The Fortune Cafe (A Tangerine Street Romance)

by Wright, Julie

She grinned. “It’s not a race. It’s one of those days where I want to enjoy every minute because it was so close to being such an epically wrong turn. I want to savor every second of being back on track.”

  His eyebrow rose. “That sounds... um, much better than I thought you would.”

  “I’m taking my life back, no big deal.”

  He grinned back at her. “Yeah, no big deal.”

  “I want to swing by the jeweler and pick up my necklace first. Seems like a good way to kick all this off.”

  Worry crossed his face. “Is it a big deal if we don’t go by until this afternoon?” He nudged a backpack that Lucy hadn’t noticed. “I went and picked up some lunch for us. It’s not going to keep forever, but I thought it would be fine if we got on the bikes right away.”

  Lucy shrugged. “Yeah, we can do it after the bike ride. She told me once that afternoons are less crazy for her anyway. What’d you get for lunch?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Isn’t everything with you?”

  “Yes. Bring me to the bikes, woman.”

  On the way out of the hotel, she narrated the sites of canceled wedding activities in the serious tones of a news anchor describing an accident scene. “And there is where Lucy Dalton almost held her rehearsal dinner. It was a narrowly averted disaster since Dave Dalton would most likely have punched Calvin Sefton. Hard.”

  Carter smiled at her fake news voice, but it didn’t turn the creases around his eyes into smile lines. Well, he’d see as the day went on how relieved she was to be here presiding over the ashes of her plans and not celebrating a misguided wedding.

  They picked up beach cruisers, and Carter made Lucy laugh by insisting on a girly bike because it had a basket in front where he could put his backpack. For the next ten miles he played tour guide with fake information. “The house on our left was once owned by the millionaire who invented the bendy straw. His name was actually Ben D. Straw, so it’s not like he could invent anything else. That large boulder on the right is called the Goliath Booger because, well, look at it.”

  “Gross. Goliath Booger? Are you twelve?”

  “Sometimes I feel like I am when I’m around you,” he said, grinning.

  A couple of times he made her laugh so hard she swerved like she was trying to bike after a night of tequila. Around mile eleven, he settled down to study the undeveloped coastline stretching down either side of the highway. She took advantage of the chance to steal glances at him, at the way he watched the passing scenery with nothing but a smile, like enjoying the view was the only thing in the world he had to do.

  She loved that smile. Whatever she’d seen Carter do, he did only that thing, whether he was deep inside a coding problem for his app or people watching at the park. He was so present in a way she’d never mastered. When he listened to her, he only wanted to know what she had to say. He wasn’t parsing it so he could figure out what to say next.

  He glanced over and she looked away, embarrassed to be caught. She wanted to hop off her bike right that second and drag him across the sand to play in the waves and then collapse and roll around in them with him From Here to Eternity style, hungry kisses and everything. Especially the hungry kisses.

  She kept her eyes on the road ahead. How was she supposed to fake just-friends indefinitely?

  A few more quiet miles slipped by. Every now and then Carter would ask her a question or point out a pelican or something. But to her it felt as if her whole mission on this bike ride was to keep him from catching her staring at him like Aaron Wellberg had often caught her doing in middle school— love-struck and hopeful.

  She increased her speed, pushing the heavy beach cruiser bike to go faster. She was a grown woman, and she could keep it together, for pity’s sake. She just needed breathing room to reset.

  “We racing?” Carter called, close behind her. Too close. She needed more space and a few minutes to get it together.

  “No race,” she called over her shoulder. “Just getting some... stuff out. Feels good.” And she poured on more speed.

  He kept pace, and even if she hadn’t been able to hear the hum of his tires, she would have sensed him there anyway. Her nerves had acquired intensely sensitive Carter antennae.

  It didn’t take long before Carter was even with her, but she kept pushing. Her calves burned from the strain of powering the heavy bike until she morphed from a hurts-so-good to a just-plain-hurts situation. She pulled into a scenic outlook and climbed off to stretch.

