The Fortune Cafe (A Tangerine Street Romance)

by Wright, Julie

  Carter had been rummaging around in his cupboards and turned to face her, holding plates and bowls. “Time to eat.”

  She helped him set the table for two, aware that somehow doing this here with Carter seemed way more intimate than the dozen times she’d cooked for Blake at her place, probably because she was hyperaware of the new surroundings.

  Fifteen minutes later they’d decimated the food. She groaned. “I’d lick the plate, but I scraped it clean.”

  Carter only gave a sleepy grunt that made her smile. A couple minutes passed before he found the energy to push himself to his feet. “My stomach says as far as rampages go, Achievement Unlocked.”

  “Thank you, Chef Neighbor.”

  “You made at least half this dinner.”

  “No, I mean for taking my mind off of things. I know I’ve got some rough days ahead, but thanks for helping me through this first part. They say the first seventy-two hours determine how the rest of your breakup goes.”

  “I think the seventy-two hour thing is for kidnappings. Or solving murders, maybe? But not breakups. You’ll need more time than that. We’ve got rampaging left to do.”

  “Rampage sounds so violent. I mean, it makes sense as a guy thing to do, but I think I want to name it something more feminine.”

  “Girl words are all too nice for the amount of getting-it-out-of-your-system that’s called for here.”

  “I was thinking maybe I should call it the binge-and-purge. You know, binge on fun things to purge Blake out of my life.”

  “Who?”

  She smiled. “Right.”

  “Wrong. About the name. I’m the expert. Your name idea is disturbing, and we’re sticking with the Rampage.”

  “Moot point. I don’t need more rampaging anyway. But thank you. This was so much better than staying in.”

  He gathered up the plates and headed to the kitchen. “Don’t get up and try to come do dishes,” he called over his shoulder as she stood to do exactly that. “Also, the Rampage can’t be over. I figured out great stuff to do when I was outrunning my issues last year, and you can’t be done until you cross them all off your list too.”

  “I can’t,” she repeated, and the note of warning in her voice stopped him cold.

  “Let me rephrase that. You can do whatever you want. But if you want a tried and true recovery plan, I’d strongly advise you to finish the Rampage.”

  She had a plan for emotional recovery she’d been working up between putting out fires at work earlier. It involved soul searching and listening to soothing music, self-betterment, reading a few classic novels, and vigorous exercise. “What does the rest of the Rampage involve?” she asked, nearly comatose just thinking about her plan.

  “Tomorrow it’s eating at Emmy’s Spaghetti Shack, and next Saturday it’s going to the Exploratorium.”

  “Those sound like things for little kids.”

  “What’s your point?”

  She laughed. “No point. Let’s do it.”

  “I don’t hear any more thumps next door. You’re probably safe to go burrow now if you want.”

  “That’s allowed during the Rampage?”

  “It’s inevitable. And it’s kind of good to have the moments of self-pity, so you can contrast them to how much better you feel when you’re not burrowing.” He walked her to his door. “Want to knock on my door when you get home tomorrow?”

  She nodded right as her phone beeped with a text from her mom. Did you hang out with Carter?!

  She held it up for him to see. “Notice she didn’t ask if I’m okay? Or how I’m feeling? Just if I hung out with you. I’m not kidding about my mom trying to fix us up.”

  He shrugged, his smile real and easy. “I don’t do rebounds. So this is me helping out my neighbor while I wait for funding to kick in on my new development project. If you’re okay with me using your crappy situation to drag you out of the house and entertain myself I guess we’re even. You know, in the interest of full disclosure.”

  “Sounds fair to me. See you tomorrow.”

  “Looking forward to it.”

  She slipped out, surprised to realize that she was too. A lot.

  Lucy glared at Carter, who was holding his sides and laughing. She poked him, hard. “This isn’t funny.” The light wind got extra playful with her hair, and she pushed the strands out of her face to glare again, but it didn’t help. Carter was almost wheezing by that point.

