“Hey,” he called as he made his way through the dining room that connected the kitchen and living room, announcing his presence so as not to startle her.
“Hey,” she said back, and there she was, cozied up on his sofa. He sat on the other end and looked at the screen.
“Benjamin,” she said, without emphasizing his name in that annoyed-schoolmarm way she usually did, “this”—she waved her arms around—“is awesome.”
“What? The apartment?”
“Yes, the apartment. But also your giant TV. Watching a match on your giant TV. All of the above. What’s with this place? Why is it so huge and nice? Who even are you?”
He shrugged, trying not to show how pleased he was by her approval. “I grew up in this apartment.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. Well, my parents had a house when I was born, but they moved up here—they owned the building—when I was little, so this has always been home.” When they retired, they’d bought a little house up the lake a way, and Law had done a remodel on the apartment to make it less of a family place and more of a swish bachelor pad—hence the giant TV. “What are you watching?”
“Just an old archived match. Sorry, I should have left when I finished today’s. This setup is just so amazing.”
She started to get up, but he motioned for her to stay. “You don’t have to go. It takes me a while to wind down after closing the bar.”
“Theater is the same. It’s hard to switch off right away.”
“I usually watch mindless TV for a while when I get home. This is as good as any. So don’t leave on my account.”
“Are you calling Crystal Palace versus Man City mindless?”
He quirked a smile. “I would never do that.”
They watched in silence for a few minutes until she said, “Benjamin?”
“Mmm?” He was getting sleepy.
“Are we having a truce?”
“It would appear so.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Bang, bang, bang.
Maya jolted awake in her bed, startled by a sudden pounding on her door.
“What the hell?” came a voice from nearby—a rough, gravelly, masculine voice. And it was very nearby.
Oh. My.
The pounding wasn’t on her door, and she wasn’t in her bed. She was on Benjamin’s couch, and someone was at his door.
She’d fallen asleep, and so had he, judging from the wild look in his eyes—his eyes that were inches from her own. He had the prettiest green eyes. They were the exact color of the moss that grew on the town gazebo, and they were bracketed by laugh lines of the sort that a person got when he was funny and friendly—to other people—and expressive.
It was annoying.
Bang, bang, bang.
Right. This was not the time to be admiring Benjamin’s eyes. “Get up,” she whisper-yelled. Somehow, though they had been sitting on opposite ends of the couch last night, now they were tangled up together, sort of half sitting, half lying on the sofa.
“I can’t until you get off me,” he “yelled” back, tapping her calves. Mortifyingly, her legs were stretched out on his lap.
His hands resting on her bare ankles suddenly felt like brands. She snatched her legs back. “What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch. “Ten thirty.”
Holy crap. “No one can know I’m here,” she said urgently.
“No shit.”
“Thanks a lot.” All she’d meant was that the old folks couldn’t catch wind of this. They would not accept the entirely innocent and entirely true we-fell-asleep-watching-football excuse, and she would have to spend the next year dodging their matchmaking attempts.
He placed his finger against his lips to signal for quiet as he smoothed his hair, which was sticking out at all angles in a way that was difficult not to find adorable. He disappeared through the dining room, and she could hear him sliding the dead bolt on the door. She went to the kitchen and pressed her ear to the door to eavesdrop.
“How’d you get in?” she heard him say.
“You gave me a key when I was building your pizza oven.” It was Jake. Strange. She hoped he was okay. As they’d been discussing last night, this time of year was hard for him.
“Right,” Benjamin said. “What can I do for you?”
“I know this is going to sound weird, but can you make me a pizza? Like, an uncooked one that I can finish at home?”
“Let’s go downstairs,” Benjamin said.
Why did Jake want a pizza at ten thirty in the morning on New Year’s Eve? They had just been talking about how Jake didn’t do New Year’s.
The more immediate question, though, was, Should she try to make a getaway while they were downstairs? In the winter, Benjamin’s pizza making moved into a small, conventional indoor oven in a tiny kitchen he had carved out of the back of the bar.
In the end she decided an escape attempt was too risky, so she went back to the living room to wait—and to ask herself what the hell had happened to her judgment. Why had she allowed herself to fall asleep here? Why had she come up here to begin with? Had she lost her mind? She and Benjamin argued. That was how they interacted. She was comfortable with that. She wasn’t comfortable cozying up on the couch with him in his apartment. Well, she was comfortable in a literal sense, because the dude really did have the best couch, the nicest apartment. She had pared her own life so close to the bone that being in a warm, cozy, welcoming place like this was so soothing. But she was existentially uncomfortable.
Benjamin was only gone a few minutes. When she heard him come in, she gathered her stuff and met him in the kitchen.
“That was Jake,” he said. “He wanted a pizza.”
“I heard.”
“And he wanted pineapple on it.”
“That’s Nora’s topping.” Curious.
“I know. But Nora’s in Toronto, right?”
“As far as I know. They have been getting kind of chummy lately, though, don’t you think?” Maya had assumed it was platonic, as Nora, who had recently been dumped in spectacular fashion, had been adamant she was done with men for a long while.
“I do think.” His brow knit. “Hmm.”
