by S. J. Bishop
I nodded. Good for Courtney. If tonight was any indication, she was clearly running a booming business. And I could respect good business. I’d been looking to get into the restaurant business myself. My time with the Patriots was limited, and damned if I was going to be one of those idiots who blew all their money the first few years out of the league.
“Is she seeing anyone?”
“Are you interested?” asked Randy. “She is still a babe.”
I shrugged. It had taken me a long time to forget about Courtney Hart. I didn’t want to be interested. I’d like to think I’d changed a lot since high school. But Courtney hadn’t changed one goddamn bit: still lean, still beautiful, and still barely made up, sun-tanned, with all that thick, long blond hair. Maybe I hadn’t changed as much as I thought. Seeing her again tonight, all those forgotten emotions, all that lust, had resurfaced with a vengeance.
“I don’t think she’s seeing anyone.” Randy paused. “She’s got a kid, though.”
“A kid?”
“Yah. Oh. Wait. Actually, she might be seeing someone. Hey, Roy!” He called up to one of the other guys. We were a block away from Ocean Drive, wandering in a thick pack and making a great deal of noise. Roy Yasgur turned around and started walking backwards. His face was red with drink.
“Roy,” said Randy, “Who’s the guy that stays at the hotel? The one who was eating with Courtney Hart a few months back. I feel like he comes around a few times a year.”
Roy shrugged. “Something Davis? Davis Something? Can’t remember.”
Elise popped up from wherever she’d disappeared to and frowned at me. “Are you asking about Courtney?” Was she pouting? Seriously? This was why I didn’t go home anymore. When you never leave the town you went to high school in, those stupid high school grudges still exist. I’d forgotten that Courtney and Elise weren’t friends.
“Yah,” I said. “Saw her at The Mangroves tonight.”
“Honestly,” said Elise, her lip curling. “She’s not worth the worry. A bit of a hermit/workaholic, you know? Not nearly as fun now as she was in high school.” Elise linked her arm through mine. “We’re hitting up the Ginger Mermaid first! You’re buying me a drink.”
I rolled my eyes, making a decision. I’d buy Elise the damn drink, but I wasn’t getting involved beyond that. Seeing Courtney again had brought up a lot of shit I thought I’d left buried. Call me a masochist, but when was the next time I was going to be home? If I wanted one more hot sack session with my ex, I probably shouldn’t bang her high school rival.
3
Courtney
When I arrived home, the front lights were on for me, illuminating the neat landscaping and circular gravel drive. I really liked my home.
When I’d moved back to Serenity after spending four years in Texas with my grandmother, I’d looked for a secluded spot away from the noise of Route A1A and the beach traffic. The realtor had found me a rundown cape-style house in Old Serenity. It’s quiet, and I love it.
I parked, and before I could get out of my car, the door opened. Adriana’s husband, Brandon, was a shadow against the hall light.
“Hey, Sugar,” he called, stepping out onto the porch so I could see all of him. Brandon was incredibly attractive: skin a smooth, pecan shell brown; sloping cheekbones; and the body of an Olympic sprinter. Brandon was from Alabama and carried the Deep South in his drawl. “You’re home earlier than I thought you’d be.”
I locked the car and strode up to the door. “Your beautiful wife shooed me out after everyone had gone, most likely so you’d be home when she gets there…”
“Woohoo,” said Brandon, white teeth flashing in his dark face. “Sounds like I’m about to have me a night.” We hugged each other warmly, and I followed him into my living room.
“How’d the kid do?” I asked, throwing myself into the antique leather wing chair I’d taken out of my parent’s house when they’d moved.
“The Chatterbox? She’s still up. I saw her light on under the covers – didn’t have the heart to tell her to stop reading.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “I owe you.”
“You do indeed,” said Brandon. “She told me a story that lasted a half hour. I’m never getting that half hour back. You tell her that she’s lucky she’s cute.” He paused a second, as if thinking about what to say. Finally, he said, “Addie texted. Said a face from your past was in the restaurant this evening.”
