Up to Me (Shore Secrets)

by Christi Barth

  Ella whisked the domed silver covers off the food. “And the appropriate food pairing.”

  Piper closed her eyes and smiled after the first sip. “It makes me think of that trip all three of us took to Key West after college graduation.”

  Now that was just the reaction she’d hoped for. “It’s supposed to do exactly that.”

  “Rather nostalgic of you.” After another sip, her amber eyes re-opened. Followed by a pointed lift of one expertly shaped red brow. “It certainly explains why you’re wearing that ratty sweatshirt from your cheerleading days. What’s with the walk down memory lane?”

  “Gray inspired me.” She took a sip, too, hoping the icy slushiness down her throat would tamp down the heat that flooded her core at just his name. Pavlov’s dogs had nothing on her insta-lust for Gray Locke.

  “Is he from Key West?” asked Casey.

  “No.” And it kind of amazed Ella that after all his secrecy, she finally did know where he was from. “I was thinking about how alone Gray is. How he doesn’t have the years of great memories with amazing friends like I did.”

  Swinging her glass high, Casey declared, “Nobody has friends as amazing as us.”

  Never were truer words spoken. But Ella wanted to get through the gist of her thoughts before the typical girls’ night mutual admiration society kicked into high gear. Because she knew better than anyone that it was dangerous to wait on telling people how important they were. Life could change in an instant. “I’m serious. What we have is truly special. I don’t want to take it for granted. Commemorating our good times together is the least I can do.”

  “As much as I appreciate the coconut rum goodness in my hand, I still don’t see the connection to Gray.”

  “Losing my parents was hard, but it wasn’t the end of the world. It felt like it for a while, but I still have twenty-four years of great memories with them stored up. Gray,” she paused, biting her lip. He probably wouldn’t appreciate her spilling his big secret about his dad, not even to her closest friends. Not without asking permission first, anyway.

  “What about him?”

  “Gray’s father cut off all contact with him years ago. No warning, no chance to say goodbye. And part of the fallout was that he lost all his friends, too. His life collapsed in on him.” The more Ella thought about it, the tighter the knot grew in her stomach. No, not her stomach—her heart clenched for him. “He didn’t get a chance to make the goofy, fun, stereotypical high school memories that we did. The core friendships that form over football games and pop quizzes and field trips, the ones that are supposed to last your whole life and can never be replaced—he’s missing those. In fact, if Gray had to choose one descriptor to put in the yearbook next to his photo, it would be alone.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Technically, I’m alone now. With my parents dead, no other relatives around. And yeah, that part of me that laid in bed at night, crying, and called myself an orphan—that part says I’m alone. But now,” her voice caught on the leading edge of an epic storm of tears. Tears not for her this time, but for Gray. “Now I know that I’ve never been, and never will be, as truly alone as Gray. And I thank my lucky stars for it. For you. Both of you.”

  “Holy catharsis, Ella.” Tears welling at the corners of her eyes, Casey launched herself at her friend, arms wide open. A second later, a wordless Piper piled on, too. They clung to each other, sniffling and cry-talking vows of love and friendship for a few minutes.

  Piper eased back first. “If two sips of that drink made us this maudlin, I’m little scared to see what we’ll devolve into by the end of the first round.”

  “Own your tears. Don’t blame the rum,” Casey scolded. And drained her glass halfway for emphasis. Which resulted in a quick wince and a hand to her temples. “Brain freeze, damn it!”

  Ella pointed at the array of plates filling the table. “Have an empanada. They’ll burn your tongue and even you out. You know how much Joel loves piling on the chili powder.”

  While Casey wolfed one down, Piper threw open the white sheers covering the French doors to the balcony. “I bet we can knock back at least one round of drinks out here before the cold drives us inside. I even brought a fleece, just in the hopes that we could have our first balcony night of the season.”

