by Sarah Beard
Gem is still glowing from Sophie’s flattery when she takes the truffle. I think she’s going to take a nibble, but instead, she pops the entire thing in her mouth and gives Tyler a triumphant look. It only takes a couple seconds for the enjoyment on her face to slip into disgust, and then panic. Gooey chocolate spews from her mouth, and on the way to the floor, it gets all over her white tube-top.
“Ugh!” she screeches. “What’s in those things?”
“Just a little something I like to call, creme de habanero.” Sophie’s voice is all saccharine. “What? You don’t like it?”
“They’re disgusting!” Gem’s eyes are watering, and she starts coughing. “And …” Cough. “Hot!” Cough, cough, cough. One hand comes to her throat as the other frantically fans her face.
“My bad,” Sophie says, sounding genuinely remorseful. “I thought Tyler only liked adventurous girls.”
Gem wipes some brown spit from the side of her mouth and glowers at Sophie, then looks to Tyler for help. Tyler is fighting a smile, but he straightens it out and gives Sophie a chiding look. “Sophie, why don’t you go back in the kitchen and play with your Easy Bake Oven?”
Sophie smirks. As she walks past me to the kitchen, I mumble, “Way to drum up business.”
I take a steadying breath and then fill up a cup of water and bring it to Gem, feeling guilty because I could have prevented her pain. “I’m really sorry. She wasn’t trying to be mean or anything. She just likes people to try out her new recipes. I’m sorry you didn’t like it.”
She takes the water and gulps it down while Tyler takes the remaining creme de habanero truffle and pops it in his mouth. He chews for a minute, and even though his eyes start watering, he says, “Hmm. Pretty spicy, but I like it.”
“Do you have a bathroom in here?” Gem asks, grabbing a handful of napkins and scrubbing her tongue with them.
I point outside. “There’s some right out there, by the pier.”
She gives me a rotten look, then turns and walks out of the shop. I expect Tyler to follow, but he watches her leave and then turns back to me.
“Sorry about that,” I say.
His lips are straight, but his green eyes are alight with amusement. They’re made even brighter by the green Cannibal Surfboard T-shirt he’s wearing—the one I got him for Christmas last year. He probably forgot I gave it to him. Otherwise, why would he wear it here, on a date with Gem? Unless he’s playing some stupid game with me.
“That’s okay,” he says. “I know Sophie well enough to not take it personally.” His smile fades and a crease appears between his brows. “So you’re hanging out with the guy who gave me a fat lip?”
It takes me a moment to realize he’s referring to my dinner with Kai. “Yeah,” I say. “I guess I am. He’s really nice.”
“Oh, yeah. It’s real nice to punch someone in the face.” He points to his lip, which is still swollen.
I can’t look at his lips without thinking of all the kisses we’ve shared. Even after all this time, I can still feel them tingling on my lips. I force myself to look into his eyes instead. “You grabbed him first. I saw you. And he said something about you hurting someone he knows. What’s that all about?”
Tyler’s head rocks back. “What?”
I shrug. “That’s what he said.”
Tyler’s jaw tenses and he looks away, confirmation enough for me. So it’s true. I wonder who she was. I haven’t seen him with anyone besides Gem since we broke up, but then, I haven’t exactly been an active participant in the social scene. He finally looks back to me and huffs out a breath. “Whatever. Are you going to see him again?”
The edge in his voice makes me feel defensive, and I fold my arms across my chest. “What does it matter to you?”
“I …” He shuts his mouth, then opens it again, but no more words come out to complete his sentence.
“You and I are friends now,” I say, “and that’s it. That’s what you wanted, right?”
He takes my words square in the chin, and then looks at me miserably. “It’s not that simple, Avery. You know that.”
I, of all people, know that love is not simple. I witness the complexity of it on a daily basis, watching Mom and Dad. “It should be simple,” I say firmly. “I mean, heaven forbid a girl and a boy just love each other and stick by each other no matter what.” I lock eyes with him, challenging him to prove his love for me. But he refuses the challenge.