  Carter stayed on his bike. “Let’s call it a tie,” he said. The wind had destroyed any remaining order to his hair, and the sight of it paired with the satisfied grin on his face was so adorable that it stopped Lucy’s breath for a few seconds too long. She remembered to quit staring and inhaled on a gasp.

  “You okay?” Carter asked, his smile fading.

  “Yeah, I’m good. Winded from that sprint.” She turned toward the water. This was ridiculous. Pull yourself together, girlfriend, because you aren’t going to convince anyone you’re emotionally stable like this. “I think I need a few minutes alone. Is that okay?” she asked, daring a glance back at him.

  His laugh lines had all been dragged downward with worry again. “Of course. Yeah, go ahead. Take as long as you need. I brought my camera, so I’ll just stay up here and shoot.”

  She trudged through the sand until she was a few yards short of the tide line. It was warm enough for people to be out flying kites or running, but still too cool for many of the locals to be in the water. Her research on an ideal date for a beach wedding had been dead on. This would have been a perfect day, but not one molecule of her regretted that she was sitting here in shorts and a tank instead of a wedding dress.

  She dug into her front pocket for the slip of paper she’d taken from her purse before leaving the hotel. True love is for the brave, not the lucky. Flecks of dried soy sauce speckled it, a reminder of the disastrous lunch where she’d gotten the cookie. It had bothered her so much then— the fact that she’d gotten her first generic fortune right after breaking her necklace.

  Maybe it was possible to make this is as true as any fortune that had ever predicted her promotion or winning lottery numbers. “Just talk to him,” her mom had said. And Lucy had told her she was afraid of ruining a good thing. That wasn’t brave.

  What if she were brave enough to ask Carter if she was more than a project to him? She thought she was more. At the very least she was someone fun for him to hang out with.

  Was that all? If she had the courage to ask, would “love” really favor her?

  It would be a lot easier to try if she knew her bravery was backed by luck, and her hand fell away from the spot where her necklace should be. She wished she had insisted on them stopping by Spyglass.

  A trio of seagulls to her right scattered and flew away. She looked up and found Carter trudging toward her, his backpack slung over one shoulder and his hands in his pockets. He dropped down beside her. “Sorry. You’re just making me too sad. I brought you something.”

  “Lunch?” she asked, eying the backpack.

  “Eventually. Something else first.” He rose to his knees to dig in his pocket.

  “Why am I making you sad?” she asked. “I’m not sad.”

  “Then you do a good imitation of it,” he said on a grunt as he freed a small box. “Here. I think you’ve been wanting this.”

  She took the white box with a picture of a Spyglass stamped on it and her eyes flew to his.

  “Open it.”

  Her fingers fumbled over each other in her hurry to check inside. There on a bed of cotton was her necklace, but it didn’t look the same. She frowned in concentration and pulled it out, letting it hang from her finger to study it more closely. The jade and its setting looked like they had the day her grandfather gave it to her, but something else hung with the pendant.

  “You can take that off,” Carter said, the words flying out of his mouth faster than their bikes had sped over the highway t
rail.

  “You know what this is?”

  “Yeah. It’s an aspen leaf. I made a call a couple of weeks ago and asked Stella to add it, but you can remove it, and your necklace will be exactly what it was before.”

  Lucy studied the intricate leaf done in the same gold filigree as the jade’s setting. “I don’t understand.”

  Carter drew his knees up to his chest and clasped his arms around them. It was casual, but in a very deliberate way. He cleared his throat and looked somewhere past her head. “I’ve always paid attention to you. I’ve seen you wear that necklace a hundred times. I did a little research and the aspen leaf symbolizes determination. Sometimes I think you think that your luck thing makes you who you are the way that your eye color and your laugh do. But it doesn’t.” He met her eyes and took a deep breath. “I thought you should remember that the best parts of you have nothing to do with that necklace.”

  She let the chain pool in her hand and touched the aspen leaf again. “I can’t believe you did this,” she said, awed by what he saw in her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have done it. At least I didn’t have her fuse it on, right?” He rose to his knees again and dug through his backpack.

