“Jessica?” Greg’s voice came from so close that she jumped in surprise. The quarter moon that had been hidden by the deep eaves over The Puffin Diner’s front porch offered enough light that she could see him clearly enough. He was barefoot and had moved very quietly.
She turned and continued toward the beach. The street was completely empty. There were a couple of cars parked down by the bar. Weekenders, because any local would have walked on such a beautiful night.
“Could you at least tell me what I said to send you running off so fast?” He was still following her. She decided that was a point in his favor, for not being scared off by the first flash of her temper—another thing she could thank Mom for. The way he’d asked it earned him another point.
“You didn’t say anything wrong, you simply hit the nerve that I’ve been trying to ignore since the moment I crossed the Coast Range this morning.” The high-water fish on the front of Grouse Hardware was way over her head as they walked Beach Way’s faded yellow centerline. “Actually for a while before that too. Like you drove a spike into it.”
“Ouch! I could break in here,” he hooked a thumb toward the hardware store, “and grab a pair of pliers. Would that help?” He headed toward the dark and locked doors as if he really would.
She was in such a fume that for just a moment she thought he was being serious. “Okay!” She huffed out a breath. “Okay! I’m being foolish. If you’re going to keep walking with me, please have the decency not to point that out again. I hate whining almost as much as I hate being ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous?” Greg offered amiably and veered back across the lane to walk beside her toward the docks once more. “You want ridiculous, you should talk to my buddy Vincent. He doesn’t even know to get his wife flowers when she’s upset. Now that’s ridiculous.”
Greg, Dawn, and Vincent. And now the twins. “Does it bother you that she married Vincent rather than you?”
“Not really. Vincent was gone on her all the way back to kindergarten. I love her to death and would do anything for her, but there was never a click between us.”
“Not what it looked like in high school.”
“Hey, I do have a Y chromosome, you know. Dawn was a knock-out way early; still is. But she was always the level-headed one out of the three of us. Always knew what she wanted. Double major in physics and chemistry and she came back to marry a carpenter and teach the high school kids. How cool is that? But it wasn’t her I was crazy about.” He stated the last as a blunt fact; again that supreme arrogance. No attempt to hide the fact or whisper it or keep his mouth shut.
Jessica closed her eyes; allowed herself the freedom of walking for a moment with her eyes closed. The gentle breeze off the ocean brushed across her eyelids and tugged lightly at her hair until it felt as if she was floating.
Floating for now, and about to drown.
She opened her eyes and there were the docks sticking out into the bay that was Eagle Cove. A half dozen fishing boats and three sailboats. Not a lot of sailors were willing to brave the reefs, sea stacks, and generally nasty weather of the Oregon Coast—a storm was just as likely to come crashing in tomorrow as a day of light winds and pleasant sun. And if she made one more metaphor about her suddenly storm-tossed life she was going to turn in her journalist’s artistic license.
“Tell me something, Greg. Anything. Just get my mind out of the rut that it’s in.”
Greg considered the challenge. He’d never really imagined himself just walking along with Jessica Baxter. Of all the things he’d ever imagined with her, he’d never thought of something so simple.
He did wish he hadn’t blurted out that she was the one he was crazy about, but it was truth and it was out there. He remembered Chef Manuel telling him, “Once you break the blasted egg, let it go and move on.” So, he’d said it. No taking it back.
The other thing he’d never expected from Jessica Baxter was the amount of distress she was showing. He’d always been attracted to her simple confidence. She’d walked down a high school hallway with an ease of passage, without tipping over into her being some kind of a queen bee. It was the same way she wrote. He had an online search alert that kicked him an e-mail of every article she published. Her written voice was as engaging as her spoken one—straight ahead, true, no evasion or softening of hard facts.
And here she was asking him to help her avoid whatever she was thinking. She looked so sad, rooted in place at the end of Beach Way and staring at the small working docks floating at the edge of Eagle Cove. Daring greatly, he rested a hand lightly on her lower back and turned her toward the beach. With just the slightest pressure he was able to get her moving again.
And from that brief contact, he could imagine how she would feel to hold. The warmth of her against palm and fingertips, the extra little pressure where her spine and the inside of his knuckles had lined up. The soft smoothness of the thin fabric of her blouse. The tip of his thumb had just brushed the lower edge of her bra’s back strap.
Way too easy to imagine holding her close.
“There’s a moment in cooking,” he had no idea what he was going to say, but if he didn’t speak soon, a sudden dryness might close this throat forever. “I’ll wrestle with a dish a hundred times. I follow the recipe. I work the ingredients. I get to the point where if I eat another lobster-stuffed pork chop I’m sure that I’ll die.”
They moved down the concrete boat launch ramp until they reached the beach and then turned south. The town lay sleepily atop the bluff to their left. On the moonlit sand, giant driftwood logs looked ten times their size with their dark shadows. The sand was a mixture of tide-packed hard and wind-blown soft that tickled his feet.
And his shoes and socks were still on the diner’s porch. Well, he wasn’t leaving Jessica’s side to go back and get them.