Dark eyes met mine. Brandon was all southern charm and sharp sass, but he could get real serious real quick. The look he was giving me now said he suspected the same thing Adriana did. I shrugged.
“Was it that football player?”
“It was. He’s in town for his coach’s funeral.”
Brandon crossed his arms and stared me down. “What are you going to do about it, Sugar?”
“I don’t need to do anything about it,” I said, sounding more defensive than I meant to. “He’ll be gone soon.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” asked Brandon, insinuating clearly that he didn’t think it was. “Maybe you should try to talk to him. Maybe you should tell him…”
“Momma, who’s him?”
Brandon’s mouth shut abruptly. I glared.
“And that,” he said, “is my cue to leave. See you tomorrow, Boss.” Boss. Not Sugar.
Lea stood in the living room entryway, wearing a pair of sleep-shorts and one of her Serenity Starfish swim team t-shirts. Brandon mussed her hair on his way out, and when the door closed behind him, Lea entered the room.
I know I’m biased, but my daughter’s the cutest damn thing you’ve ever seen. She’s shaped like me: leggy and thin, and she has my nose, but not my coloring. Lea is dark-haired and dark eyed and has the tiniest cleft in her chin.
“Who are you going to try to talk to?” asked Lea, sliding into the room and perching on the chair across from mine.
Goddamn it, Brandon.
“The football player,” said Lea, revealing that she’d been listening before she’d entered the room. “Is that your high school boyfriend. Ryan?”
Sharp kid. I leveled a stern gaze at her, hoping parental censure might shut her up and send her back to her room. No such luck. Lea had my stubborn streak. “And what do you know about my high school boyfriend?” If Adriana had said something to her…
Lea didn’t respond but wandered over to the bookshelf. Below the shelf were cabinets where I stored all the old videos from when she was a baby, as well as mementos from my parents’ house that I’d salvaged a few years ago when they’d moved. Lea went right to the third cabinet and opened it up, pulling out my two, hard-backed yearbooks. Shit. My little girl was too nosy by half.
I sat still as Lea opened my junior class yearbook. Finding what she wanted, she came back and set the book onto my lap. I looked down. The photo was from prom: a picture of the homecoming court. Sixteen year-old Courtney sat in the back of the pickup truck wearing jean shorts and a t-shirt, and beaming at the camera for all she was worth. Next to me was a tall, lean young man with dark hair and a mocking smile. Ryan had always been “too good” for high school traditions (I’m pretty sure, looking back, it was Ryan’s coach who’d made him participate in the photo). Around our faces, in black sharpie, a large heart had been drawn. I knew, if I went back and looked through the yearbook, I’d see all the places were Ryan had gone through drawing hearts. I could still hear his mocking, “Oh, look at us, aren’t we sweet!”
“That’s him, right?”
I sighed. “Yes, baby, that’s him.”
“I marked all the pages,” said Lea, pointing to where a few pages had been dog-eared. “There are hearts all over the place, and they say ‘love, Ryan.’ He must have really loved you.”
I sighed at my daughter. Of course, to a guileless ten-year-old, all those hearts and those sweet, cloying words would symbolize love. To Ryan, it had been a joke.
“No, baby, it’s not like that,” I said, closing the yearbook. “He was teasi
ng. He was making fun of how many times our faces appeared in the yearbook.” I’d gotten so angry at him when I’d given him my book to sign and had gotten it back, defaced.
Lea made a face at me and cleared her throat. “To my girl, Courtney,” she quoted. “Baby, I don’t want a day to go by without holding you in my arms. You are heat lightening and summer storms. More passionate than a rip tide…”
“Lea Hart, did you memorize that whole passage?!” I snapped, cutting her off. I didn’t need to hear the rest come out of my daughter’s mouth.
“Is he really in town, Momma? Are you going to go see him?”
“Lea, you need to go to bed.” My tone brooked no argument, and I watched my daughter try to determine whether or not it was safe to press me further. I held up a finger. “One,” I counted. Lea turned abruptly and fled up the stairs. Good girl.