He falls back a step and lets out a long sigh. “Just be careful, okay?”
“You know me. If I’m anything, it’s careful.”
Anger flits across his face, and he comes back and slams his palm on the counter. “No,” he grinds the word out between his teeth. “That’s not the Avery I know. The Avery I know tames ten-foot waves, and dives off cliffs, and climbs vertical mountains with no harness. You’re everything but careful.”
“Well,” I say calmly, even though there is nothing calm inside of me, “that’s not who I am now.”
He shakes his head dubiously, fire in his eyes. “I don’t believe that.”
A wayward lock of dark hair has fallen into his eye, and I have the urge to reach out and push it back like I have so many times before. But I don’t. Because breaking up means unlearning old habits, living by new rules. He’s staring at me, as though searching for remnants of the girl he once loved. He must find a shred of her, because when he speaks again, his voice is tender, almost a murmur. “I know you’re in there somewhere, Avery. Come back.”
“I’m. Right. Here,” I say with quiet force, enunciating each word to be sure he understands. “I’m dealing with some tough things right now. Tougher than any wave or mountain. I don’t expect you to understand. But trust me when I say I’m still me.” My voice breaks on the last word, and I turn away so he can’t see the tears pooling in my eyes. I step over to the back counter and stare down at the pad of blank order forms while I get my emotions in check.
Tyler is perfectly quiet. When I turn around to see if he’s still there, he’s standing right behind me. “There’s a party tonight at Dillan’s. Will you come?”
“I don’t know.” My voice is nonchalant, but my throat is still burning with unshed tears. “Are you bringing Gem?”
He hesitates, and then shakes his head decisively. “I’m not planning on it.” His hand slides up my arm and comes to rest on my shoulder. “Avery, she’s a customer.”
“I’ve never seen you so cozy with a customer.”
“I like her. As a friend. She’s fun to be around. And her parents are here for some tree-hugger convention with meetings and dinners and stuff, so she doesn’t have anyone to hang out with.” When I say nothing, he adds, “She’s leaving in two days, back to Connecticut or Rhode Island or one of those tiny eastern states.” He raises an eyebrow. “See? I can’t like her that much if I don’t even remember where she’s from.”
“Geography was never your star subject,” I say, smiling despite myself. The door chimes, and when I look over Tyler’s shoulder to see who it is, my breath catches in my throat. Kai stands in the shop entrance, the evening sun catching in his hair and lighting it up like a crown of white fire. He glances my way, and then wanders over to the dark chocolate section like he’s waiting for me to finish my conversation with Tyler.
“Come tonight,” Tyler says softly, not noticing Kai. “I really want you to.”
I glance at the clock on the wall. We’re officially closed, but my work is far from over. “I have seven hundred and twenty pieces of chocolate to make by morning.”
“Can’t your dad help?”
“He’s … helping my mom.” I give him a look, and he understands exactly what I mean. I miss that about him. Never having to explain, because he already knows about Mom and Dad. “She called at four this morning crying because she broke a light bulb while trying to change it, and it was stuck in the socket.”
“What’s she doing changing a light bulb at four in the morning?”
I shrug.
“Her muse keeps wacky hours. So my dad went to help her because she was plunging into crazy mode, and he’s still not back.”
“What about Sophie?”
“She’ll help with the order, but even then, it’ll take us half the night.”
“Well, you know Dillan’s parties. We’ll be there until sunrise.”
I glance again at Kai, catching his eyes. He greets me with a little smile. This time Tyler notices, because he twists to see what I’m looking at. When he turns back to me, he looks stung. “So that’s the real reason you won’t come. You already have plans.”
“No—I don’t. I really am making chocolates all night.”
“What’s he doing here then?” he whispers.