  “Great minds think alike.” Ella tapped hard with her foot at the bottom of one door, banged her fist against the top of the other one, and yanked hard. Living in a castle had its far from glamorous moments. Old doors stuck, warped by the spectrum of upstate New York weather. Drafty didn’t begin to describe her rooms. But she still loved being in the round tower with its exceptional view of the lake. “I wiped off the chairs and brought out some blankets. I love our sessions on the balcony.”

  Casey carried the drinks outside, and set them on the picturesque but crooked flagstones. “Did you invite us over here just to clear out our tear ducts? Or can we commence with the time-honored traditions of girls’ night—stuffing our faces and talking about boys?”

  “Well, you refuse to talk about Pierce.” Ella sat in the Adirondack chair and breathed deeply of the twilight air. It held a faint tinge of sweetness from the last of the cherry blossoms. A heron squawked as the ripples from its wings spread out from the lakeshore in a widening circle. “Or at least not to say anything interesting about him.”

  “He’s not that interesting. He’s a dentist, for crying out loud. Pierce is just a nice guy.” Casey leaned against the iron railing, legs crossed at the ankles. “How about you, Piper? Got your eye on anyone special?”

  That earned her an eye roll. “Nice deflection, Case. And no, I’ve developed no burning case of the hot and lusties since I talked to you at lunch. A mere five hours ago.”

  Casey shrugged a shoulder beneath her long-sleeved tee emblazoned with a cartoon pine tree caught in a firm hug from a woman with a dreamy expression on her face. “Just checking. Look at how fast it happened to Ella.”

  Well, it’d been nice to have the interrogation spotlight off of her for a whopping two minutes. Ella figured she might as well use this segue to get her big announcement out in the open. If it didn’t go over well with her friends, there was always the rest of the pitcher of piña coladas to help console her. “Actually, that’s why I invited you over.”

  “The hot and lusties?” Casey pretended to fan herself with the end of her braid. “Cause I thought we decided not to throw caution to the wind and embark upon a lesbian experience during, yes, that memorable trip to Key West. Remember, that night when we stayed up dancing from sunset to sunrise?”

  Laughter gurgled out so hard Ella grabbed the armrests to keep from folding over. “You’re right. The great lesbian experiment is and always will be off the table for us.” Time to bite the bullet and just tell them, already. “I’m doing enough experimenting with Gray.”

  Piper leaned forward, the setting sun casting her face in shadow but creating a fiery nimbus around her hair. “We’re getting to the good stuff early. Do tell.”

  Their time spent under the waterfall at the pool was the most sexually adventurous Ella had ever been. Part of her wanted to not just tell her friends, but stand up and scream the details with smug glee across the lake. But she held back. What she’d done with Gray was so special, so intimate that, for once, she’d rather keep it all to herself.

  “I’m not going to tell you what we did,” she declared. “But I will tell you what we’re going to do. I’m going to sleep with Gray.”

  Her friends exchanged long, wordless looks with each other before pinning her with their combined squints of disbelief. In preparation for their volley of objections, Ella slurped up some of her drink.

  After biting her bottom lip, Piper said slowly, “I can see why you wouldn’t want to run that tidbit past the mailbox journal. Nobody wants Orson the trash collector thinking about their sex lif
e.”

  “I bet Mrs. Orson does,” Ella shot back.

  She shook her head. “Regardless, don’t you want to run this by us?”

  Hadn’t they all just agreed it was about damn time she let people stop voting on her life? This felt like a one-step-forward, two-steps-back reaction. “I just did.”

  Another head shake. “No, I mean really talk it through. Pros and cons.”

  “You know how fond Piper is of her lists,” Casey mocked.

  “Seeing as how my mind’s made up, that would just be a waste of time. Besides, I thought you guys wanted me to break my dry spell.”

  “Sure we do.” Another exchange of significant looks, like they were characters on a soap opera. Ella was quite sure that soap actors had more stage directions for looks per script page than actual lines. “But you barely know this man. You haven’t even been on a date with him.”

  Another slow sip of her drink. In fact, that emptied it. Ella practically leapt out of the chair to retrieve the pitcher from inside. Glad to be out from under their intense scrutiny, she called over her shoulder, “That’s not exactly true.”

