it on the counter until you pick it up.

Football

Read option: A football play in which the quarterback reads one defender after the snap and decides on the spot whether to hand the ball off or keep it. The book takes its title from it.

Place

The gray house: The big gray rental next door to Isla's cottage, across thirty feet of shared gravel: four bedrooms, a wraparound porch and absurd weekly rates on a luxury vacation site. Nobody rents it in November, Isla tells Ruth, and Ruth says somebody did.
The Harbor Bean: Ruth's cafe on Main Street, where Isla works the morning shift beside an espresso machine that sounds like a whale dying in a clothes dryer. Danny Kowalski has come through the door at six-nineteen every morning for seven years, and Hemingway, the six-toed cat, sleeps on the chair by the window.
Wellfleet: The Cape Cod town where Isla rents a six-hundred-square-foot cottage to finish her thesis novel. From November through April it is stripped to its bones, not abandoned but resting, and that is how she needs it.

Writing

The thesis novel: Isla's MFA thesis: a woman named Elena goes home after her mother's death and finds the house on Marsh Street worth nothing, the lot poisoned by a dry cleaner's runoff and the inheritance a beautiful lie. Dr. Sato calls it unflinching, Isla calls it slow, and a hundred and eighty pages in, Elena still hasn't cried.

Spoiler-safe. Only what you learn in chapter 1.

The series