“I get it.” Her expression turned thoughtful and she smiled a little.
“What?”
“Do you ever wonder if people like us start businesses in faraway cities to avoid our families?”
He rolled over onto his back, threading his fingers together over his stomach. “I’ll cop to that.”
“Do you have any other siblings?”
His stomach soured. “A brother. Older.”
“Ah, you’re the baby.”
He rolled his eyes.
“That’s okay.” She tugged at his T-shirt. “I’m the baby, too. Maybe we have more in common than I realized.”
“Maybe we do,” he said, looking at the television without a clue what was on.
“So what’s he like?”
“Who?” he asked, a delay tactic.
“Your brother,” she said, and then tossed back some candy.
He glanced around. “Where’s the remote? Aren’t we about to watch a movie?”
She handed it to him, eyeing him. No, he was not going to talk about his brother. Not tonight.
He started flipping. “Did you have something specific in mind?”
“I guess I should say yes,” she said.
He smiled at the television, stopping on the only channel that wasn’t running a commercial. It was something that looked like it’d been filmed in the sixties or seventies. He’d gotten interested in that old stuff ever since he and Gracie lost the remote that one day and got stuck watching a marathon of The Love Boat. That had taken them into a stint with Fantasy Island, and then Charlie’s Angels. The acting on all the shows was so bad it made them good. “What’s this?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
“Oh, God,” she said. “Keeping going.”
The fact that she wanted him to turn it just made it more interesting. “Do you know what this is?”
“Mmm hmm. Can I please see the remote?”
He grinned over at her. She was blushing again. “Seriously, what is it?”
She started grabbing for the remote, so he held it out of her reach, trying to watch the show all at once. “What is this? A story about a boy and his grandma?”
She sat back on the bed. “No, not quite.”
Now that he wasn’t trying to fend her off, he could figure out where the info button was and see for himself. He hit it. “Harold and Maude,” he read aloud.
Cassidy held both arms out, her wine cup still in her hand, and glanced up at the ceiling. “Are you freaking kidding me?”
“What?” he asked through a chuckle. “What’s wrong with this movie?”
She gave an exhausted sigh and then pointed with her wine cup. “They’re not grandmother and grandson. They’re…romantic.”
His mouth dropped open. “Are you fucking serious?”
“I’m dead serious. It’s a cult classic. You’ve never heard of it?”
“No, but we’re definitely watching it. When did it start?”
“Not too long ago,” she said, resigned.
He met her gaze. “We don’t have to.”
“No, it’s actually a really good movie. I had the luxury of watching it without having a clue what it was. I took all these cinema studies classes in college which made me really interested in all sorts of films. So I was home from college one weekend on a Saturday afternoon, and this movie came on. I was totally sucked in and clueless about the plot, and so as they grew closer it was extra fascinating to me.”
“Oh man. I wish I didn’t know now.”
“I’m sorry. Now I feel like I ruined it for you.”
“Nah. I’m not like that. I can come in the middle of a movie or a TV show and be just fine.”
She looked at him curiously. “I can, too.”
He shrugged. “It’s a special skill. We should be able to list it on our resumes.”
“Lord knows mine needs work.”
He turned toward her. “I know bakery owner. Fill me in on the rest.”
She inhaled a deep breath, looking off into space. “God, the whole ugly thing?”
“Start with high school. What was your first job?”
She smiled. “I worked at a frozen yogurt shop.”
“I’m sensing a theme here.”
“I know. I swear I’m not addicted to sweets. I honestly could take them or leave them.” She held up the M&M box. “Except for these, of course. What was your first job?”
“Construction. My buddy’s dad had a company so he and I both worked for it.”
“Ah, working guy.” She took his hand and inspected it. “Yeah, you definitely look like you’ve worked with your hands.” She grinned. “Probably way more than I care to know about.”
She went to pull away, but he took a look at her long, slender hand, a tiny tremble in it. He met her gaze, curiously. What was she nervous about?
“I’ve definitely worked with my hands over the years,” she said. “Proof is in the pudding.”
Her hands were marked with a few scars and imperfections. “These look like hands that have enjoyed life.”
She laughed. “Very kind way of putting it.”
He threaded his fingers through hers and they rested their hands between them which gave him a natural peace of sorts. “Did you ever work a desk job?” he asked.
“Oh, for about five minutes. I temped when I got out of college and was well on my way to corporate hell when I met this friend who had volunteered for the Peace Corps.” She shrugged. “So I figured I’d give that a try.”
“You were in the Peace Corps?” he asked, not sure why he was so incredulous. He guessed admiring was a better word.
“Yeah, I was, for about two years.”
“Wow,” he said, feeling wholly inadequate. “What did you do?”
“My focus was in health, mainly in HIV/AIDS education.”
He winced, thinking about her asking him to wear two condoms that night on the beach. No fucking wonder. “Wow. I imagine you’ve seen a lot of stuff, doing that.”