  “Come again?” said Piper. “I thought you were waiting to get a green light from the journal?”

  Why did it matter? Again, they’d both just agreed the journal was an emotional crutch she should’ve ditched a long time ago. So Ella launched into her explanation as she came back out to the wide balcony. “Technically, yes. I don’t know how to break it to the town that I don’t need their help anymore. I know I can’t quit cold turkey. So I wrote in the question about dating Gray. And then we very carefully not-dated.”

  Casey gave her the same stern look usually reserved for tourists who disregarded the official warning signs not to walk across the waterfalls she guarded so fiercely at the state park. Equal parts smackdown and don’t even think of lying to me. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “We didn’t do anything specifically date-like. But we have spent a ton of time together.” Ella felt like she knew Gray better than the last three guys she’d dated put together. Despite the fact that she still had no idea what he did for a living, or what his favorite food was. Or even if his mother still lived in the town that had treated them so shamefully. What she knew was the inner Gray, his resilient spirit, his good humor, and his caring nature. The rest was just frosting on the cake. Frosting that would be oh-so-fantastic to lick off of him...

  Casey didn’t look convinced. “Really? What does he do, sit in on your massage clients? Pass you clean towels on the hour?”

  “We share a long breakfast every day. Nothing’s less sexy than breakfast, right? And we do late dinners every night in the kitchen with Joel. That’s like having an official chaperone. Totally not a date. And now we do yoga together.”

  Gasping, Piper clapped her hands over her mouth. Then let out a long rush of air. “You can’t claim that’s unsexy. Bendy moves in spandex? I defy you not to get turned on doing that with him.”

  Ella certainly wouldn’t lie to her friends. Especially since it didn’t require any special bendy moves from Gray to turn her on—just his regular walking and breathing accomplished the same effect. “The intention behind yoga was for stress relief. The sexy factor was a great side benefit.”

  “So Gray’s not a complete stranger.” Casey threw up her hands into the air. “Fine. Under any other circumstances, if he’s as great as he seems, he might be the perfect person to slake your dry spell.”

  Then she passed the verbal attack baton off to Piper. “But you shouldn’t do it with him. Not with a tourist who leaves in a week. That’s just setting yourself up for failure.”

  “No, it isn’t. Gray happens to be quite talented in this area.” Ella felt a slow, satisfied smile spread her lips as she remembered his thoroughly knee-wobbling kisses. “He’s not going to fail me at all.”

  “Those long legs and that tight ass. Yeah, I bet he’s got some serious moves.”

  Casey snapped her fingers an inch from the redhead’s face. “Piper, focus.”

  “I’m sorry, but did you not see him in those jeans today? You’d have to be a nun with a case of pneumonia not to notice that the man’s smoking hot.”

  “I’m not denying Gray’s inherent hotness.” Casey nipped inside, and returned with the plate of flaky empanadas. “Or the fact that his light eyes/dark hair combo is pretty much hypnotically sensual.”

  Now that they’d begun making a laundry list of his attractiveness, it made Ella squirm. “Um, how about you all stop thinking about his hotness? I’m the only one who’ll be sampling the goods. There’s no sharing.”

  “That’s just it. I don’t think you can sample.” Casey started to take a big bite, thought better of it, and then waved the steam away from her lips. “Ella, you’ve never once taken a bite of a brownie, then pushed it away and declared that you’re full.”

  “So?”

  Casey took a cautious nibble of the fluted crust. “So, you’re not a sampler. You go all in, whether it’s your refusal to split a gigantic brownie with your best friends in the whole wide world—”

  Really? Ella couldn’t believe Casey wouldn’t let it go. Couldn’t believe she’d equate what promised to be an off-the-charts sexual experience with Gray to eating a square of brownie. “Are you still pissed about lunch today? I got you your own damn brownie. There’s no clause in the friendship pact that says we have to share. Get over it.”

