“Well, help yourself to whatever you want, but do me a favor and watch the place for a few minutes, will you?” Law came out from behind the bar. With anyone else, he would have expected an interrogation about his sudden need to bail on his place of business, but he was counting on—and got—merely a grunt of assent from Jake. That was the nice thing about Jake. He wasn’t always jumping to conclusions where there were none to be made.
He’d made it almost all the way to the door when Jake’s voice caught up with him. “You’d better hurry or you’re going to miss her.”
“What’s with the Spice Girls thing?” Sawyer asked a few minutes later as he came to stand next to Law on the curb near the end of the parade route. Sawyer had finished his role in it, parked his cruiser, and shown up to watch the end.
The Gorgons were approaching, performing an enthusiastic version of that “If you wanna be my lover” song. Several of them sported headpieces that made it look like they had snakes for hair.
“Why is it always the Spice Girls?” Sawyer went on. “I mean, songs from The Little Mermaid I get. But the Spice Girls?”
“Maya got her undies in a bunch years ago because I didn’t have any Spice Girls on the jukebox at the bar. So I think she gets them to sing it to stick it to me. Also, you may remember that the Gorgons never marched in front of the royalty float back in the day. They were further up in the parade, and…”
He trailed off, registering Sawyer’s puzzled look. Yeah, Sawyer didn’t remember that. It was a weirdly specific detail that only someone obsessed with the parade would recall.
“So what you’re saying,” Sawyer said, “is that you get Maya elected mermaid queen every year, and she responds by surrounding herself with a choir named after figures from Greek mythology whose whole schtick was to turn men to stone and she has them sing the Spice Girls purely to irritate you.”
Ah, yes. That was what Law was saying. But he did realize how ridiculous it sounded when put like that. Annoying Maya was his main hobby, which maybe didn’t reflect well on him, but he didn’t care. Given that he was cursed by being wildly attracted to a woman who hated him, and given that the feeling was mostly mutual—though he couldn’t honestly say he hated her as much as he was endlessly annoyed by her—the Mermaid Parade was pretty much the highlight of his year. He got to see Maya in all her glory, and he got to bug the shit out of her. Win-win. But he didn’t know how to answer Sawyer’s question. Law had learned to live with the contradictions inherent in his relationship with Maya, but his friends did not need to know about them. They wouldn’t understand.
Sawyer shrugged, returned his attention to the float, and said, “That sounds about right, actually.”
The Gorgons wrapped up the song, and the band began playing a royal flourish, heavy on the horns.
Maya was wearing her signature Converse high-tops—a sky-blue pair. After the first year of her reign, she’d cut a hole in the bottom of the tail so her feet could peek through, saying she “refused to be jailed,” which was a very Maya-esque turn of phrase. The green and blue sequins on the tail made it sparkle in the sun. She wore a hot-pink tube top and had painted her lips a matching color. Her long, so-brown-it-was-almost-black hair hung loose down her back, which was a rare occurrence, and it was windy enough that she kept having to push it out of her face.
As the float came to a halt, she made one last rotation perched on her throne, waving first to the people on the other side of the street. It wasn’t a fakey beauty-queen wave, but it also wasn’t the kind of wave she’d do in her real life. That kind would be fast and enthusiastic—Law aside, she was always happy to see people. No, it was merely a slow, unremarkable, almost disinterested wave. And as she turned to face forward, he could see that it matched her expression, which was blank. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t scowling like she sometimes was on that throne. She was bored. Unmoved.
Well, damn. Maybe it was time to retire this stunt. He’d had people in the bar this past spring asking him for ballots before he’d even bothered to put any out, though, so he wasn’t sure he could retire it.
She kept up the blasé waving as she rotated to face his side of the street, her arm moving mechanically in between brushing hair off her face—clouds were moving in, and the wind off the lake was picking up.
Something happened as their gazes met and she registered his presence. She rolled her eyes. Not a lot. Just a little. Enough to communicate, though, when you were capable of communicating in subtle gestures like they were, resigned disgust.