  He tried to stop long enough to check on her. “You didn’t hurt anything, did you?”

  “My pride. I think I gave a pigeon a heart attack. What have I become that now I’m spending my afternoon terrorizing birds?” She redirected her glare to her rented rollerblades. “This is your dumbest idea so far. Who even rollerblades anymore? Why did I let you talk me into this?”

  Carter only laughed harder, and she shoved him. “Sorry,” he gasped. “It’s just…” And he quit talking so he could do an imitation of her from three minutes before, his arms flailing while his feet competed to take him different directions. That’s probably what his imitation of a kitten on roller skates would look like too. She’d never understood how fast breakneck speed really was until she, in fact, felt in danger of breaking her neck. She clenched her fist a couple of times, trying to figure out how much it would hurt her if she punched him for real, but he let out a high-pitched whine that was such a spot on imitation of her that it broke her, and she collapsed on the grass in giggles. He dropped down beside her.

  “I didn’t sound like that,” she said between gasps of air.

  “You did,” he said, his voice strangled with more laughter.

  “I hate you.”

  “You love me. Who else buys you spaghetti meatballs as big as your head?”

  That was true. On the night Blake had dumped her, she’d been overwhelmed by how her structured life had suddenly become riddled with holes where Blake was supposed to be. She’d dreaded having to go through that initial stretch of time without him. All the time they used to spend together would be hers to spend alone.

  Alone.

  She didn’t do alone. And when she’d thought about how long that aloneness might stretch into the future, it had made her ill— pounding head, churning stomach, the works.

  But Carter had come around every day that she let him, pulling her to this museum or that gallery, or this weird little shop, or that hole-in-the-wall restaurant. When she’d complained that her waistband couldn’t survive any more food adventures, he’d decided they should rent rollerblades and sacrifice themselves to the gods of stupidity.

  She’d still noticed Blake’s absence, but in ways she didn’t expect. She hadn’t realized how much energy she’d spent in managing him and his moods. Or how much brainpower went into making everything perfect for him. She’d seen it as a challenge, an extension of the work she did at the Duchess, another chance to flex her skill set.

  Running around and doing things with Carter just because they were there to be done had made her realize how little downtime she’d had from her work mode. Even the socializing she and Blake had done had mostly revolved around him networking, buttering up new clients, or schmoozing for work.

  Carter shifted beside her, lying back on the grass with his arm over his eyes to shade them. The smile still playing around the corners of his mouth wrung a return smile from her, even though he didn’t see it. She stretched out too and stared up at the blanket of blue above her, unbroken by clouds.

  Carter was all about the hard work of playing. For three weeks now, these adventures with him had made everything bearable because she could forget it all. She could forget that work was still going wrong as often as it went right, that her kitchen had only barely been patched up, that a hundred things fell apart each day until Carter whisked her off to play.

  But it was going to catch up to her. At some point, the sheer suckiness of the situation, all the feelings she hadn’t worked through about Blake, were waiting to come crashing down. She couldn’t outrun them
forever, and it didn’t seem fair to hang on to Carter and let him drown too. She didn’t know when it would happen, but she had a nasty feeling it would be the day she’d highlighted in red on her calendar— June 2. Instead of walking down a petal-strewn sandy aisle to get married, she’d be at her desk at the Duchess with a million tasks to do, exactly as if she had never given up eighteen months of herself to a relationship that had gone nowhere.

  Carter stretched his other arm out and nudged the top of her head, a wordless invitation to rest it on him instead of the grass. She hesitated. He was a touchy-feely kind of guy, but this was a step short of cuddling, not his usual teasing pokes and friend-hugs. He nudged her again, but it felt as absent-minded as a pat on the head from her grandmother, affectionate but not insistent, so she scooted up enough to accept his arm pillow. “You’re a good friend, Carter.”

  He didn’t say anything to that, but that’s what she liked about him. He was comfortable with silence. Blake had used it as a weapon to let her know she’d screwed up somehow or to get her to knock herself out trying to find out what was wrong with him. She sighed. She didn’t miss that.

