Mari jumped a little when her phone vibrated in her back pocket. She flushed guiltily. She’d been jumping every single time her phone did anything, always expecting it to be Jay. It was Friday now, and they hadn’t seen one another since their Monday morning surf session. Jay had texted her twice, once just to check in and once to see if she and Linc wanted to come to a party at Eli’s house next weekend. She’d very vaguely responded to both. Interacting with Jay gave Mari the same feeling she got when someone accidentally shined a flashlight in her eyes. She felt stunned, momentarily exposed, and then she saw spots for hours afterwards. She knew that her motto was go slow, so that nobody got hurt here, herself included. But it was hard to go slow when even a cordial text message from him made her feel like she’d just stomped a brick down onto the gas pedal.
When her phone wasn’t in the pocket she’d thought it was, Mari frowned. She shoved her sandwich into her mouth, held it between her teeth while searched for her phone with both hands. It buzzed again.
Finally finding it, and cursing herself for wearing cargo pants with so many pockets, Mari lit up the phone’s screen to see two texts from Jay. She involuntarily bit down on her sandwich.
You’re in my seat, the first text said.
And then.
Nice look, chipmunk. You saving that sandwich for winter?
Mari swung her head around, looking for him. He could see her? She knew she must look like an idiot with her sandwich hanging out of her mouth, but still, she couldn’t quite get her brain to work well enough to get her smooth on. She spotted him up on the second floor balcony that overlooked the courtyard. He leaned over the rail and grinned at her, saluting her with the small bag he held in his hand. She waved back dazedly.
Mari tried not to watch him as he jogged down the escalator towards her. But there really was something aesthetically pleasing about the way the man moved. He truly was like a water animal of some kind. Fluid, smooth, graceful, but also with just a hint of playful in each of his movements. Mari supposed that the glowing blonde hair and the muscles for days currently stretching his button-up shirt didn’t hurt matters.
“Hi,” he grinned as he approached her table. He ducked his head and kissed her cheek like he didn’t think twice on the matter and Mari had to fight her hand to keep from pressing her fingers against the spot where his lips had been, where his slight stubble had scraped her.
“Hi,” she mumbled around her sandwich, finally pulling it out of her mouth and tossing it into the container in front of her. She took a healthy swig of the iced tea she’d brought in a little thermos. “What are you doing here?”
“Eating lunch,” he responded and set a little canvas sack on the table next to hers. He started unpacking his lunch, offering Mari some carrot sticks.
She took one, crunched down on it. “And why are you eating lunch in the mall?”
He looked up at her, took a big bite of his own sandwich. “I work upstairs. There’s a section of offices that are mostly occupied by non-profits.”
“I know,” Mari swallowed, eyeing him with surprise and interest. “I work up there too.”
Jay’s eyebrows rose. “Since you moved? Two months ago? And we haven’t seen each other until today?”
Mari shrugged, fighting against her body’s impulse to grin like a fool. There was no reason to grin right now. So she swallowed it down. “I guess so. Although this is my first time eating in the courtyard.”
“Ah,” Jay said as he nodded sagely. “You’ve finally become wise to the ways of the courtyard. It’s definitely the best place to eat in the mall. Plus, if you make eyes at the girl in the smoothie stand, sometimes she gives you a free one.”
Mari turned to where he’d gestured with his sandwich and sure enough there was a young twenty something with bleached blonde hair and a visor on, furtively glancing over at Jay. She frowned the second Mari caught her eye.
Mari turned back to Jay, a smile on her face. “Something tells me that I wouldn’t be enjoying the same smoothie privileges. In fact, I think just sitting at this table with you has ensured me spit smoothies for life.”
Jay looked up, studied the hellfire that was spouting from smoothie girl’s eyes towards the back of Mari’s head and he shrugged, conceding. “Then I definitely shouldn’t take you to the vegan ice cream spot on Fuller. Who knows what they’d do to your desserts there.”
“Ah,” Mari smiled into her iced tea. “More admirers?”
Jay shrugged. “All I know is that I go in, I smile, and I leave without paying and with twice the amount of ice cream I need.” He chewed thoughtfully. “And usually a phone number scribbled on a napkin.”
Mari laughed and shook her head. “Well, that smile is pretty deadly.”
Something flipped in Jay’s stomach and he ruthlessly ignored it. Things were going so well, it wouldn’t do to get all tied up and spoil the moment. “Oh yeah?” he asked playfully, tossing said smile in her direction.
Mari shrugged, keeping her face intentionally bland. “I mean, it’s the same smile that convinced me you weren’t a murderer, over the course of like six hours, in the middle of a hurricane, while we were abandoned on an island. You gotta know those pearly whites have some fire power.”
Jay couldn’t wipe the grin off his face and he was delighted when the one that Mari had been attempting to stifle finally bloomed as well. “I’ve been told something along those lines before,” he conceded.
They fell silent as Mari helped herself to more of his carrot sticks and pushed a small container of yogurt toward him.
He frowned as he looked at it.
“It’s vegan,” she said, one eyebrow raised.
