As Josh was getting off work on Saturday morning, he received a text from Maggie asking him to pick up some barley and dried mushrooms so she could make beef and barley soup. Josh was happy to oblige, as it was one of his favorite soups and one his mom used to make for dinner every week during the winter.
He stopped in at CoCo’s to get the ingredients. CoCo’s Food Emporium, a higher-end organic grocery store, was one of the recent successes of the city’s downtown development efforts and included not only groceries but a full deli, bakery, and salad bar. While they served great coffee, Josh was heading home after a forty-eight-hour shift and hoped to nap, so he focused on getting in and out of the store as quickly as possible. Coming out of an aisle and turning a corner, he didn’t even see the woman in his path.
“Oh, geez! Hi!” she said, and Josh’s heart began to race even before he looked up.
It was Hayley, in a camel-colored wool coat he hadn’t seen before with a plaid scarf, looking gorgeously retro and classy.
“Hayley.” He halted, feeling at a loss for words. “Do you always get up so early to do your grocery shopping on the weekends?”
“Ha. No, not at all. I’m just getting some eye drops before meeting my—” She cleared her throat. “Evan and I are meeting in the bakery to kick off our date with a coffee.”
“That doesn’t sound very auspicious,” he said. “Beginning a date in a grocery store at seven-thirty in the morning.”
“Now, now,” Hayley said. “He offered to pick me up at my apartment, but I don’t like to have people over until I know them pretty well.”
“You had me over.”
Her laugh was like sunshine on a cloudy day. “And, see, I got to know you pretty well.”
“So you won’t be getting to know this Evan guy in such a manner?” he asked, although he knew it was none of his business.
“Not today, no.”
They looked at each other awkwardly, so much unspoken between them. Josh wanted to tell her he’d checked his phone a hundred times since he’d left her, hoping for a message.
“I had a good time the other night,” he said finally. “I mean, the other day, too, not just the night. The whole day—it was pretty perfect.”
Their eyes connected, and for a moment it felt like it had that day. Then Hayley looked over her shoulder. “Listen, I have to go, but, um, will you still let me interview you for the profile piece? I’ll understand if you think it’d be too awkward.”
“Not at all,” he said, relieved he had an excuse to see her again. “Do you want to set something up right now?”
“Let me text you,” Hayley said. “I don’t want to be late.” She tilted her head toward the café area of the store.
“Right.”
They said goodbye, and Josh watched her walk away, hoping she’d look back.
She didn’t.
This is why you don’t have one night stands, Hayley scolded herself as she waited in line to pay for the eye drops, waving to Evan to let him know she’d be right over to the table he’d secured for them.
Seeing Josh was a mini-disaster for Hayley. She’d tried hard to separate Josh and Evan in her mind, to put as much distance as possible between her night with Josh and her day with Evan.
Since Wednesday night—the night—she’d thrown herself into work and was almost ready to launch the “Bring Your Heart” campaign. She’d hosted Singles Night. She’d gone to a second spin class with Cassie and although she again nearly collapsed from the exertion, she was rather proud of herself for going. She’d steadfastly refused to call or text Josh, and after a day of obsessively checking her phone to see if he’d called her, she’d even taken to powering it down so she’d stop looking at it.
And then, in spite of all her valiant efforts to avoid thinking of him, she’d run into him now.
Golden Falls can be a damn small place, she thought, and then hated the warm, fluttering happiness inside that had come from seeing Josh again. It wasn’t good for her.
She flipped her hair over her shoulder, pushed all thoughts of Josh’s intense honey eyes and ripped muscles aside, and walked toward where Evan was waiting.
He stood. If Hayley hadn’t just seen Josh, she would have thought Evan was one of the more attractive guys she’d gone out with: tall, dark hair, nice face. The kind of guy who looked like he’d make a good boyfriend.
“Hi, Hayley!” Evan said. “It’s nice to see you.”
