She laughed. Leave it to Ben to make her laugh in the middle of an apology. He wasn’t wrong about the play. “Romeo and Juliet are both jerks.”
“So why stage it?”
“Everyone loves it. It’s a crowd-pleaser.”
“Like My Fair Lady.”
Yes. She loved that he remembered that. He did that—remembered little things she said.
“I talked Sadie into blowing it off,” he said. “The concert tickets came with a hotel room. I really wanted to go, and I didn’t realize how much damage us going would do here. To you. It was careless. And for what it’s worth all these years later, which I realize might not be a lot, I’m sorry.”
It was amazing what a simple apology could do.
Also amazing was how, now that she had it, she realized she didn’t need it. That Ben Lawson had been kind to her for so long. Which was a confusing thing to ponder, but if you looked at what he did, at his actions, the conclusion was unmistakable. He stocked special wine for her that he barely charged her for. Put the Spice Girls on his jukebox. Came to all her plays. Let her watch football at his house in the middle of the night.
Steadied her when she was about to fall—literally, like that time at the dunk tank, but also metaphorically, like…right now.
But she didn’t know how to say all that. So she smirked and said, “You and Sadie, eh? What was up with that?”
His eyes widened. He was surprised she wasn’t going to make a bigger deal of the apology. “Yeah, I don’t know, except she suddenly asked me out that summer. She was a year older than I was. You remember she went to Western before she came back and opened the diner?” Maya nodded. “She was still in school at that point but was home for the summer. She seemed so worldly.” He rolled his eyes, like he was annoyed with his own bullshit.
“What happened with you two?”
“Nothing. We only went out for a month that summer. She was…”
“What?”
“Boring,” he said immediately, then winced like he’d verbalized something he hadn’t intended to. “Please don’t tell anyone I said that. Sadie is really sweet. There’s just…”
“Not a lot under the surface?” That had always been Maya’s impression, but she figured she wasn’t the most reliable judge of character when it came to her runaway Juliet.
He nodded but made a face like he was chagrined to be agreeing.
“What show was it?” she asked.
“What?”
“The concert you won tickets to.”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes. If you ruined my play to go see, say, Beyoncé, that’s one thing.”
He chuckled. “No, it, uh, wasn’t Beyoncé.”
“Tell me who it was! Let’s see, this would have been, what?” She tried to send her mind back. “Twelve years ago?”
It was his turn to close his eyes. Ooh, he didn’t want to tell her. Which meant she absolutely had to know. “Ben Lawson, I won’t forgive you until you tell me who it was.”
He sighed, opened his eyes, and mumbled, “It was the Jonas Brothers.”
A shocked laugh ripped from her throat. “What? Mr. I Don’t Know About Boy Bands! And this would have been original Jonas Brothers, not latter-day, married-to-women-out-of-their-leagues Jonas Brothers.” She threw her head back and let herself laugh unreservedly. It felt good.
“It was free!” he protested, but he was laughing, too. “It was the trip as much as the concert.” But he sobered quickly. “It was stupid, though. I ruined your play for the Jonas Brothers. But somehow, all these years, if I’d thought about why you hated me, I wouldn’t have put two and two together. I wouldn’t have connected it back to that.”
“I don’t hate you.” Not anymore. Had she ever? Truly? “And I’m not sure it was ever hate, anyway. I…” She hardly knew how to explain it, even to herself. “I was mad, for sure. But, I don’t know, I moved back here and we had a couple legitimate business spats, and the animosity sort of accreted. And then we just…” She waved her hand back and forth between them.
“Started feuding?” he supplied, an odd cheeriness in his tone.
“Yeah, and now it’s like a habit more than anything.” It was her turn to wince. “That sounds terrible.”
“No, I know exactly what you mean. It’s like we didn’t hate each other so much as we enjoyed fighting with each other.”
Why was he using the past tense? Did that mean they weren’t going to fight anymore? The thought was oddly disappointing.
Also, forget fighting, were they going to keep sleeping together?
And if not, which would she miss more?
“Anyway,” he said, “I really am sorry.”
She sighed. She’d been trying to brush off the apology, but she was going to have to engage with it, wasn’t she? “It’s okay. I mean, I was mad at the time. I was actually really hurt.” That was hard to admit. “But really, that should have been directed at Sadie. I just…Arg. In a way, you guys did me a favor. After that play, I made sure I always had understudies. If I wasn’t acting in a play, just directing it, I learned the whole play so I could step in myself if need be.” She had learned a good lesson that day. “I got really obsessive about my backup system, until…”
“Holden.”
Right. Amazingly, though she had come up here crying, feeling like she was going to break into pieces on account of Holden, she’d forgotten about him while they were talking. That was the power of Ben. “I should have had someone else learn the part. But I thought, well, Holden moved here for this, so he’s going to be reliable. And who’s going to understudy Holden Hampshire, anyway?” She blew out a breath. She was so frustrated with herself. “What am I going to do?”
“You’re going to come to the beach with me.”
“What?”