She nodded, staring down at the bed, seeming to drift off into another world. “It was a time when AIDS was a death sentence. I don’t know how your generation feels about it, but mine was scared straight. Have you ever seen Reality Bites?”
He shook his head.
“Anyway, it’s a different time now, at least for those who have access to medicine and healthcare. Definitely not like that for everyone.”
He nodded, the sins and carelessness of his past creeping up his spine.
“Have you ever had a scare?” she asked.
He appreciated her kind way of asking him if he had HIV or AIDS. “I guess I was pretty careless a few years back. I didn’t test positive for HIV, but I did catch something.” He winced.
To her credit, her expression remained impassive. “Something curable, I hope.” She said it not in a judging way, but sincerely.
He pinched his temple. “Chlamydia.”
“Well, it is a popular one, isn’t it? Did you have to call all your exes and tell them?”
“That was fun. I called as many as I could, but…” He trailed of, too embarrassed to finish the sentence.
“You didn’t remember them all?” she asked.
“I probably can remember all of them, I just didn’t get all their information.”
“But with Instagram and Snapchat and all that these days, surely?”
He shook his head. “I’m not on any of that.”
“Really?”
He didn’t want to explain why. “Not my thing. Anyway, it all freaked me the hell out. I’ve been careful ever since.”
“Usually just takes one scare for that. You got lucky.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“How often do you get tested now?”
“I try to remember to go every six months.”
“When’s the last time you went?”
He thought about it, wanting to give her an honest answer. “I think it was last summer. July maybe.” He considered her.
“What about you?”
“I get tested when I see my gynecologist for my yearly exam. I went when I got back from Jamaica.”
“You’ve never had anything?”
“No, but it’s only because I’m pretty much always careful. Like I said, I come from a different generation. We don’t mess around with that. I know it feels better without a condom and all that, but our lives were at stake back then.”
“I get it,” he said, and then smiled. “So pure.”
“Ha! Now that’s funny.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “So of all those girls who you passed through, were there any who stuck around for a while?”
He looked down at his hands. “Not especially.”
“What about a high school sweetheart? Did you have one of those?”
“No,” he said, truthfully. He hadn’t met Lauren until college.
“So you’ve never had a long-term relationship?” she asked, not seeming to believe him.
He let out a resigned breath. He wasn’t ready to do this. Not tonight. “I did, actually. In college.”
“How long did that last?”
He shook his head at the ceiling, the pain from that time period gut-punching him again. “Too damn long.”
She waited him out, wordlessly, and as much as it pained him, he figured now was as good a time as any.
“Four and a half years through college, and then two and a half after we graduated.”
“Wow. That sounds really serious. Were you planning on getting married?”
“We’d mutually decided to wait to get engaged. She was in law school and I was working for her father.”
“Doing what?”
“Accounting.”
She sat up. “Are you serious?”
He nodded, glancing over to see the shock on her face. He forced a smile. “Don’t look too surprised.”
“I shouldn’t be. You do own your own successful business. It’s just that I can’t imagine you in a million years working in accounting. Did you wear a suit?”
“On occasion. But typically the uniform was khakis and a polo.”
She giggled. “I’m sorry. But I just can’t picture that. Did you have the tattoos then?”
“No, I didn’t get those till after. Lauren hated tattoos.” It was so weird saying her name. He hadn’t said it in years.
“So how did you go from that life to the one you have now?”
He scratched his head, his heart clenching from just having to say the words. Nobody in his current life knew anything about what had happened except for Dane, and he, of course, never mentioned her. He knew not to.
“Her parents had a big party for her when she graduated law school. We were all there—her family, my family, all our friends. My brother showed up, which I didn’t think a lot about at first, because he’d known Lauren as long as I had. We all went to UK together. I’d noticed Lauren had been missing for a while, so I went inside to find her, and I did, in her room.”
She held her hand over her heart. “Oh no.”
“They weren’t in bed together. I think I may have preferred it if they had been. Instead, they were sitting on the bed, and she was crying. He had her cradled to him, kissing the top of her head.” A wave of embarrassment flowed through his body. “Like the biggest moron on the planet, I went to her and kneeled down in front of her, my hands on her knees. I asked her what had happened. Was it one of her parents? Was someone sick?” He shook his head, the memory so vividly wicked and fresh. “She was sitting there cuddled up to my brother, and my first thought was to comfort her. Have you ever heard of a bigger moron?”
“I think that makes you kind and compassionate.”
His thoughts went dark and murderous. “He did the talking for them. They’d fallen in love. They hadn’t meant to hurt me. It’d never been the right time to tell me. They didn’t want to do anything to derail her plans of graduating law school, so they’d kept it a secret. They’d been fucking one another for years. I couldn’t get them to tell me how long it’d been going on, but I’m pretty sure I can pinpoint it back to my junior year of college. She broke up with me for a few weeks and then she came back to my apartment bawling one night, begging me to take her back. She’d made a huge mistake. She would never do it again. I suspected she’d slept with someone, but I didn’t care. Not enough. I wanted her back. That was all I knew. My brother was still in Lexington at the time, working out an internship. Her coming back to me lined up with him going home after the internship was over. I knew it at the time, but I refused to believe it.”