  She tried again. “I meant that—”

  He groaned at something inside his bag. “Man, I thought I had such a great idea to help you today. I was going to reverse engineer that whole day when you were down here with Flake and make this place a better memory for you, but I think I really, really suck,” he said, pulling out a dripping plastic bag with The Fortune Café logo on it. “Looks like now that you have your necklace back, our luck is reversing already. I can’t believe this exploded. I was super careful when I packed it.”

  “Wait, you were trying to recreate the day my necklace broke?” she repeated, trying to understand his logic.

  “No, reverse engineer it. I mean, that’s where it all fell apart, right?”

  She nodded slowly. She had thought that. She didn’t now, but she’d put it that way to him when she’d told him about it one particularly rough night in the days after the breakup.

  He shrugged, and set the bag down to rub at his sticky fingers with a napkin. “I know you’re into signs and stuff. I thought I’d turn this day into a sign that things are getting better. New and improved necklace, lunch from the same place as last time, but I rigged the cookie with a different fortune.” By now he was mumbling, whether out of embarrassment or in distraction as he tried to sop up the mess inside his backpack, Lucy wasn’t sure.

  “You rigged my fortune cookie?” she repeated.

  “Yeah. That’s hard, by the way,” he said. “It took me like twenty tries to do it at my place. I’m just glad I was smart enough to try it at home instead of here. Because I was definitely not smart when I thought egg drop soup would be good on a bike ride.”

  She grabbed the bag and looked for the wax pouch inside where Chinese restaurants always put the fortune cookies and the soy sauce packets. Carter looked up when the bag rustled and his eyes widened. “You don’t need that,” he said, taking the pouch from her fingers. “It was a stupid idea. I’m going to get this mess out of here, and let you meditate or grieve some more or whatever I interrupted.”

  “I’m not grieving. Why was it a stupid idea? I think it’s amazing. Let me see the fortune.”

  He froze for a moment so quick she wasn’t sure she’d seen the hesitation. “No, it’s fine. I’m sure it’s trashed anyway from the soup spill.”

  “Should be fine inside that bag. I want it.” He started to stand, and she tried to snatch it away from him again, but he jerked it out of her way and they both lost their balance. She pitched into his chest and knocked him flat on his back. She didn’t apologize. She didn’t even move. She stared down at him, into his eyes full of nothing but her. He wasn’t breathing; if he was, she would have felt it against her lips. “I want the fortune,” she repeated, propping herself up on her forearms but making no effort to move off of him.

  His eyes flicked down toward her mouth, and he shook his head. “Lucy.”

  A tingle shot down her spine at the strain in his voice. “Yes, Carter?” she asked, relaxing into him even more.

  His eyes slammed shut, and she grinned. “Lucy...”

  “Yes?”

  He hesitated. She didn’t mind. She liked her perch.

  “Carter...” She trailed off his name and swallowed, trying again. “Carter, I want to be brave.”

  That got his eyes open. He reached up and twined his fingers through her hair, giving it a soft tug. “Don’t mess with me,” he said, his voice soft as the breeze off the ocean.

  “I’m not.” She wiggled against him while she tried to reach behind her for the slip of paper she’d pulled from her pocket.

  His eyes shut again, and he clenched his jaw. “Lucy-Lou, stop.”

  “I just need—”

  His hands closed around her waist and held her still. “I mean it. Stop.”

  She tucked her worn fortune into his hand and slid her arms around his neck, loving the feel of the warm sand against her palms and his soft hair against the backs of her hands, her lips barely grazing his as she spoke. “Read it.”

  He held her gaze for a long moment, and the intensity of it only made her want to dip down and steal a longer kiss. He glanced at the fortune, his eyes scanning it then darting back to her face, searching again. They were so close she could see his eyes darken, and this time the look inside them sent another shiver down her spine. Why wasn’t he saying anything?

  She slowly righted herself and let him up. He reached into the wax bag for a homemade-looking fortune cookie, plucking the paper slip out, and handing it to her.