“Sorry I’m late. Actually, I got here early, but my eyes have been dry and—” She held up her little bag and stopped talking, realizing she’d been blabbering. “Never mind. It’s nice to see you, too!”
“Ready for some coffee?”
“Always,” Hayley said.
The line at the coffee bar was short, and as they waited together, Hayley felt what she might have called first-date nerves, but it wasn’t that. The buzzing tension throughout her body had everything to do with Josh.
Focus on Evan, she told herself, as if she were her own dating coach.
“How are you finding the weather?” she asked him. “It must be so different than what you had back in Seattle.”
“It’s the darkness I’m having a hard time adjusting to. I’m having a hell of a time getting out of bed, but I’m falling asleep really early, too. I didn’t count on it feeling like night all the time. It’s a strange feeling.”
“I moved here in summer, so the adjustment wasn’t nearly so bad, but I know what you mean. Do you have one of those lamps that replicates daylight yet?”
“No, but I need one.”
“I have three,” Hayley told him. “The one in my bedroom is a wake-up light, which is probably the most important because it mimics the sunrise so your body feels like it’s time to get up. It really makes a difference.”
She linked her arm with his at the same time she caught a glimpse of Josh in the checkout line and another frisson of nervous awareness went through her. She immediately wanted to pull away but didn’t know how to do so without being obvious about it.
Josh is your past. Evan might be your future.
She kept her hand where it was and gave Evan a big smile. “So. What are we doing today?”
“I’ll tell you if you insist, but I’d rather just take you there. Can you trust me with the surprise?”
“Let’s go with the unknown,” she said.
“Awesome.” His dimples gave his smile an extra twinkle. “I think you’ll be happy with your choice.”
Hayley watched Josh walk away from her, and she squeezed Evan’s arm.
“I know I will.”
18
After coffee and a shared maple donut, Hayley and Evan stepped outside CoCo’s into the late dawn of mid-morning. In winter, it was Hayley’s favorite time of day, when the light was in its infancy. It felt like a new relationship, where anything was still possible.
“Where to now?” she asked.
“To the Moondance,” Evan said.
The theater was a three-block walk up Main Street. The mid-twenty-degree temperature was refreshing for Hayley, but she remembered how blistering it had felt her first winter after having moved from Florida, and so she took a moment and turned up the collar on Evan’s parka, and tugged the flaps of his hat down more snugly.
“Thanks, Mom.”
She smiled. “Ha.”
“Even though I knew it would be cold here, I didn’t anticipate the reality of it,” Evan said. “It was ten below last night, and I walked home from work and it was insane. I had my hat on, and my scalp tingled beneath the hat because it still felt the cold.”
“Wait until it’s thirty below and windy and icy and snowing,” she said. “Then you’ll know you’ve made it.”
“Is it true you can toss a pot of boiling water into the air and it’ll freeze and turn into ice crystals before it hits the ground?”
“Only if you do it outside,” she said with a teasing smile.
He elbowed her. “Seriously, you guys take such pride i
n enduring your weather. What’s that about?”
“We’re proud of not being wimps,” she said. “We’re the tough ones. You can look around and literally every person in town has the fortitude to handle winters from hell. It bonds us, because no one gets through it alone. You learn to rely on people, and to be relied on. And then we get the gorgeous summers as our reward. Year after year, the flowers bloom for us. Just wait until you experience an Alaskan summer. Your senses will be overloaded with beauty.”
“They already are,” he said. “Winter’s a thing of beauty here, too—if not a thing of color.”
“That’s true,” she said. “Anyway, I hope you don’t regret moving here.”
“It’s an adventure. I needed to make a radical change, and this definitely qualifies.”
His words seemed like an invitation. “Why did you need to make a change?”
He glanced at her. “You want to hear my sad story?”
“Of course!”
“Well, the short version is I found out my girlfriend of five years was cheating on me with my best friend.”
Hayley’s mouth dropped open. “Is this recent?”
“About three months ago,” he said. “We lived together, and when I moved out, he moved in. Took my place without a word of apology.”