  “What are you thinking about?” Carter asked.

  “Stagnation.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  She smiled even though he was studying the inside of his eyelids and not her. “I just realized I was stagnating professionally.”

  “This epiphany brought to you by rollerblades. And you thought they were stupid.”

  She elbowed him, and he laughed. “Anyway, back to my pathetic personal problems, I was saying I was pretty distracted with Blake. I figured I’d push hard at work after the wedding. I mean, I always work hard, but I had big plans for the Duchess once everything with the wedding settled down.”

  “Like what?”

  She smiled again at the question. The curiosity was a Carter thing; he wanted to know about everything from how the chef at Emmy’s had made the meatballs so big and still got them to cook through to why inline skate styles had changed in the last ten years. On the day they’d gone to the Exploratorium, a hands-on science center, he couldn’t get enough of all the interactive exhibits. Within minutes she’d been playing like a nine-year-old right beside him, giddy over all the gizmos and whirligigs.

  He nudged her, a reminder that he’d asked her a question.

  “I want to make the Duchess the premiere venue for high profile events. We get a lot of those already, but I want to push it farther, tap business that hasn’t considered us before by offering the most elegant high-tech setting they could imagine. And then I would be so amazing that the hotel group would beg to promote me to general management at one of their lead holdings. Maybe even at the Duchess.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” he said, his voice full of late afternoon sun, warm and lazy. “Do it.”

  “I wish it were that simple. But you’ve seen how bad my luck has been when I’m with you. It’s actually worse when I’m at work. It’s like Murphy’s law on steroids over there. A promotion is definitely not in my future. I’m not sure even a job is in my future if this keeps up.”

  “You’ll be okay.” His lips grazed her hair in a kiss. She went still but nothing else happened. She slid a sideways glance at him, but his eyes were still closed, his face still turned to the sun.

  He wouldn’t have kissed a guy friend that way. But he had sisters, so maybe that’s what he would have done to cheer one of them up? She hoped. Didn’t she?

  She cleared her throat. “Anyway, I need to get work under control.” She tried to pick up the thread of the conversation, but the kiss was still distracting her. What was that? She should ask. But if he was going to act like it was nothing, then it must be nothing.

  “You will,” Carter said. “That’s something I figured out about you quick. If you decide you’re going to do it, it happens. So work doesn’t stand a chance. They should give you the keys to the Duchess now because that’s a done deal.”

  “I already have the keys to the Duchess.” It had been a fast kiss, like he hadn’t been thinking about it, so that was good. Right? She wasn’t sure. Random kisses, even hair kisses, seemed like a bad idea.

  “Then they should give you the crown and scepter or whatever it is you get when you’re the boss of the Duchess. A special RFID badge? What is it? It’s a crown and scepter, right? Say it’s a crown and scepter.”

  “It is, but my boss never wears them because they don’t go with his suit.” Maybe that hadn’t been a kiss. Maybe the wind had ruffled her hair again, and it felt like a kiss. But how did the wind make a kissing sound? She straightened, too fidgety to lie down anymore.

  “You okay?” Carter asked, cracking an eye open to check on her.

  “Fine. Except for not. I’m really stressed about work.” And about you kissing my hair. “I think I liked it.”

  “Sorry, what?”

  Her cheeks heated. She couldn’t believe she’d said that last part out loud. She’d meant she’d liked him kissing her hair and that was the problem. Focus, girl. “Nothing, just saying I’m glad I like my work.”

  Work. She’d let Blake dominate her work-life balance, and it hadn’t balanced at all; the wedding had gotten her attention, and the Duchess got what was left. She had to flip that, at least until her job was under control.

  When she put all the pieces in place, luck had a way of happening. When she got distracted, let things get too spontaneous, everything went sideways— it rained bad luck. She caught herself reaching for her necklace again. “You think I should call Spyglass again?”