Cassidy reached for his thigh, laying her hand on it and running her thumb back and forth, calming his darkened mind.
“So how long did they stay together afterward?”
He exhaled a deep breath. “They’re still fucking together.”
“Oh my God, Jesse. I’m so sorry.”
He shrugged.
“This might be a strange question, but you said you worked for her dad. Was he grooming you for big things at his company, or…”
“Oh yeah. That was the plan. Her dad and I were close. We played golf at least once a week. I was a part of their family. He kept me really close at work. I started near the bottom, but he pulled me into all kinds of meetings I didn’t belong in. ‘Watch and learn,’ he’d always tell me. I’d eat lunch in his office and he’d run ideas and proposals by me. He valued me and I worked my ass off to show him I was worthy of his time and all he was prepping me for.”
“What did he think when this all happened?”
“He was stunned. Livid. He’d invested three years in me and promoted me a couple of times. He had too many bourbons one night and told me the company would be ours one day, mine and Lauren’s.”
“Wow. This must have been a shock to him.”
“Oh yeah.”
“So did your brother step into your shoes at the company, too?”
“He tried. Bill, her dad, told me he worked there four months and then bailed for another job. His major was finance, but he always hated it.”
“You stayed in touch with her dad?”
“Yeah. He still calls me about once every six or eight months. Asks about the bar. Asks if I’m seeing anyone. He knows not to say much about Lauren, but I swear I think he’s gauging me to see if I’d consider coming back. I don’t think he’s accepted the fact that his plan went to shit.”
“The two of you must have had some kind of connection for him to continue keeping in touch.”
He hesitated before he said his next words. Only Dane knew the truth. Others suspected, but nobody else knew for sure. “He’s probably checking in to make sure his money is still going to good use. When I gave him my notice, officially, he paid me a year’s worth of severance, lump sum. My salary was already inflated as it was, so I’d banked plenty already. I thanked him, took the money and drove south.”
She huffed a laugh. “Good for you.”
He turned to face her. “You don’t think less of me for taking his money?”
“Are you kidding me? Why wouldn’t you? I’d have taken it.”
“You’d have given it to charity, too.”
“Not necessarily. The money I used to open Seaside Sweets wasn’t totally pure.”
“How’d you get that money?”
“A sort of ex of mine died and left me some money. He was a man I dated on-and-off for several years during my thirties, someone I’d met on a volunteer trip. We had very different lives. He was a corporate type who lived in Pittsburgh. I was never going to live in Pittsburgh,” she said with a smile. “But I did enjoy him. I could have loved him if I’d allowed myself to. But I’d known better.”
“You can do that? Just shut off your heart like that?”
She cut her eyes at him. “I like to act like I can.”
His heart swelled with this hint of vulnerability she showed him. “What were you doing before you got that money?” he asked.
“I was working in elderly care. My mom had died and she
’d been in a rehab center at the time, which was a glamorous way to say nursing home. The people who worked there were hit or miss, but this one woman was so dedicated to her patients. I was going to be this woman. I was going to sign up and dedicate my life to these elderly people in need.” She shook her head. “Needless to say, I didn’t stack up. I wanted to be as selfless as my mentor was, but I wasn’t even close. It was the hardest work I’ve ever done. I thought I would get used to the smell but I didn’t. It was back-breaking work, holding up the dead weight of a person over the toilet or trying to move them up on a bed. I’d promised myself I’d do it for a year, and I kept that promise, but when I got that money a few months in, it was like a guarantee of parole.” She met his gaze, a shameful look on her face. “I sound awful.”
“I think that’s a whole lot more time than most people give.”
She waved him off. “I’m no humanitarian. I give it a college try every once in a while, but I use Seaside Sweets as my crutch. ‘I’m sorry I’ll have to skip this trip. I’ve got the shop.’ I can only imagine the eye rolls on the other end of the phone when they call.” She looked at him abruptly. “God, listen to me. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.”
“It’s called opening up to someone. Haven’t done it in a while?”
She smiled at him, a true, genuine smile that meant something. He had no idea what, but something was going on between them. “I guess I have not.” She peered over him at the end table. “You’re not drinking your wine.”
“I feel buzzed enough just lying here with you.”
“Yeah, because talk of nursing home work will really do that to you.”
“Getting to know you does that to me.”
She took a sip of her wine through a little smile—his reward for putting himself out there. She held the cup between them. “So have you and your brother reconciled?”
He looked up at the ceiling. “We don’t speak.”
“What do you do about the holidays?”
“I only go for Christmas. My sister has it at her house. Lauren’s family does their big get-together on Christmas Eve, so that’s when I go to my sister’s house. They come over for Christmas Day and I’m headed back here by then.”
“So you travel up there for one day?”
“It’s what I’ve done for the past few years now.”
Grayton Beach Dreams Page 10