“Geez,” Hayley said, and couldn’t help but notice he seemed a little embarrassed by his admission. “If it helps, I think most people move to Alaska to get away from something. Or someone. So you can come and re-invent yourself.”
When they arrived at the Moondance Theater, Evan unlocked the front door and they went inside. Hayley took a moment to appreciate the lobby’s renovation. The theater dated back to the early 1900s. It, like the city, had been built during Alaska’s gold rush. It had fallen into disrepair during one of the city’s bust cycles, but after a striking renovation was now one of the city’s proud landmarks, the crown jewel of downtown. The stage was replete with velvet curtains, the ceiling was an art deco design, and the original massive glass chandelier had been restored. On the walls of the lobby hung black-and-white photographs from the early days of Golden Falls.
“Don’t you love walking in here every day?” she asked Evan. “It’s so gorgeous.”
“I love the grandeur,” he said. “Here, let me have your coat. I’ll put our stuff in the office.”
It took a few minutes to take everything off—scarves, hats, gloves, coats. Hayley kept on her shearling vest in case the theater was cold.
“Come this way.” Evan led her into the theater and swept his arm across the expanse of it. “Pick a seat. Any seat.”
“No way!” Hayley took in the empty theater. “Are we going to watch a movie? Just the two of us?”
“Not just any movie,” Evan said. “Where would you like to sit?”
“We can actually go from seat to seat if we want, can’t we?”
“Yes, and we can also scream at the top of our lungs, or talk as loud as we want, and no one’s going to shush us or kick us out.”
“This is so cool!” She pointed to the exact middle spot of the theater, center seats about halfway up. “How about there?”
“Works for me,” Evan said. “I’ll be right back. I have a few treats for us.”
He’d set up a small table at the base of the stairs, and he moved it to the aisle she’d chosen. While he was gone, Hayley looked around with a broad grin on her face. She felt like a queen, having the theater all to herself. He came back a few minutes later carrying a large tray filled with popcorn, mineral water, and about ten boxes of movie-theater candy. Hayley selected a box of Junior Mints to start with.
“I’ve got one last thing to do,” Evan said.
He set the tray on the little table and left again. When Hayley saw the movie projector light illuminate, she turned and waved to him. He waved back and pointed to the screen, and her heart leapt when she saw the movie choice: The Philadelphia Story, which she’d told him was her favorite on the night they met.
Evan returned from the projection room while the MGM lion was roaring. Just seeing the names Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart on-screen, accompanied by the heart-racing piano score, made her feel hyper and excited.
“Hurry!” she called. She folded down the seat beside her so he could slip right into it. “You don’t want to miss the opening sequence!”
He hustled over, and when he sat down, she offered him a Junior Mint. He took one out of her hand with a sweet sideways smile.
“How many times have you seen this movie?” he asked.
“Probably twenty,” she said. “I watch it about twice a year, maybe more. You?”
“About the same. At my last theater, we had a classics night every week, and it was a double feature, so we ran the most popular movies a lot. Usually we’d play an obscure one and pair it with a popular one.”
They stopped talking and watched the opening sequence in which Cary Grant pushes Katharine Hepburn to the ground. Then they laughed together at the comic manner in which the dissolution of the on-screen marriage was handled.
“I love how the music ties into their actions so perfectly,” Hayley said.
Evan nodded. “But can you imagine it today? The Avengers, fighting to the beat?”
“That would be super funny!”
She poured him a handful of Junior Mints and they turned back to the film. As they chomped on popcorn, it occurred to Hayley it was the sort of first date you’d tell your kids about. Evan was a thoughtful dater, not a lazy or self-absorbed one like so many men were.
“I’m glad you kept this a surprise,” she whispered to him.
“You don’t have to whisper. We’re the only ones here.”
“I’M GLAD YOU KEPT THIS A SURPRISE!” she shouted.
They exchanged a grin and went back to viewing the movie.