To their right, the ocean waves sparkled outward forever. The steady whump of waves hitting the sand then scraping up and down the beach kept them company. Seagulls slept on the sand as bright lumps, who scowled when “forced” to stand and step out of the humans’ way. A few miles to the south, Orca Head lighthouse towered above the beach, casting its sweeping lights out across the water, but passing high above the beach and town—a guiding beacon that offered no illumination to their next steps.
The ocean breeze didn’t draw on the infinite fresh air and sea salt to intrigue his nose. Instead, Jessica, walking just windward of him, scented the breeze like warm honey. Like…what had he been talking about?
Food. Tough guess. He was a chef after all. Pork chops. That was it.
“Then after a hundred meals of merely good,” he continued, “and occasionally awful, something happens. I’ll cook without looking at the recipe. After all, I’ve long since gleaned every scrap that the prior chef encoded in coarse-minced versus fine-diced and dash versus pinch. And maybe I’m in too much of a hurry to look at the recipe again. I just cook.”
He tried to assess what Jessica was thinking, but she ambled along beside him watching the beach ahead. They were moving too slowly for it to be walking. They were like two old friends heading down the beach as somewhere to talk rather than actually heading anywhere.
“There’s something that happens at that moment. I…” he tried to recapture what he’d felt while cooking tonight. “I was no longer just cooking. I was…”
Somehow they had stopped walking and were facing each other in the moonlight. The sliver of a moon was behind her and her face was cool skin and deep shadow, like a modernist painting of herself.
Well, if he was going to go down for anything, he might as well go down for the truth.
“I was cooking for you.”
It wasn’t something he could have said even this afternoon. But the Judge had been right; he’d never cooked like this before. After so many meals for himself, for the Judge, and for the town, he could now feel the difference. And some part of him knew now that he’d finally glimpsed how to be a chef rather than just a cook. He wouldn’t be sl
iding backward anytime soon. Just as thoroughly as Jessica had ruined the morning’s roulades, she’d made the dinner, but he owned that now.
Jessica watched him without blinking. No tilt of her head to show what she was thinking.
He waited, too tired to do anything else. Too certain that once again he’d utterly blown it.
“I’m going back to my original premise,” her voice was as neutral as her expression.
Was it some journalist’s tool? Never show your own emotions so that the interviewee must fill the void? Well, his voice was food, not words, and he’d spoken with everything there was inside him.
“My first question was, ‘What the heck, Slater?’ That still seems appropriate.”
If she couldn’t see it or couldn’t let it in… Somehow he’d thought more of her. He’d given her all that he had and it hadn’t been enough.
“You know what? You were right. Teenage crush, decade-long delusion, whatever. I hope you enjoyed the meal.”
He turned to continue down the beach.
Jessica grabbed his sleeve.
He shook her off, surprising himself as much as her.
“Okay!” It came out as a shout that he couldn’t seem to clamp down on. “I don’t know who you are. You left this town fourteen years ago at a dead run and you think I’m a failure because I didn’t. Well, I did leave. But after eight years I came back because my mother was dying and then my father needed me. And you know what happened? I discovered I liked it here.”
Still that neutral expression.
He almost blasted her with the rest of it. That he knew it was still a schoolboy crush, but it was one that even just the sight of her brought roaring back to life. He wasn’t an idiot, except about Jessica Baxter. He—
Unable to face what he did and didn’t know, he turned from her and headed down the beach. She didn’t try to stop him this time.
He waded through one of the half-dozen little runoff streams that cut just inches deep across the sand. The chill water did nothing to slow his steps as he passed the small, sleepy hotels perched along the bluff. The cuffs of his jeans now slapped wetly at his ankles chafing the sand into his skin.
When he glanced back, Jessica was still standing there, a shimmering figure in the moonlight—as ephemeral as the waves and just as indifferent. Maybe he should go back and apologize or placate or something, but he didn’t feel like it. He was only now putting together why he’d cooked the way he had. He hadn’t even known it until he said it aloud and it scared him to death. The food had always been his and his alone. No one should have the power to ruin roulades or create the best meal he’d ever put together.
And the worst fear—the one that had him practically sprinting down the beach—was that he was fooling himself and he’d never again be able to cook just for himself.
“Where have you been?” Natalya’s sleepy mumble greeted Jessica as she tried to slip into the room without waking anyone.
She whispered, “Just go back to sleep, Natya.”
And for a blessed moment it appeared that’s what she did. But after Jessica had washed her face, brushed her teeth, and found a nightshirt, she could see Natalya sitting up in her bed.
“Care to explain that one?”
“It’s two a.m. my time,” the hall clock had softly chimed midnight as she’d snuck in, again making her feel like a teen past curfew. “I had to catch an early flight. We can talk about it tomorrow.”
“I thought you were maybe necking with Greg Slater.”
“So not,” Jessica shifted her bag and the rest of her clothes onto the floor and crawled into the other bed. Even though it was the high season, Aunt Gina had saved them one of the largest rooms which just fit a double and a single bed with a tiny nightstand between them. Natya, arriving first, had grabbed the double, of course, just as Jessica would have done.