Maya didn’t have time to stand here gossiping about her friends. She had several decades left before she became one of those types. It was almost a new year, and she had a list of resolutions a mile long. She had a theater to save. “Thanks for…” She gestured back toward the living room.
“Anytime,” he said.
“Really?”
He didn’t answer, just opened the door. “Come on. I’ll make sure the coast is clear.”
It was, and as she was leaving, he said, “You coming in for New Year’s Eve tonight?”
She usually did, but she wasn’t in the mood this year. “So I can stand there and be the only one without someone to kiss at the end of the countdown? No thanks.”
Something flared in his stupid green eyes. He was probably about to say something mean, so she turned to go before he could. As she made her way down the stairs, the most absurd image popped into her mind: kissing him at the stroke of midnight tonight. She shook the ridiculous idea out of her head. Her brain was on the fritz. She needed to get more sleep—at her own apartment.
Chapter Four
Six months later
Law was accustomed to Maya staggering into his bar all bloody and dirty, but the tourists weren’t.
You could use the approach of Maya as a catalogue of who in Lawson’s Lager House was local and who wasn’t. For example, the old folks sitting at a table near the front door merely waved as she passed, unmoved by the poufy, baby-blue formal gown she wore and by the dramatic trail of blood down its front.
But when she pulled out a stool at the bar next to a woman nursing a White Claw, the woman screamed bloody murder. “Oh my stars!” She shot off her stool. “What happened? Someone call 911!”
Law c
huckled. If the woman’s reaction to Maya hadn’t given her away as an outsider, her American southern drawl would have.
Maya held up her hands like there was a gun and Miss I Have Bad Taste in Booze was holding it. “It’s fake! It’s a costume!”
“Oh my stars!” the woman said again, pressing a hand to her chest.
“Sorry to alarm you.”
Law bent down to grab Maya’s Riesling from a fridge under the bar, set a wineglass in front of her, and started pouring.
“We’re in the middle of a run of a murder mystery play,” Maya explained to the woman, “and I’m the victim. Also the director. Also the playwright.”
The tourist was delighted. “I have to say, your dress reminds me of the formal I wore when I was crowned Miss Louisiana Teen USA in 1989.”
“Louisiana!” Maya exclaimed. “You’re far from home!”
“It’s a long story.”
Law could practically see the pleasure centers in Maya’s brain firing. Maya loved stories, the longer and more riddled with twists and turns the better.
Someone farther down the bar hailed him, and after he’d served that customer and ambled back over, Maya was deep into telling the tourist about her current production.
“The show is called Dancing in the Dark—and it’s set during a prom in 1985, so you were right on track with your Miss Louisiana Teen USA 1989 observation. It’s about a girl named Heather who goes to the prom, and during the first song the lights go out. When they come back on…” She crossed her palms over her throat and made a melodramatic choking sound as she collapsed on the bar. But then she reversed course and popped back up, her wide smile at odds with her “murder.” Law twisted his torso a little, trying to put himself into the line of that smile—he still had never seen one full-on—but he wasn’t successful.
The tourist laughed, and when she spotted him, said, “May I have another White Claw, please?”
“I’m all out.”
“No he’s not.” Maya snapped her fingers at him. Snapped her fingers at him. He enjoyed sparring with Maya, but it genuinely riled him when she did that. “Give the lady another White Claw.”
Law tried not to be a booze snob, he really did, but White Claw was a bridge too far. Maya knew how he felt about the alcoholic seltzer. He’d decided to stock it because people kept asking for it, but White Claw did not belong on his menu next to the carefully sourced local craft beers and the cocktails he made from the best spirits he could get his hands on.
She glared at him. He knew how she felt about him being “snobby,” which was pretty rich coming from her. He wasn’t the one staging Greek tragedy, experimental theater, and “the classics, except gender swapped.”
She leaned forward over the bar, closer to him, her stare unwavering. He bent down and rummaged in the fridge for another White Claw, but he held her gaze the whole time, as awkward as it was. Despite the fact that he could identify the White Claw by feel, he couldn’t tell which flavor he’d retrieved.
“That’s a lovely corsage you have there.” The woman pointed to Maya’s wrist.
Maya had to look away or risk coming off like a weirdo in front of her new friend. So she did, but she gave Law one of her little eye rolls as a parting gift. Quick, subtle, almost undetectable.
But detectable by him.
Ha! He smirked, triumphant, as he held up the canned abomination. “Thought you might want to try black cherry this time.” He said it with the merest hint of snark in his tone, enough that Maya would hear it but the tourist wouldn’t.
The woman made a happy noise, and Law cracked open the new can for her before turning his attention to Maya. She was extra bloody today, and she had a “wound” on her forehead—that hadn’t been there last night.
It was interesting how she looked “bad”—she was a murder victim, after all—yet simultaneously amazing. It was confusing. But not any more confusing than being attracted to someone you didn’t like, and he was accustomed to living with that contradiction. So he turned his attention to playing his role. “I don’t understand why you don’t change at the theater before you come in here and scare my customers. Or, hell, even just wash your face.”