Evan leaned over toward her during the scene when Jimmy Stewart sings to Katharine Hepburn. “I always kind of wish she’d married Jimmy Stewart.”
Hayley disagreed. “She loved Cary Grant first, and she never stopped loving him. Jimmy Stewart couldn’t compete with that.”
“You’re right.” Evan smiled as Cary Grant punched Jimmy Stewart in the face. “But you can’t blame a guy for trying.”
Hayley glanced at him. Evan was nice, no question about it. Considerate. Available. But as she sat next to him, their elbows almost-but-not-quite touching, she had no urge to move closer. No desperate wish for him to put his arm around her shoulders or his hand on her knee.
Unable to help herself, she imagined Josh there instead.
She wanted Josh there instead.
He would put his hand on her knee. She would snuggle her head against his shoulder. Her heart would be pounding. The movie would play on as he kissed her, their tongues dancing, the armrest between them a barrier to more. Hayley would push him away, tell him to behave himself, and they would watch the rest of the movie. She wondered what Josh would think of it, if he would like it.
Stop that, she told herself abruptly. You’re not here with Josh, you’re here with Evan. Who set this up for you, who’s funny and friendly and good-looking and AVAILABLE.
She put her head on Evan’s shoulder, and he tilted his head against hers, and even though Hayley felt no zing from it, it was still nice.
Their first date ended with a kiss on the cheek outside the theater, and as Hayley walked to her office for the afternoon, objectively she thought it couldn’t have gone any better. Sure, she hadn’t felt the same shock of lust like when she thought about Josh, but not feeling it this early was by no means a deal breaker.
Josh, on the other hand, did have a deal-breaker. Not wanting long-term. Hayley was sure once she got Josh out of her head, she’d feel plenty of lust for Evan.
19
It was almost dark when Josh came inside after a hard sled run with the dogs. He’d pushed the team through a grueling forty-miler, starting in the morning as soon as it was light and getting back just as the sun was
grazing the tops of the trees. The dogs had done great, obeying commands and maintaining pace, huge happy smiles on their black-and-white faces.
Josh, on the other hand, had been in a brooding, surly mood that the bracing cold and mental concentration hadn’t alleviated. All day he’d been thinking about Hayley, wondering how her date was going, hoping that the guy was a jerk and she’d walked out after fifteen minutes. It was unfair, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. The images running through his head were agonizing: Hayley, laughing that clear-summer’s-day laugh at something the guy said; Hayley, smiling up at him as they walked down the street hand-in-hand; Hayley, tilting her head back and letting him kiss her. That last thought burned like acid in his heart.
But when he came inside after taking care of the dogs, feeding them, and stowing the sled, his mood lightened just a little. It smelled like … yes … Maggie was making the hearty beef and barley soup that tasted like home in winter. He could also smell that something sweet and delicious had been baking in the oven.
Josh found his sister and dad in the kitchen. He clapped his dad on the shoulder and peeked into the large pot of simmering soup. Then he noticed not only a loaf of fresh-baked bread, but also a pie with a crumb topping cooling on the countertop.
“Is that apple butter pie?”
“It is,” Maggie said.
“You rock, Mags.What did I do to deserve my favorite dessert? And Mom’s best soup?”
“I just felt like making it.” She put the fresh bread on the table and pulled out the soup bowls from the cabinet.
He noticed the glance exchanged between Maggie and their dad.
“Is something up?”
“Nothing’s up,” Maggie said. “Let’s eat.”
As Josh filled his stomach with his favorite food and chatted with his family, he felt happy again. Like the short chapter with Hayley had closed, as it was supposed to, and things were back to the normal he’d worked so hard to establish and which he treasured.
And then Maggie dropped a bomb.
“Hey, so, speaking of family traditions, I bought a ticket to Florida so I can visit Sophia and Lila over Thanksgiving,” she said. “I know we always celebrate together, but you’re on shift this year anyway. I hope it’s okay if I go visit them instead.”
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