The door chimes again and Gem reappears, beckoning Tyler with a pathetic pout. Her tube top is all wet, and there’s a vague stain where she didn’t manage to get the chocolate out. Tyler glances at her and then back at me. His thumb trails along my collarbone, and I notice how his touch feels different than it used to. Less electric. Heavier. “Come,” he says earnestly. “Come late if you need to. But come.”
“I’ll do my best.”
fter Tyler leaves with Gem, I lock Kai inside with me and turn over the Closed sign. “Hey,” I say. He’s standing so close that I have to tip my head back to look at his face. It’s kind of like looking into sunshine, especially after Tyler’s dreary expressions.
“Sorry,” he says, “I didn’t mean to interrupt.” He glances out the window at Tyler’s retreating figure.
“It’s okay. There wasn’t much to interrupt.”
He gives me a skeptical look, but before he can say anything else, I turn and head back behind the counter, saying over my shoulder, “So—did you find somewhere to crash last night?”
He strolls over with his hands in his front pockets. He’s wearing the same board shorts as yesterday and a faded cobalt blue T-shirt with a white phoenix on the front. “You sound concerned.”
I open the cash register and start sorting and counting the contents. “Last night as I was falling asleep, I pictured you curled beneath a eucalyptus tree in the woods. It was a very sad image.”
He doesn’t say anything, and when I glance at him, one corner of his mouth is tipped up, like he’s amused that I was thinking of him before falling asleep. “I did find a place,” he says. “A little vineyard where I’ll be working for a while. It’s up Sienna Canyon Road.”
I stop counting. “Isadora’s place?”
His dark brows lift in surprise. “Yeah, actually.”
I finish counting the tens and twenties and write down the total. “My dad used to buy grapes from her. But she stopped selling a couple years ago, when her son died. There’s still a sign on her driveway that says, ‘Temporarily Closed.’ ”
“Yeah, the vineyard looks like it’s been neglected for a while. But I did some major pruning today, so hopefully she’ll get a yield from it.”
“Well,” I say, emptying the quarter compartment, “let me know when you’re harvesting and I’ll come buy some from you.”
He looks down at his feet, like he’s not sure if he’ll still be around during harvest. His flip-flops, which looked new yesterday, appear more than broken in. They’re the shoes of someone who doesn’t stay in one place for very long. And I get the feeling that when he told me he was from Michigan, he left out a lot of stops between here and there.
While I finish recording the day’s earnings, Kai falls back a step and surveys the display case. “You have quite a selection here.”
“Do you want to try something? On the house.”
He runs a hand through his hair, leaving it like a white sea anemone. “What would you suggest?”
I shrug. “Depends on your taste. We have plain, dark, salty, spicy …” I think about Sophie’s stunt minutes earlier. “Really spicy, fruity, savory, flowery … you get the idea.”
He peruses the glass shelves, seeming overwhelmed by the abundance of choices. “What’s your favorite?”
I look at the different chocolates Dad has created over the years, some of them old recipes, some new. Products of countless trials and errors of different flavors and combinations until he reached perfection. But I can’t answer Kai’s question honestly. Because there’s something I’ve never told anyone, especially Dad: I hate chocolate. I didn’t always hate it, but after spending years as a guinea pig for new recipes, I can’t taste chocolate without grouping it with that weird asparagus experiment, or the seaweed-noni mishap, or worst of all, the Crab Cacao that surprisingly, food critics raved about.
“I’m still deciding,” I finally say.
He tilts his head curiously, then points to something on the wall behind me. “You grew up in a chocolate shop and you’re still deciding?”
I twist to see what he’s looking at. It’s a photo of our family posing in front of the shop on the day it opened a decade earlier. Sophie and I are in matching yellow eyelet dresses, our hair in curly pigtails and our expressions like sunshine. Mom’s smile is wide and genuine. Beautiful. And Dad had a lot more hair back then. I avoid looking at the picture if I can help it because it hurts to remember how good things were when Mom and Dad were happy together. I turn back to Kai. “How can I decide when we’re always coming up with new recipes? I can’t keep up.”