I listened for her door to close before picking the book up, closing it, and sticking it back on the shelf.
4
Ryan
“Rise and raise your voices high; they fear the Panther’s battle cry…” Okay. I’m tone deaf, but the baby I was currently rocking in my arms didn’t seem to care. I think she responded more to the noise than to the tune. I’m not a big ‘baby’ kind of guy, but the kid I was currently holding was my niece, and holding a baby was not much different than holding a football.
My brother Gabe had moved back to Serenity with his wife, Ellie, about two years ago. Gabe was a property lawyer and made a decent living. He and Ellie had bought a three bedroom house on the water with a pretty sweet wrap-around porch. When their three-month-old, Katie, had started bawling at five o’clock that morning, I’d told a bleary Ellie that I’d walk her around. I’d slept terribly anyway.
Sitting in the cushioned rocker on my brother’s porch, staring at the sunrise over the Atlantic and rocking Katie back and forth, I was as far from bad-ass womanizer as you could get, and I was damn happy no one was around to witness it. I had a reputation to uphold.
As Katie dozed off in my arms, my mind wandered. I don’t know what it was - perhaps that powerful mix of sea breeze, sunrise, and crashing waves – my head was full of Courtney. I’d never told her, but Courtney had done a helluva lot to ground me after my mother had left. Without Coach Cal, I’d probably be in jail. But without Courtney, I wouldn’t have even graduated to play sports in college. I’d acted out in some seriously destructive ways, but refocusing all of my energy on trying to get the untouchable Courtney Hart to turn those baby-blues my way… And once she’d looked at me, it had been hell to keep her. I’d had to work my ass off.
Fuck’s sake, I was getting sappy. I should have gotten my rocks off with Elise last night. I was hot and restless and pretty desperate for a good fuck.
“She calmed down for you, then?” My brother Gabe wandered out onto the porch, wearing nothing but his boxers.
“Yah, Bro, she’s chill,” I said. “But she’s starting to stink, so if you want to take her and take care of that…” Gabe came and gently lifted Katie out of my arms. If you looked at my brother and me side by side, you’d never guess we were related. Gabe was at least four inches shorter than me, and I had about fifty pounds of muscle on him. He’d always been quiet and soft spoken, where I tend to be louder and more assertive.
I stood up, cracking my neck and flexing my shoulders, stiff from sitting still.
“You heading out?” asked Gabe as I walked off the porch.
“Going on a run. Then I have some business to take care of.”
“Business in town?”
I pretended I hadn’t heard him. Instead, I pulled my phone out of my pocket, put my earbuds in, and began to jog.
There were two parts to Serenity, the mainland and the island. The mainland stretched inward and was a real mix of socio-economic statuses; the island cost big money to live on and had the fancier restaurants and bars that we had never been able to afford as kids. Gabe didn’t live on the island, but he wasn’t far from one of the bridges.
The Mangroves, on the other hand, was seated on the island in the shadow of the Barton Bridge, which connected the island to the mainland. It was right on the water and, on one side, had a dock where boaters could park and order lunch. It had a huge wrap-around deck with an overhanging roof and paddle fans, and there was an enormous inside seating area. I didn’t remember it being so big back in high school, and when I reached the restaurant about forty sweaty minutes later, I wondered if Courtney had renovated it.
It was only eight o’clock – way too early for The Mangroves to be open, but I figured that, if Courtney was running the place, she’d be here. The Courtney Hart I knew was wild, but she never slacked on anything a day in her life.
Upon discovering the front gate locked, I wandered around onto the back porch.
“You looking for the boss?” called a women, standing in the doorway to the main dining room.
“Courtney Hart,” I said, in case my information was wrong and she wasn’t the boss.
“I’ll see if I can find her,” said the woman, “have a seat wherever,” and she closed the door and disappeared.