  She straightened it and read the words. Maybe what you’re looking for is just a balcony away.

  He watched her so closely she wondered if he could see the pulse jump in her neck, and she blushed. He reached for her and settled her into his lap, turning her face up to his for a kiss that would have melted her if he wasn’t holding her up, his arms tight and sure. He deepened it, confident in a way that sent tingles skittering through her stomach, hotter than she’d ever have thought possible, and tasting like sweetness that was purely Carter.

  When he drew back enough to breathe, he rested his forehead against hers, and she wondered if he could feel how flushed her skin was. That had been good. So, so good.

  He smiled and dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose. “If you’re going to be brave, then I guess that means I’m very, very lucky.”

  But his next kiss only proved that Lucy’s luck was back again.

  Stella Novak ignored the incoming text. She didn’t care if Andrew was “stopping in” at Seashell Beach and wanted to catch dinner together. The fact that she was now a stop along the way bothered her more than it should. Thinking of her ex-boyfriend used to hurt, it used to make her mad, but now she just felt… tired.

  Besides, if Andrew really wanted to find her, he knew where she worked. He’d been to her mother’s jewelry shop, Spyglass Jewelry, more than once. He used to tease her about how someone on a full-ride academic scholarship to Stanford had come from a touristy town.

  “Did you even have to take tests in your tiny school?” Andrew’s voice echoed in her mind. “Or did they let you out early to go cater to the tourists?”

  At first, Stella thought Andrew was charming, witty, and cosmopolitan. He was from Seattle and was one of the most brilliant minds in the business entrepreneurial program. They were put on the same team in Marketing 410 while doing their undergraduate degrees. By the time they both graduated, they were a steady item on campus.

  Stella aced the GMAT and had her application in for the MBA program when her world fell apart.

  Or more accurately, her mother fell apart.

  Her mother had suffered a mild stroke from her diabetes, and now Stella spent her days running her mom’s shop, and her ni
ghts taking care of her mom.

  Andrew had been sympathetic at first, but when he realized Stella was dead set on moving back home to take care of her mom on a long-term basis, he had walked away. Until the last three months. It seemed Andrew hadn’t found any women to fawn over him during his MBA studies. And now he was back on her trail. Thinking of his persistence made Stella want to close the shop for a couple of hours and walk alone on the beach. Sand between her toes always seemed to help her forget Andrew and her former dreams.

  Her phone buzzed again.

  She looked at it simply because she had to. Most of her vendors texted her when they were running low on product.

  Need 2 doz moon & star bracelets b4 weekend. ??? –Ronnie

  Stella set down the silver bead she was crimping and texted back. No prob. Pick up Fri a.m.

  Setting the phone back down, she scrawled a note on a lavender Post-it note. She had them all over the wall above her desk. It looked disorganized, but the method helped her prioritize. The note about the moon & star bracelets now went into position #2, right below Post-it #1 that read: Order food.

  She kept that Post-it in first position always because if there was one thing she was forgetful about, it was eating dinner. She worked late after her mom went to sleep in their house behind the shop, and by the time she realized she was starving, the restaurants were closed. And her mom’s special dietary food did little to satisfy Stella.

  She grabbed her stack of takeout menus and fliers, then glanced at her phone to check the time. 9:15 p.m. It was Tuesday, so the restaurants closed down by 9:00 p.m. That left the pizza joint. She dialed and ordered a personal size with pepperoni, olives, and mushrooms, then as an afterthought, she added a Diet Coke. She’d be up late starting on Ronnie’s order anyway. She pretty much kicked her Diet Coke habit after moving back home, but it had been creeping back lately.

  While she waited, she reviewed the orders of the day. A woman had come in earlier with a broken jade necklace. When Stella said it would take at least a week or two to fix, the woman was upset… the necklace meant a lot to her, she’d said. Stella reviewed the contact information on the Post-it: Lucy Dalton. Stella suspected that the woman put a lot more stock in the superstitious nature of jade— and the fact that it was supposed to be a good luck charm. People were certainly interesting.