He was immediately, almost embarrassingly, awash with relief. He couldn’t have said why it had deflated him so much when he’d thought she’d forgotten he was vegan. But her statement had his eyebrows rising in confusion.
“Why are you eating vegan yogurt?” he asked as he peeled the aluminum top off the yogurt, and carefully set it aside to recycle it.
Mari frowned as she watched him arrange his lunch. He obviously brought only reusable items or ones that could be recycled. She couldn’t say why that set off a tiny, irritating firework in her chest. But it did. She wanted to roll her eyes at herself.
He took a few bites of the yogurt, with her spoon, and then passed it back over to her, his eyes on hers. He was obviously waiting for her response still.
Mari sighed. She knew that he was going to take her next statement to mean something large. Something larger than she wanted it to be. But not necessarily larger than it actually was.
“I eat vegan now.”
“Oh?” Jay looked vaguely surprised. He cleared his throat. “Since when?”
She raised an eyebrow at him, and sucked her teeth, annoyed that he was making her say it out loud. Couldn’t he just go ahead and make his own assumptions? “About five years.”
She didn’t give him the satisfaction of saying the words since I met you out loud.
Understanding lit in Jay’s eyes and he nodded. He took a long swig of water he had in his thermos and eyed her over the rim, his expression somehow both inscrutable and open at the same time.
“So, I never asked, which non-profit are you working for?”
Grateful that he’d changed the subject, and still wary of the way the air was charged between them, Mari shifted in her seat and took a gigantic bite of her sandwich, hoping that a little lack of grace on her part might quell the electricity that couldn’t seem to stop zinging around the courtyard. “ARC. The Animal Rights Coalition.”
Jay nodded. “Cool, they’re good people over there. We did some work with you guys a few years back on that shrinking habitat report. You all handled the species impact half and we handled the atmospheric impact half.”
Mari nodded, remembering that report well. She hadn’t worked on it personally, but she’d worked side by side with the people who had. And they’d been working with Jay. God. Small world. And it had still t
aken five years for them to find one another again.
“So you’re with Future World?” she asked him, remembering the name of the non-profit her group had partnered with on that project.
He nodded and Mari eyed him critically.
“What?” he asked after a minute.
She shrugged. Wanted to pretend it was nothing. But she found that that felt like a lie. And she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to lie about this. Lying led to hurt people. And she didn’t want to hurt people. So she sighed, told herself to take it slow and to tell the truth. “It’s just pretty crazy, Jay. What happened to us. You know?”
He nodded, watching her while he chewed.
She tugged a hand through her black hair, didn’t notice the way it fell like water, right back into place, but he sure did. “And I don’t know,” she continued. “I’m a vegan now and you’re working in environmental conservation like we’d talked about.”
She let the words hang there for a second before she picked them back up.
“It just meant something. Our time on the island really meant something. But there’s no explaining it to other people. We’re the only two who are ever really gonna understand what happened on the island.”
He was stock still. His eyes on her face like nothing could have torn them away. His heart raced in his chest. And across the courtyard, the smoothie girl sat back on the stool behind the counter, propped her chin on her fist and kissed a certain fantasy goodbye.
Mari forced her eyes to go to his. “For a long time, I was the only one who knew what had happened. And now you’re back. And there’s two of us. And I don’t know, that’s spinning me.”
“Yeah,” he agreed instantly. “It’s a relief and a burden at the same time.”
She nodded immediately, that was the perfect way of putting it.
“It’s a relief to have somebody be able to verify my feelings,” she started.
“And it’s a burden to remember how shitty that fucking hurricane was,” Jay finished with a wry smile.
Mari nodded and a tear slipped out of her startling green eyes. She didn’t bother brushing it away, part of her knew that Jay would do it. And he did. He reached across the table and used one rough thumb to erase the tear from existence.
***
It was Sunday when Mari got a call on her cell phone from a number she didn’t recognize. She usually didn’t pick up those calls, but it was an Ocean City number, so she figured she would.
“Hello?” she puffed into her headphone cord. She was currently jogging up a very steep hill.
“Mari?” a deep voice asked.
“Yeah.” That was the best she could do. Wind was currently at a premium for her. She wasn’t wasting any on words right now.
“This is Eli Bird, Jay’s friend. Are—are you alright?”
“Yeah. I’m running,” she responded, panting.
When he spoke again, she could hear the smile in his voice. “Ah, I see. You answer the phone when you’re running? That’s badass. I basically flick off the world, squeeze my eyes closed, and pretend the torture of cardio isn’t happening to me.”
As the top quarterback in the league, Mari was sure he was exaggerating. She knew for a fact that he could run a 4.5 40. She wasn’t an avid sports follower, but the fans around here were diehard. And the Stingrays had had a really great season. It had been impossible not to get caught up in the party a little bit.
“Did the starting quarterback of the Stingrays just call me a badass?” she wondered aloud.
“Jay told me you went surfing with him earlier this week. In January. So, yeah, your badass title is firmly in place.”
She smiled, as much as she could while gutting it up a real asshole of a hill. “So, what’s up, Eli?”
“I wanted to invite you and… Linc, was it? To a party at my house next weekend.”
“Yeah, Jay mentioned that.”
