Progress on Just A Touch has slowed – work, family, and stuff are distracting me, in a good way. I keep remembering Steven King’s advice to let a chapter or chapters ferment before taking an editing pass. And when I do that, the work gets better (at least I think so).

In this excerpt from Chapter 23, we find Maya contemplating her image in a mirror. She’s thinking about her life, her age, and her new lover.

Maya looked at her image in the mirror, ran her fingers through her hair, and wondered if this was a part she wanted to play.

Girlfriend or one-night-stand? she thought.

Except for the application of face makeup, she rarely looked at her full image, and she couldn’t remember the last time she studied her reflection. Growing up in Barcelona, her girlfriends called her Machorra, the girl who would rather play soccer with the boys than gossip with the girls. She never saw herself as attractive or special.

They were two weeks into the relationship, and each morning she swore to stay in control and not let him get too far inside her head. Maya’s been here before, and she resists making plans or elevating expectations.

She turns to the mirror, and in her mind, her reflection had not changed much since her twenties. A face more oval than round, thin lips with a rounded cupid bow shape, and ears she kept hidden under her bronze hair. This morning, it was the same Maya, but a little different, a little older. She noticed the emergence of fine lines around her eyes, and the skin along her cheek and jaw was no longer as firm and taut. She turned her head from side to side, thinking it was the lighting.

She was feeling like her days as a coed, at the beginning of the road. A blink and suddenly, she was somewhere near the middle. It was time to confront the demons of age and get on with her life.