“Okay, then. Why don’t you just give me something you think I’ll like?”
“I’ve only known you for a day. I don’t have much to go on.”
He shrugs. “Do your best.”
I study him a moment, from his snowy, unruly hair to his exposed toes. He’s a complete mystery to me. But when I think of him—which I do more than I should for someone I hardly know—I think of stillness and of soothing warmth. I reach into the display case and select a chocolate cube with a red swirl on top. I hand it to him, and when my fingertips brush his open palm, I swear the nerve endings in my fingers have suddenly multiplied.
“What’s this?” he asks, looking at the chocolate in his palm.
“Molten chocolate. Don’t chew. Just let it sit on your tongue.”
He puts it in his mouth, and his jaw remains stationary as I instructed. I watch his face, expecting to see pleasure or surprise, expressions I always see on our customers when they sample something new. But Kai’s face is serious and thoughtful, his eyes far away as though he’s savoring a beautiful sunset while contemplating the meaning of his life. And then his eyes turn wistful, like the colors of the sky have melted with his chocolate, and he’ll never taste chocolate or see the sun rise again.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
He looks at me. “Nothing. It’s just … been a long time since I’ve had something so good.” His voice is soft and forlorn, reflecting his eyes. “Thank you.” He leans his elbows on top of the display case so that we’re eye-level. “So, are you and Tyler working things out?”
The question catches me off guard, and I don’t know what to say.
“I’m asking,” he says, “because if you are, I don’t want to get in the way.”
“You’re not,” I say automatically. But the truth is, I don’t really know what’s happening between Tyler and me.
“Is that why he was here? To make up?”
“No. He brought in his ‘customer,’ ” I say with air quotes, “for some chocolate. She got some stuff on her shirt, and”—I skip over the details of the creme de habanero incident—“she went to clean up. Then he invited me to a party tonight.”
“So you’re going?” he says with an unexpected amount of encouragement.
“I can’t. I’ll be working on a big order all night.”
“But do you want to go?”
I hear Sophie’s voice back in the kitchen. “Willst du mich küssen?”
“Is that … German?” Kai asks, looking confused.
“That’s my sister, Sophie. She’s been listening to German lessons on her iPhone.”
“Does she have travel plans?”
I shake my head. �
��She wishes. Her favorite band is from there, and she’s kind of obsessed with them. They’re like Radiohead meets a German Everly Brothers.”
“The Astromotts?”
“Oh—you know them? They seem so obscure.”
“I used to listen to them, before I …” He purses his lips, as though he almost said something he shouldn’t. “Before I got tired of them. They’ve got some killer guitar riffs.”
“Du hast eine schöne Stimme!” I don’t know what Sophie is saying, but her voice is all sultry. For someone who insists she’ll never fall in love, she sure is crazy for German boys.
“Anyway, I would love to get out of here,” I say. “It’s been a long day. But when your dad’s a small-business owner, duty calls.”
“Let me help you.”
“Are you asking for a job?”
“No—I already have one, remember? I’m asking if you want some free help.”
I give him an incredulous look. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to help me make chocolates so I can go to a party with my ex-boyfriend?”
He considers for half a second. “Yeah.”
“Why would you do that?”
“Because I—” His gaze rises to meet mine, and I glimpse something like tenderness before a wave of neutrality sweeps it away. “I like you, Avery. I want to be your friend. And if going to a party with Tyler will make you happy, then I want to help.”
I stare at him for a long moment, waiting in vain for that tenderness to resurface in his eyes, and it slowly and sadly occurs to me that he sees me only as a friend. It’s probably why he wants me to get back together with Tyler, so I won’t get the wrong idea.
“Well,” I say, flustered by a surge of disappointment, “if you want to volunteer here, I need to know your last name.” When he hesitates, I add, “It’s policy.” More of a personal one, seeing how we don’t have a volunteer policy, but I don’t tell him that.
He shifts his feet and then clears his throat. “Lennon.”