He stood and extended his hand. “Come on. I have an idea, but it’s too beautiful a day to talk about it inside.”
“What about the bar? You can’t just leave the bar closed.”
“You know what? It turns out I can.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Law could leave the bar empty and locked in the middle of the afternoon. He could take a loan against the bar building and open a restaurant. He could apologize to the woman he loved for hurting her, albeit unknowingly, in the past.
He could do all these things, it turned out.
So the next thing was easy. “I think we should apply for the grant together.”
Maybe he should have dropped the bomb on their way to the beach, rather than wait until they were right at the edge of the water, because she started so violently he feared for a moment that she was going to trip and get wet.
But she steadied herself and turned to him. Bewilderment gave way to incredulity, and he could tell she was gearing up to argue.
Bring it.
“What on earth are you talking about?”
He smiled. “I’m talking about a joint application. Think of it as risk pooling. No, it’s more than that. We’ve been bickering about business-related stuff all this time, but what if we flipped the script? A restaurant and a theater. They complement each other. Why not stick our lots in together?”
“But you’re probably going to win. So if we shared, you’d be giving up half the grant.”
“That’s not true. You’re going to win.” He truly believed that.
“I am not! You already have a successful business.”
“It’s apples and oranges. I sell beer. People will always pay for beer. You’re a nonprofit. This town is organized around its festivals. And what’s at the center of every festival?”
“A pack of meddling old people?”
“No. A play. Your plays.”
She sucked in a breath.
He gestured across the beach, which was fairly crowded but thankfully not populated by any of the old folks. He’d brought her here hoping to make a point he was struggling to articulate even to himself. “Sandcastle Beach. The site of so many battles. T
hink of all the years we spent competing. Think of all the energy we spent. What if we had worked together? Can you imagine the sandcastle we could have built?”
“What are you saying? Is this a metaphor? My brain is too tired for metaphors right now.”
He smiled. “The new restaurant will need business. You want to keep theater attendance up in the post-Holden era. What if we offered dinner-and-theater packages? Maybe we could each draw customers we might not have had without the other. If we work together instead of against each other, we might find that we’re more than the sum of our parts.”
“We’re more than the sum of our parts,” she echoed, a note of astonishment in her tone.
“So I’m thinking, what if we divide the money into thirds? You use a third for building repairs. I’ll use a third as a down payment on Jason’s house. So each business is getting a new lease on life, so to speak. Then we take the final third and use it for stuff that will benefit us both—and the town.”
“But you’re going to need more than thirty grand to buy Jason’s house. You’ll still need a mortgage.”
“Right. The grant was never going to be enough to allow me to buy the place outright, and—”
“But you said it was enough to—”
“Will you let me talk, woman?” He rolled his eyes, but he smiled as he did it. She rolled hers back, but she stopped talking. “I’ve learned something from you this summer.” Her mouth fell open, but she didn’t interrupt him again. “I learned that sometimes you have to take a risk. I’ve been thinking about that Junior Achievement panel. You did start something from nothing when you opened that theater, and I admire the hell out of it. Sometimes you just have to take a risk.” In more ways than one. But one risk at a time. “Watching you taught me that.”
“Sometimes you just have to take a risk,” she echoed, astonishment and happiness battling it out on her face. “But that third of the grant, that shared third, if we play it right, can mitigate the risk for both of us.”
“Exactly.”
“We could do behind-the-scenes packages. Meet the actors at the bar afterwards. Or your chef caters a meal backstage for people who buy VIP tickets.”
“See—you have all the good ideas.”
“Well, this whole collaboration was your idea.”
“Yeah, but that was obvious. It was staring us in the face.”
“I didn’t see it.”
“Well, maybe you’re not as smart as I am.” He winked.
“Are we going to fight now about who has better ideas, except in a new twist, we’re each arguing for the other?”
“Maybe.” He for one hoped this peace treaty wasn’t going to be the end of all fighting. Giving up bickering with Maya would be like giving up seeing the world in color. “There is one flaw in my plan, though.”
“There is?”
“You were going to use the grant money to set up a fundraising program.”
“If I won. Honestly, I was already a little worried about that being the centerpiece of my application. Fundraising will support the theater, not the town. It’s not actually very community-minded.”
“But the theater is a big part of this community.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of what you were just trying to persuade me of seconds ago?”
“No! I just want you to see what you’re giving up.”
“I see it. And I’m not really giving it up. I’m just postponing it. We get the grant, we do the joint stuff, we add volume to both of our businesses, I can use that increment of new profit to set something up fundraisingwise.”
He couldn’t hide his grin if you paid him. “Okay, then.”
“All that time we spent fighting about the pizza oven, we could have been leveraging the pizza oven for the common good,” she mused.
“It kind of blows the mind, doesn’t it?”
“You know what? I secretly love your pizza. Nora has been smuggling it to me since she moved here.”
“Really?” Another thing that blew the mind.
“Really. So…” She trailed off, all coy and adorable. “I think this means I should get my pizza for free from here on out. Because we’re basically business partners now, right?”