“Then I’m guessing that you weren’t having your way with his body either.”
Jessica didn’t bother to answer, just hugged her knees to her chest and was momentarily glad that she could see so little of the room. Aunt Gina had decorated by genre and she and Natalya were in the Sci-Fi room. The lone shaft of moonlight just now reaching in through the west facing windows lit a small side table with a foot-tall Princess Leia doll facing a pair of Lieutenant Uhuras: one classic and one reboot. The three miniature women and one life-size one watched her with shadowed gazes. Thankfully only the life-size one was expecting an answer.
“Tell me that isn’t why you stayed behind after dinner.”
“That isn’t why I stayed behind after dinner.”
“Holy—” Natalya was putting some real heat behind it.
“Don’t say it! You’ll shock Anne.” Even though it was invisible in the darkness, Jessica knew that a poster of Anne Francis and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet hung above Natalya’s bed. Linda Hamilton from Terminator II hung above Jessica’s bed brandishing her massive machine gun and wrapped in crossed bandoliers of bullets implying a deep cleavage despite the military vest. Linda wouldn’t give a fig what Jessica said, so she was glad she’d ended up with this bed.
Natalya sighed, “Please tell me that you didn’t yell at him.”
“No. But he yelled at me.”
“Did you deserve it?”
“I dunno,” Jessica dragged the covers over her head. “Maybe,” she told the darkness.
“Heard that!”
She could feel Linda glaring down at her as well.
Chapter 4
(Saturday morning)
It was the weekend. Worse, it was really early on a weekend morning. He should be sleeping in.
Yeah, that always worked well for him. Getting up five days a week at five to help his father at the diner didn’t exactly train him to relax on a sunny summer morning. Greg knew that the Judge, a creature of habit, wouldn’t stir from his bed before eight on a Saturday—the end of the BBC morning news.
Greg headed out for a run to clear his head. The beach was chilly despite the promise of a warm day. The fog had moved close ashore and though the sun had cleared the Coast Range, it wasn’t high enough to clear the bluff and most of the beach still lay in cool shadow.
As was usual, he trotted south to the base of the cliffs atop which stood the Orca Head lighthouse. He did some stretches against the rock.
He glanced up at the Lamont place. That and his family’s were the two great Victorians of the town, like side by side beacons; together they were as commanding of the shoreline as the lighthouse perched hundreds of feet above him.
He’d spent much of the night puzzling about why Jessica’s question had ticked him off so much.
What the heck, Slater?
Seriously, what the heck? He’d practically drooled all over her. He’d insulted her for her wanting marshmallows in her hot chocolate and run hot and cold through both the dinner and the conversation afterward.
Hi, babe. Haven’t seen you in fourteen years, but you’re the love of my life. Wanta do it?
Okay, he hadn’t been that bad…he hoped. But he sure hadn’t been good.
Nine days—eight now—if he wanted to do something about it before she once again left Eagle Cove.
He leaned into his hamstring and felt the stretch tug all the way up to his exhausted brain.
After last night, wasn’t much chance of that happening. Let’s impress her by yelling at her and calling her an idiot. Actually, he was fairly sure that he’d been calling himself an idiot, but it probably hadn’t come out that way.
He tried the other hamstring which was no better after tossing and turning through most of the night.
Well, it wasn’t going to get any better than this.
He heard a faint call caught on the breeze.
Greg scanned the beach, but the nearest person out this early was Clarissa and Emilio Thompson a half mile down and tossing a ball for their dog.
The call was repeated, a little louder. It might have been his name.
He tracked it
to the veranda on the Lamont place. A tall slender figure with blond hair was shouting his name and waving him over.
A thread of hope shivered through him, as chill and cutting as the fog that hung close offshore.
Run down the beach and ignore Jessica for eight days? Or go all in and see just what he could do to explain himself from last night in hopes of patching things up?
Well, since he’d already broken some eggs, he might as well see what he could make with them. Besides, no matter the danger, he didn’t want to risk not seeing Jessica for another fourteen years. He had to try.
Acknowledging that he was probably being an idiot, Greg began trotting across the beach toward the stairs that led up the bluff to the Lamont’s house.
Jessica jolted out of a dead sleep, the kind that only happened after her brain refused to shut off with the lights. Like a combination of drunk, hungover, and three-day old dishes. She’d laid awake for hours in a mashed-up collage of her stumbling career, the amazing meal, and Greg’s harsh words—that she’d thoroughly earned. He seemed like a nice guy doing his best to be honest and she’d slapped him with “What the heck, Slater.” Real nice. Jessica heard the grandfather clock downstairs chime two before she’d finally plummeting into true sleep.
She tried to shake off the dream that someone had been shouting Greg Slater’s name. Someone with her own voice. Jessica really had to file a complaint with the dreams department for writing such a stupid story. Guy dreams were supposed to be about handsome and sexy ones who flowed with charm. Instead she’d woken from a dream of a handsome and sexy guy who scowled like a ticked-off golden retriever—all happy, then all sad, then all happy, then…
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