“Okay, well, I just wanted to make sure you knew the invitation is genuine. I know you’re new to Ocean City. And there will be some good people there. My girl included. I think you’d like each other.”
It was sweet. Really sweet. If it had been any less sweet, Mari would have had cause to wonder if Jay had asked Eli to check in on the status of the invitation. But Mari suspected that Eli was calling out of the kindness of his own heart.
“Well, I’m definitely in,” she decided right then and there. “I’m pretty sure Linc is out of town next weekend, but I’ll check with him and let you know.”
“No worries! It’s not an RSVP thing. We’re just gonna have dinner and shoot the shit.”
“Should I bring anything?”
“Nah, we’ll have food and drinks.”
“I’m vegan.”
Eli laughed, one hard chuckle. “Why does that not surprise me?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing. Yeah, we’ll have vegan food for sure. Hope you can make it! Saturday at 6 pm. I’ll text you the address.”
“Okay. Thanks for the invite.”
Mari hung up the call and sprinted the rest of the way up the hill. She liked Jay’s friend. She couldn’t say why that irritated her. But for some reason, liking Eli felt like it had just made a complicated situation even more complicated.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“So your friend called me,” Mari said as she and Jay sat next to one another in the mall courtyard midway through the next week.
Jay looked up in surprise, in the middle of trading half her peanut butter sandwich with half of his hummus and veggies one. “Really? Which one?”
“Which friend you mean?”
“Yeah, either Marcus or Eli, I assume.”
“Those are your only two friends?” She raised an eyebrow at him.
“Those are my only two friends who would call you.” He chewed thoughtfully. “I hope it was Eli who called you.”
“Why?”
“Because Eli is friendly, a charmer. And Marcus is…not.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Jay considered his words very carefully. “He’s not an asshole or anything. He just has rougher edges. And he’s not, I don’t know, friendly with women. But somehow they still fall at his feet.”
Mari grinned now. “You think there’s a danger of me falling at Marcus’s feet?”
“I would say no, because I know you. But I’d also say yes, because I know Marcus. Seriously, chicks seriously dig whatever it is he puts down. And on the dance floor? Game, set, match. There’s something about the way he dances that makes women just line up to get dumped by him.”
Mari’s eyebrows rose. “I think I’d like to see what all the fuss is about.”
“Yeah,” Jay said, giving her a slight side eye. “I’m just saying, I’m relieved he wasn’t the one calling you.”
“Well, you’re right,” Mari admitted. “It was Eli. He invited me and Linc to that party that you invited us too last week.”
“Oh yeah?” Jay’s sandwich turned to chalk in his mouth. “And?”
Mari cleared her throat. “I can come. But Linc can’t. He’s gonna be out of town at a big conference for Cavanaugh’s Kids.”
“Ah,” Jay said carefully. He was unsure how to react to that news. He was thrilled that Mari was coming. And thrilled that Linc the douche in a suit would not be coming. But he knew that revealing all that wouldn’t go over that well. “Well, I’ll be glad to see you then.”
“Sure.” She chewed and propped her ankles up on the edge of the fountain. “It’ll be nice to get to know some more people in Ocean City.”
“Are, uh, are you guys here to stay?” Jay forced himself to ask the question in that way. To include Linc in her future plans. He refused to ignore that asshole’s presence. In a way, if he was petty enough to ignore Linc, then Linc was winning. It was a strange game, but it made sense to Jay in a twisted way.
Mari glanced his way. “I guess. This is where Linc’s business is. And I don’t have a burning desire to live someplace else.”
/>
“You were ready to leave Boston?”
“Yeah. I’d been there for so long. I knew the city well enough to know what it could give me and what it couldn’t anymore.”
“When did you move there?”
“About fifteen years ago. Right after high school.”
“Right after your parents died,” Jay said, his eyes sad as they searched hers.
Mari’s breath caught in her throat. Not because of the reminder of her parents, but because Jay had brought them up. No one ever brought them up. People generally assumed that she’d rather not talk about them. Which meant that she often went months without speaking a word about them. And here he was, remembering enough about her life to understand the timeline. Mentioning her parents like he wasn’t scared of their memory, or scared of Mari’s pain. The simple act showed her that he accepted her pain. That he’d never hide from it.
Mari swallowed quickly. Maybe she was reading too much into it, but she really didn’t think that she was. “Yup. I definitely couldn’t stay in Sioux Falls. Everything reminded me of them.”
“No other family there?”
“I have an aunt and uncle. Sister to my dad. They still live there and they’ve been out a few times to Boston to visit me. They’re good people. And I love them very much. But they don’t get me. I think it’s that I’m Latina. They have no idea what to do with that. Aunt Grace is Irish, like my dad, and Uncle Ira is from Sioux Falls originally. That’s why my mom and dad moved there when they got married. To be by family. But, yeah, they love me. They just don’t understand the environment thing. The surfing thing. The Spanish speaking thing.”
Jay nodded, propping his feet alongside hers on the fountain, he was careful not to disturb a row of pennies someone had left on the ledge. “That sounds like my dad, except for the good people part.”
“He didn’t get you?”
Bachelors In Love Page 35