  “You called her two days ago, right? I think she’ll let you know when it’s done.”

  That would have sounded so condescending coming from Blake, everything underscored with an unspoken but obvious “duh.” But Carter’s tone was reassuring, and it made her want to burrow into him and soak up more of his mellowness.

  Hold up. Bad idea.

  As much as the last three weeks with Carter had been fun, she didn’t need the double awkwardness of getting caught up in some emotional rebound with a neighbor she couldn’t avoid when her emotions inevitably flamed out, plus having her career fall apart due to lack of focus.

  Carter was a cute guy. A really cute guy, actually. And if she quit distracting him, she’d leave him free for someone else to swoop in and snatch him up. In fact, her friend, Ally, had hinted more than once that Carter seemed pretty dateable. Maybe she should hook them up.

  She pictured them together and wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t say why, exactly, but something about it was off. It was the same sense of something being not quite right when she was eating chicken at a nice restaurant and it had been grilled too close to where they’d cooked seafood. Blake had always said she was imagining the fishy flavor, but she always asked the server, and she’d never been wrong yet. The picture of Ally and Carter in her mind had the same tinge of not-quite-rightness.

  Wait. Did she think that because she wanted it to be herself in the picture with Carter? She gave that mental image a whirl. It looked totally normal in her head, and she frowned.

  “You must have some deep thoughts going on in here,” Carter said, startling her with the feather-light touch of his finger grazing the furrows between her eyebrows. Her eyes flew open to find him propped on his elbow and smiling down at her. His finger moved down to trace the frown tugging down her mouth. A devilish impulse to catch the tip of his wandering digit between her teeth and see what he did parted her lips, but before she could see what would happen, her phone shrilled, and she shot up.

  “Hello?” she said, aware of Carter’s gaze on her profile.

  “Hi, this is Jolie at Eveline’s Bridal. Your dress is here, and we’re ready to schedule you for a fitting.”

  Lucy’s chest tightened. “I canceled that order a couple of weeks ago. I canceled my whole wedding.” Keeping her voice steady as she said it felt like walking a high wire without falling.

  She listened to clerk’s flustered apology on th
e other end that sounded as if it were coming from way below her perch on her high wire. Yes, she understood that she would still owe the cost of the special ordered dress, but they could attempt to sell it on consignment for her if she would like to do that. Yes, she would like to do that. No, there was no way she would be wearing that dress. No, Jolie didn’t need to apologize for the call.

  She hung up and scrounged up a smile for Carter. “I guess whoever called me last time didn’t leave a note that I’d canceled the order.”

  “You still have to pay for it?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. They might be able to sell it to someone looking for a deal.”

  He rested his hand on her back. “I’m sorry. Maybe we should ramp up the Rampage?”

  She straightened away from his hand and climbed to her feet, fighting hard to keep her balance— emotionally and otherwise. “Carter—”

  And whatever he heard in her voice shadowed his face as he climbed to his feet too.

  She continued anyway. “You got me through the worst of it. The Rampage was a success, and now I need to focus on work. You made it possible for me to hold on to the status quo, but I really need to push ahead. I’m getting to the point where all this spontaneity is starting to go from being helpful to getting me off track. Not that it hasn’t been amazing,” she rushed to add when a flicker of hurt flashed in his eyes. “But the healthy thing for me to do is to take control of my life again. Besides, think of all the free time you’re going to have now that you don’t have to babysit me,” she said, hoping to tease a smile out of him.

  It worked. “You mean babe-sitting?” he asked, wiggling his eyebrows at her, dirty old man style. He ducked when she swung at him, and he caught her fist, using her momentum to spin her around and pull her up against him. He braced his feet on either side of her skates and steadied her. “Careful there, Sugar Ray. You steady?”

  She nodded, surprised by how hard his chest felt against her back. He released her slowly, keeping hold of her hand until he was sure she’d found her feet. She was even more surprised by how much she missed his warmth against her.