  Leaning her elbows on the rail, Casey shot her a combo disgruntled glare and disdainful lip curl. “I only wanted half. Your other half. The half that you didn’t need, and will make you guilt jog for an extra ten minutes tomorrow. Sharing would’ve saved you that torture.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” Piper pushed out of the chair to refill her glass from the pitcher Ella still clutched. “Casey, you’re bumbling your way through this. She’s trying to tell you that you’re simply not a one-night-stand girl. Sure, you can have a fling, and Gray will perform magnificently, but then...you’ll get attached. You’ll want more of him, just like you wanted that whole brownie. You won’t be able to let him go with just a taste.”

  Casey crowded in closer, too. Close enough to drill her index finger into Ella’s upper arm. “Except that he’s leaving. So you have no choice in the matter. Do you really want to open yourself up that inevitable loss?”

  Feeling penned in, both physically and emotionally, Ella moved to the opposite end of the balcony. Ran a hand over a tendril of bright green ivy trying to make the leap from the wall onto her balcony. “So what if I used to be Ms. Commitment? I can be a fun-for-now girl, damn it. I’m sort of starting from scratch over here. Clean slate, due to three years of total inactivity on the dating front. I’ll freaking fling if I want to.”

  Another exchange of meaningful glances between her friends. Talk about feeling ganged up on. It was supposed to be the three of them against the world, not two of them against her. She’d known that announcing her intention might not go over well. Ella never thought, however, that they’d try this hard to talk her out of it. A few stock back-and-forths about whether or not she was ready was all she’d expected. Not this dire warning of a supposedly inevitable downward spiral. With this sort of reaction from her best friends, Ella imagined that if she had mentioned sex with Gray in the journal, the town would’ve shown up at her door with flaming torches and driven him out of town on a rail to prevent it.

  A pair of hands settled on her shoulders. Piper’s signature tuberose scent wafted forward on the breeze. “We held your hand through three years of devastating heartbreak, Ella. Forgive me if I’m in no hurry to see you go through anything even close to that again.”

  Well, geez. Ella couldn’t be mad at them for trying to keep her happy and whole. But she also couldn’t let them think that stagnating in unexciting happiness was the only acceptable option. “Life’s a gamble. Th
at’s what I’ve learned. Protecting myself from heartbreak, locking myself up in this tower—that’s not living. Rolling the dice on having a good time with Gray is barely a gamble. We’ll have a good time. I’m quite sure he’ll be amazing. He’ll make my eyes roll back in my head. And there’s no reason to skip giving myself such a fantastic experience. At the very least, I’ll have a yummy memory.”

  “That’s the same reason I wanted to try half your brownie,” Casey grumbled. But there was laughter in her voice and in her big green eyes.

  Deep down, Ella knew that they might be right. When Icarus flew too close to the sun, look at how far he fell. On the other hand, how glorious were those moments up in the sky, basking in its radiance? The bottom line was that she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t seize this moment. Because Ella knew all too well that moments had a funny way of disappearing without warning. Just like Gray might in a few days.

  Chapter Twelve

  Most of the time when Gray was on assignment, it was easy to find a place to work. He didn’t need much. A coffee shop with a decent French roast. More importantly, one a couple of blocks off the beaten path where there was no possibility of running into anyone he might be investigating. Most importantly, no chance that they might come up behind him and read his notes as he typed them into his tablet.

  Seneca Lake, however, was different. Gray found it all but impossible to be alone, no matter how hard he tried. Or how often. For a lakeshore strung out along thirty-eight miles, it sure felt small. He’d started at the bottom of the lake, in the library. Whereupon the librarian piled him with brochures about local attractions and events, and tried to sit down and bend his ear about the winery her uncle ran. And, of course, worked in a plug for him to visit it. She couldn’t have been nicer, but he still fled after ten minutes.

  The patio at a winery halfway up the lake didn’t work either. The busload of senior citizens should’ve provided a big enough distraction. But the winemaker had seen him with Ward, and offered a private tasting of his first whack at making vodka. Wanted Gray to report back that his product had a leg up on Lakeside Distillery’s product.