Ha! There it was. He choked back a grin and raised his eyebrows at her. Not a lot. Just a little. Enough to communicate, when you were capable of communicating in subtle gestures like they were, triumph.
As the Gorgons finished their song, a huge gust of wind tore across the beach from the lake. It was so strong and sudden that some people gasped. Maya had been about to climb down from the float, so she was standing. She grabbed a corner of her throne with one hand and flung the other out to balance herself. The wind caught her hair and blew it up and out behind her, so she looked like a Gorgon, too. Like the queen of the Gorgons, commanding the vengeful musical army at her feet.
But she also looked like the queen of the mermaids. The hand she’d flung out to balance herself was holding the trident, and with the drama of the gesture, you could almost believe she was creating the wind, like she was about to call forth the lake itself, to summon a tidal wave that would subsume them all.
She was stunning.
Chapter Two
Back at the bar, Law had words with Carter, who’d shown up while he was out. “You can’t just show up two hours late on one of the busiest days of the year.” He hated to sound like a nag, but honestly, this was a place of business, not a frat house. “It’s not like I have backup. It’s me and you here, bud.”
Though maybe that needed to change. Even if Carter were more reliable, running this place with only two bartenders was a stretch. Law used to have a third person, but Amber Grant quit when she graduated from nursing school, and now she worked for Nora Walsh, the new town doctor. Law had always known that his time with Amber, who’d been a stellar employee, was limited. He’d held off on replacing her, though, because of his plans. He didn’t mind working a ton of hours himself right now if it meant saving money.
“Sorry, man. I’ll do better,” Carter said, and Law moved on to serve Nora, poacher of Amber, who was just pulling out a stool.
“Hey, Doc. I heard you were running a vaccine drive. How did it go?” There’d been a measles outbreak in the region, and Nora was determined to beat it back.
“Okay, I think. It was just an information table—I wasn’t actually giving shots.” She shook her head. “I’m still a bit gobsmacked by that parade.”
“It’s something, isn’t it? You get so used to the craziness around here, you sometimes forget—”
She was here.
The door opening, which was what had drawn Law’s attention, was not unusual. He was in the habit of quickly looking over when he heard the bells on the door. You tended bar enough years, you learned to keep an eye on the crowd.
When Maya came into the bar, which she did more days than not, it always felt like he’d been teleported into a cheesy Western where an outlaw cowboy type slammed open the saloon doors and the whole place fell silent, waiting for him to say something like, This town ain’t big enough for the both of us as he challenged his nemesis to a shoot-out.
Maya never said that—though the sentiment was probably pretty representative of her opinion about him. And the whole place didn’t pause when she came in. It just felt like it. Because the normal functioning of Law’s brain did pause whenever she walked through his door. Not long enough that anyone ever noticed, thankfully, and usually muscle memory kept him from spilling anything if he was in the middle of pouring a drink. But her appearance always caused his brain to peace out of its surroundings for a second and run a little movie in his head—a movie called Maya’s Nineteent
h Birthday.
He’d been behind the bar, chatting idly with her brother, Rohan, who’d been home for the holidays. Law was six years older than Maya, so they hadn’t overlapped in high school, but he was only three years older than Rohan, and they’d been on the track-and-field team together. Rohan had gone on to become a big-shot business exec in the US, but at that point he’d only recently graduated university and moved to Chicago, and they were chatting about how he was finding it.
The funny part was, if you had asked Law then if Rohan Mehta had a sibling, he’d have had to think about it. He knew Rohan, and he knew Rohan’s dad, who owned A Rose by Any Other Name. Law’s dad and Mr. Mehta had been active in the chamber of commerce when Law was a kid. And yes, he vaguely knew there was a little sister, the gangly theater girl who staged plays on the town green. He had never been to one at that point, though. He was already putting in a ton of hours at the bar helping his dad, and between that, school, and track, he didn’t have time for much else. He wasn’t even sure he’d known Maya’s name at that point. She just hadn’t registered in his brain.