I looked around, realizing quickly that I wasn’t the only person on the deck. There was a skinny, dark-haired girl maybe ten or eleven years old, who was sitting at one of the high tops coloring. As if she sensed me, she looked up, beamed a crooked-toothed smile, and gestured at me with her crayon.
So I wandered over. “Whatcha drawing, kid?” I asked, staring down at her paper. I blinked. She was drawing a football field – I could definitely make out the yellow goal posts and the green rectangle of the field. She’d no sense of dimension, but the shapes were clear enough.
“Hey, that’s pretty good,” I lied. “You watch football?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “You play football?”
“Now, how’d you know that?” I pulled out the chair and sat down with her, snatching the paper out from under her fingers and stealing a crayon. This is my move: insert yourself into the conversation physically – it works with women and little girls worldwide. I began to draw a stick-figure and expected the girl to object, but she watched me with interest.
“You’re big, and I’ve never seen you before. So you might be in town for that coach’s funeral. So, one plus one…”
“You’re pretty sharp, kid,” I said, glancing over to the door to see if the woman had come back yet.
“I’m Lea,” she said, and she stuck her hand under my nose so that I had to look up at her and take it.
“Mac,” I said.
Lea frowned, pursing her lips. “Oh.” She looked dejected. “I thought you were him.”
“Who’s him?”
The girl shrugged. “No one.” She snatched back the paper and her crayon. “Wow,” she said. “You suck at drawing.”
“Thanks.” I looked back at the door in time to see Courtney breeze through the dining room on her way elsewhere. “Hey, I gotta run. See you later.”
“Sure,” said the girl, but her tongue was already sticking out of her mouth, her face screwed up as if to determine how she might fix the picture I’d ruined.
5
Courtney
“I swear to God, if that damn busboy used all the lemons for the bar garnish…”
I ducked behind the bar to open the bar fridge. Sure enough. There was a bucket of lemon wedges – way more than were necessary. “Shit. Someone is going to have to go out and get more.”
“Is someone down there with you, or are you expecting the fridge to respond?”
I snapped my mouth shut, my heart leaping. What was he doing here?
I shut the fridge door, hoping my face didn’t betray the fact that my heart was pounding hard against my ribcage. I stood up and looked right into the dark and devastating eyes of Ryan Mcloughlin. Men should not be allowed to have eyes that beautiful.
“What are you doing here?” Great, Courtney. Start by being antagonistic.
Ryan must have heard the snap in my voic
e because his warm smile turned a bit brittle. “You didn’t call me last night,” he said, resting his forearms on the bar and leaning so that our heads were on the same level. I resisted the urge to take a step back, to put distance between us.
“Was I supposed to?” I asked.
Ryan’s smile turned flirtatious. “Yah.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I had other things going on.”
“I get that,” said Ryan, nodding. “Though I have to admit, I was disappointed. I was hoping we might hit up Reds, or take a stroll on the beach for old-times’ sake.”
I rolled my eyes. “Since when were you ever interested in old times’ sake? I honestly can’t believe you’re here. You said you weren’t ever going to come back.”
“Ah,” said Ryan. “My brother moved back home and had a kid. Coach died…seemed like a good enough reason to come back to Serenity.”
Right. I vaguely recalled hearing that Gabe Mcloughlin had moved back into town.
“Well,” I said, reaching down into the fridge and pulling up the tub of lemons. “What I’m hearing is: Courtney, I came back for a lot of reasons – none of them was to see you. So, why are you here?”
Ryan’s smile faded. “I didn’t think you’d still be in town,” he said. “Or I would have tried to reach out. I figured you’d left a long time ago.”
I shot him a glance. “Really? Because if I’m remembering our last conversation correctly, you were pretty sure I was never going to leave Serenity.”
Ryan had nothing to say to that. The silence turned awkward. I was about to walk off when he cleared his throat. “So, I hear you’re running the restaurant now. I never pictured you running a restaurant.”
“No? What did you think I was going to do?” What I wouldn’t give to be a bit more cool-headed. I wished I wasn’t still angry at Ryan. Angry meant I still cared. I didn’t want to care.