“You know there’s no shower in the theater. Anyway, I wasn’t at the theater. It was Murder at the Mermaid tonight.” She pointed in the direction of the Mermaid Inn, the site of her annual murder mystery play.
“Yeah, but you live right across the street. Why don’t you go home and change before you come here?”
She pressed her palms on the bar and leaned forward. “Benjamin. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe I come here dressed like this because I’m trying to scare your customers?”
That had actually not occurred to him. Even though their ongoing battle of wits raged as strongly as ever—they had experienced a détente of sorts last winter, but it had not lasted beyond the end of the soccer season—he didn’t think they truly wished each other ill on the business front. Hell, he was passing his wholesale discount on wine along to her.
“Eve and Nora are meeting me in a bit,” she said, “but I need to talk to you about the parking situation first.”
“I thought we came to a compromise on the parking situation.”
“We did. So why are there cars in my spots?”
“Murder mystery is at the Mermaid,” he said. “There’s nothing happening at the actual theater tonight.” Which was why he’d gone out and covered her signs, as he always did on nights when there were no plays. As per the agreement they had finally come to a couple months ago. Which one would think was a case in point on not truly wishing each other’s business ill.
“Those are my spots.”
“In front of your empty theater.”
“Benjamin. I told Holden Hampshire he could park there, and when he arrived, the spots were full. So he was late to the show, and he missed the big dramatic lights-out moment.”
The lights-out moments of Maya’s murder plays were pretty dramatic. The story would reach a fever pitch, and suddenly the whole place would go dark—which was when the “murder” happened. The audience always loved it, gasping in a mixture of fear and delight. “Who is Holden Hampshire?”
“Two Squared? Babble Town?”
“I have no idea what those words mean.”
She sighed, like he was an ancient fuddy-duddy ignorant of the ways of the modern world. “Holden Hampshire is a Toronto-based actor who used to be in a boy band called Two Squared. They sang that song ‘Petal Power,’ you remember? It was supposed to be about flowers, but the video was them goofing around on tandem bikes? Get it? Flower petal, bike pedal? I’m sure you’ve seen it.”
“Nope.”
“He was the token Canadian in the band, so everyone was obsessed with him? Then he was on Babble Town? That talk show on MuchMusic? He would interview musicians? Anything ringing a bell here?”
“Still nope.”
Cue the eye roll. “Probably due to your advanced age.”
The six years between them probably was enough of a gap to explain differing teen pop culture touchstones. Or would have been if he’d ever been the kind of person who cared about boy bands.
“I know who Holden Hampshire is, and I’m much older than you are,” Miss White Claw said to Law. She had been watching their conversation like she was a spectator at a Ping-Pong match.
“Thank you,” Maya said to the woman before turning back to Law. “He’s been sort of low-level famous since the band broke up,” she went on, “but his star is rising as an actor. He had a small part in that submarine movie, Submergence. I heard from a friend of a friend in the Toronto film scene that he was looking to try some theater and he has an open summer, so I hunted down the contact info for his agent, and I’m trying to lure him out to star in Much Ado about Nothing.”
She did that sometimes. Though her theater was mostly a community theater, which meant she cast actors from around the region, she sometimes brought in a big name from Toronto or the nearby Stratford Fes
tival to headline a show. But they’d never had a legit celebrity in town before.
“So the point is”—she leaned forward over the bar—“Holden Hampshire was going to come check out a show, and I told him to park in one of the reserved spots.”
The tourist whistled. “Ooh, you’re in trouble now!”
Well, crap. But he couldn’t feel too bad about it on account of his not being a mind reader. “Much Ado about Nothing, though? I thought the summer play was always a musical. I thought you were doing My Fair Lady.”
“I was, until my source told me that Holden was looking to try some Shakespeare. Apparently he wants to acquire some serious acting cred.”
“A boy-band dude is going to star in a Shakespeare play?” It was hard to imagine.
“Well, I don’t know, Benjamin. I wanted him to. I was intending to show him my directing prowess, but he missed the dramatic lights-out moment on account of the parking situation.” She deflated a little.
Aww, crap. He pulled out her wine and topped up her drink.
Maya’s friends arrived and pulled out stools. “Hey!” Eve said. “That went well!”
Nora climbed onto a stool with a little more difficulty than usual. She was pregnant and starting to show. It still blew his mind that Nora had managed to penetrate the fortress Jake had erected around himself.
“Did Holden leave already?” Nora asked.
“He sure did. I invited him for a drink, but he said he had to run and he’d call me.” Maya took a gulp of her wine without acknowledging the top-up—not that she ever did. “Well, actually, he said he’d have ‘his people’ call me.” Another gulp. “I don’t know what I was thinking. He’s way out of my league.”
Law topped up her glass some more.
“Also, he missed the dramatic lights-out moment because he had nowhere to park.” Maya was talking to her friends but looking at him.
He ignored her. He didn’t do glaring contests when they had an audience. He capped her wine bottle and stowed it in a fridge under the bar. “What can I get you ladies?”
As he was setting up Eve with a beer and Nora with a virgin mojito, Maya introduced them to the tourist.
Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella Page 4