But that day, she did register in his brain. Oh boy, did she ever.
It had been a quiet December afternoon. Law was working alone, his dad having moved into semiretirement, and there were only a handful of customers in the bar. When she arrived, both Law and Rohan turned to look at her, and Rohan grinned and got up. “Happy birthday, kid!”
“Hi, hi!” she exclaimed as she hugged him. “And thanks!”
“You been to the store yet?”
“Yeah, I dropped off my bag there. I told Dad we’d meet him there at six. We’re going to the White Rhino in Bayshore.”
“What a shock,” Rohan deadpanned.
“Shut up. It’s my birthday. I’m the boss. And I love that place.” She shrugged off her coat. She was wearing skinny jeans and a fitted T-shirt that read “Drama Queen.” Nothing about the outfit was revealing per se, but it did make Law wonder how he had ever thought of her as gangly. She had her hair in this big messy bun almost but not quite on the top of her head. It made him want to know how long her hair would be when it was down.
There was just something about her, though it was hard to say what. She wore no makeup, and that, together with her casual clothes and almost-messy hair, should not be having this effect on him—“this effect” being that he couldn’t stop looking at her. Her light-brown skin was all glowy, and the smile she gave her brother was almost blinding even from Law’s vantage point to the side. “It’s your birthday?” Law said.
She swung around to look at him for the first time, and her eyes were the exact same color as the honey cream ale from Bayside Brewing they had on one of their permanent taps.
He wasn’t sure why he was noticing all this stuff about her. Comparing her eyes to beer? Come on. She was pretty, for sure. But he was a bartender. Every subcategory of humanity had been through Lawson’s Lager House, including “pretty,” and he was generally indifferent. He would provide a friendly ear if one was wanted, but he didn’t hit on customers. Especially the little sisters of old acquaintances—the key word there being little.
How little, though? He hoped not too little, because he could not deny that he was, suddenly, perving on Maya Mehta.
Until she started talking.
“Nineteen today,” she said in answer to his question, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Nineteen was the drinking age, so he felt less gross for admiring her than he would have if she’d been younger. Not that he was going to do anything about it, but still.
“Hey, congrats. Nineteenth-birthday drinks are on the house. What can I get you?”
She kept staring at him, and if he wasn’t mistaken, she didn’t like what she was seeing. After an uncomfortably long time, she said, “I can pay for my own drink, thanks.”
“You sure? Because—”
“I’ll have a white wine, please.”
“Any preference?” He’d recently talked his dad into expanding the wine list. It used to have two items: red and white. Now it contained six offerings, vintages he had researched and selected. He slid her one of the small laminated menus.
“What do you recommend?” she asked.
“The Tawse Chardonnay is nice.”
“I’ll have the Riesling, thanks.”
Okay, then. Rohan’s little sister was a sourpuss. Noted. Law turned to pour the wine, and by the time he set it in front of her, she was getting out her wallet.
“Take the free drink,” Rohan said. “You were just complaining about the cost of living in Toronto.” He turned to Law. “Maya’s at Sheridan College studying theater. She just finished her first semester.” He raised his glass to toast her, his pride apparent.
“I can pay for my own drink,” she said again.
“By all means, don’t let me stop you,” Law said. “I’ll happily take your money.” He was teasing. Mostly. He didn’t understand why she would turn her nose up at a free drink, or why her refusal was so snooty, but whatever.
“I would never let you stop me,” she said.
Huh? But before he could even try to start parsing what she’d said, she’d pressed a ten-dollar bill into his hand, and it felt like she was electrocuting him.
And that was the story of how Law came to be wildly attracted to someone he didn’t even like. If he were a superhero, that day would have gone down in the lore as the day Maya came into his bar, her bright, bitter beauty an injection of life on a slow, snowy afternoon, and stung him.