And ideally a whole lot more, but, again, one thing at a time. A chat on the beach wasn’t enough to make his case on that front. For that he needed an action plan.
A person of words and not deeds is a garden full of weeds.
But for these deeds, he needed help.
Handily, he lived in a town full of helpers.
Maya was looking at him kind of funny, so he got his head back into the game—this game, the business-partners game. If they were going to mix business and pleasure, which he sincerely hoped they were, they needed this part cleanly squared away. He would never want her to think one was contingent on the other. He would design dinner-and-theater packages with her and leave it at that if that was what she wanted. His heart would break in the process, but he would do it. So he held out his hand for her to shake. “Yes—business partners. And yes—all the free pizza you can eat.”
She shook his hand, but she seemed a little underwhelmed.
“We can win it, right?” he asked. Maybe that was what she was concerned about. He hadn’t been keeping up on who else was applying.
“Are you kidding me?” she said, shaking off her seriousness. “What’s more community-minded than joining forces to provide arts and dining for the town and to lure in tourism dollars?”
He liked that idea. He also liked the idea of just…having her around while he made the big restaurant leap. Between Maya and Brie, he sort of felt like he couldn’t go wrong. Smart women saving his ass. “There is one more thing we have to discuss.”
She smiled widely, which was a bit confusing, because he wouldn’t have thought this topic would inspire that reaction. “And what would that be?”
“Holden.”
The smile evaporated. “What’s there to talk about?”
“Where he’s gone so I can go drag him back by his hair?” And who would have ever thought Law would find himself in a position of wanting Holden Hampshire around?
“LA,” she said dejectedly.
“Give me his number.”
“You’re not going to get him back.”
“I know, but I’d like to have a few words with him.” She raised an eyebrow. “I promise I’ll be civil. I just want to talk to him.” The eyebrow went higher. “Do you trust me?”
“I…do.” She sounded surprised. She gave him the number.
“Don’t cancel the last two shows yet, okay?”
“You’re not going to get him back here.”
“I know, but let me try. It’s only Monday. You have the rest of the week to cancel.”
“Yeah, but if I’m going to cancel on people, it seems better to give them as much notice as I can. And I have to get Marjorie going on issuing refunds.”
“Give me twenty-four hours.”
“What are you going to do? Send in the Mafia and threaten to break his legs? This isn’t like throwing him out of your bar.”
“You just said you trusted me.”
“Fine,” she harrumphed.
“Okay, now we gotta get moving on this application. We have to start over, and it’s due a week from tomorrow. I really should go open the bar. So let me take a crack at a first draft and I’ll email you?”
“So there you go; that’s the whole sordid story.” Maya flopped back on her bed in the pink room. She had invited Eve and Nora up that evening for a summit.
Maya could handle Ben when they were fighting. Or when they were having sex. But she didn’t know what to make of this new, collegial, business-partner version of him. His plan to do a joint grant application was great, of that she had no doubt. But was it a platonic plan? Were they done sleeping together? “So I guess we’re just going to be friends now? He’s going to email me?”
Eve laughed. “You make it sound like the worst torture imaginabl
e.”
“The thing is, Ben sees me. Like, he really sees me.”
“Whoa, whoa. You’re calling him Ben now?” Nora asked.
“I think when a person sees you, you’re supposed to use the nickname,” Eve said.
“We’re happy for you,” Nora said. “He’s a great guy.”
“You’re talking like we’re together. That is not what’s happening here. He’s all, ‘We’re getting the grant together, we’re business partners, I’ll email you.’ So, like, what? Are we just never going to talk about our interlude of sleeping together?”
“You know what’s a good way to talk about something?” Eve appeared to be directing her question to Nora rather than Maya.
“Talk about it?” Nora answered.
“Bingo,” Eve said. “Or, you know, email works, too.”
“Okay, shut up,” Maya said. “I know that. But it’s not that simple. Try to remember, ladies. Cast your minds way back to a time when you were scared and uncertain.”
“I know, sweetie.” Eve lay back next to Maya to stare up at the ceiling in solidarity.
“I’m coming in,” Nora said. “Make room.” She made a beep beep noise like a truck backing up.
“Oh, shut up. You’re one of those cute pregnant ladies who look exactly the same except for the bump,” Maya said as she moved over.
Once they were all lying on the bed, Nora said, “Hey, have you and Law had sex in this room?”
Eve cracked up. “Oh my God! The pink room is on its third romance!”
“Hello, as we just established, I am not having a ‘romance’ with Ben,” Maya said. “To date it has been more like arguing plus sex.”
“Yeah, but have you had sex in this room?” Nora punctuated the question with a little physical prodding, tapping her finger on Maya’s shoulder.
Maya laughed. “Hooboy, have I ever.”
The girls whooped.
Maya turned to Eve. “Actually, if this room really is three for three, you should start charging more for it.”
“Maybe it only works when I let people live in it for free,” Eve said. “If you think about it, both of you were temporarily homeless when you moved in here.”
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