She had come into his bar a lot in the years after the sting. Not so much when she was in college, though there had been a few visits. But once she came home for good, she was in the bar all the damn time. And every single time she walked through his door, his brain stuttered for a second. It was irritating. It was embarrassing.
“Hey,” Nora said as Maya plopped down next to her. Maya was still wearing the pink tube top from the parade—God help him—but the tail and tiara were gone. The top was now paired with her standard jeans and Cons, though she’d changed the Cons from her blue mermaid pair to a baby-pink pair. “That was really something. This whole town is really something.”
“You’ll get used to us.” Maya smiled at Nora. Maya had a big, easy smile, but Law had still never seen it straight-on.
“So what’s with the mermaid queen thing?” Nora asked, looking between him and Maya. “I hear you’re behind her election every year?”
Sort of. He had been the first time. After that, it had taken on a life of its own. But he would take the credit. “I am.”
“Benjamin,” Maya said, finally deigning to greet him. Everyone in town called him Law except Maya and his mother. Maya had a certain way of saying his name, emphasizing it like it was heavy in her mouth, like it pained her to say it.
He set a wineglass down in front of her and poured her wine—that was his version of greeting her. It was still a Riesling, though a different one from that first time. After he’d taken over the bar full-time, he’d done even more tinkering with the wine list—although this one wasn’t on the menu.
“Benjamin lives to antagonize me,” Maya explained to Nora.
“You started it,” he retorted.
“Untrue,” Maya said, but, having dismissed him, she was talking to Nora. She was also wrong. She had been distinctly frosty since Sting Day.
Most people liked Law. He had always thought of himself as inherently likeable. Until she came along. It was kind of interesting to be the object of someone’s disdain. No, not interesting. Exhilarating. Sparring with Maya was the highlight of his day—which he realized sounded crazy, but it was true. As downtown business owners whose jobs had them keeping late hours, they saw a lot of each other, and the odd day he didn’t see her felt strangely off, like he’d gone around all day with his shirt inside out or something.
“But how did you even come up with the mermaid queen prank?” Nora asked Law. She turned to Maya. “And why do you hate it so much? I would think, with the whole theate
r thing, that it would be up your alley.”
Maya picked up her wine. “We were all here one night during the Raspberry Festival, so the place was crawling with tourists. There was a bachelorette party happening, and the bride had one of those beauty-queen sashes on, you know? Like, it said, ‘The future Mrs. Brad McBoring’ or whatever?” Nora nodded. “We somehow started talking about pageants, and we were laughing about what our talents would be if we were in one.”
“You would do a dramatic monologue,” Nora said.
“Yes, the one from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House where Nora—hey, her name is Nora, too!—is talking about how she subsumed her tastes into her husband’s so much that she’s effectively his doll.” She struck a purposefully melodramatic pose and cried, “‘You and Papa have committed a great sin against me! It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life!’” She made a silly face and broke character. “And then I made some big pronouncement about how I would die before I’d ever be a beauty queen, and…” She performed a big shrug. “Here I am.”
Nora laughed. “And what was your talent going to be?” she asked Law.
“I’d make the perfect martini.”
“Oh, Maya would definitely beat you,” Nora said dismissively. “She’s prettier, too.”
He could not argue with that.
“Yeah,” Nora said to Maya after Benjamin wandered away to serve someone else, “but why do you guys dislike each other so much? It feels like a long-standing grudge. Did he stand you up at the prom or something?” She laughed like the idea was ridiculous.
“Benjamin is six years older than I am, so no, no one was jilted at the prom,” Maya said, fake-laughing along with Nora, but the truth wasn’t that far off. She wasn’t sure how—or how much—to explain. She liked Nora. They were fast becoming friends, and she didn’t want to run her off by sounding like a lunatic with a gold medal in grudge holding. “We never really knew each other as kids,” she added.
Sandcastle Beach--Includes a Bonus Novella Page 2
