Come Home

by Raleigh Ruebins

  Maureen selected a purple T-shirt from the rack and pressed it toward me. “This’ll do,” she said. She leaned in, whispering close to my ear. “And darlin’, I think you may have a hickey on your chest.” She winked at me, making her way back up toward the counter, her long floral dress swaying as she walked.

  “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. Hot mess, population: me.

  It wasn’t even a hickey—I’d gotten the bruise when the corner of a microscope hit me as I pulled it down from a shelf at the school yesterday—but it didn’t look good, all the same.

  I tugged the shirt on and turned toward the full-length mirror propped up against the wall. The shirt was pastel lilac, and emblazoned across the front, in metallic silver letters, was the phrase Powered By Ferry Dust. In the center was an illustration of a Kinley ferry boat rushing through water, with Kinley, Washington written underneath. Clearly a design made for a tourist’s six-year-old daughter had somehow found its way onto a men’s size large T-shirt.

  “Alright, how much do I owe you?” I asked, approaching the front counter and pulling out my wallet.

  Edgar looked up from his newspaper and immediately broke into a fit of laughter that turned into coughing and then looped back to laughter again.

  Maureen grinned. “It’s on the house, Hunter,” she said, waving me off.

  “I can’t let you do that,” I said. “A work of art like this demands to be paid for.”

  “And seeing you in it is all the payment I need,” she said.

  I deftly snuck a twenty into their tip jar as Maureen circled her hand along her husband’s back to calm him from the laugh attack.

  “Oh, Jesus, what is that?” Maureen said as I was slipping my wallet back in my pocket.

  “It’s okay, just let him laugh it out. I accept my place as the town jester.”

  “No,” she said, pointing out the big front windows of the store. “That.”

  I turned to look and my stomach dropped.

  Five sleek, black, perfectly shiny Mercedes Benz cars were stopped at the intersection outside. I swallowed as the light turned green and they accelerated off, up Hill Street toward the small hill at the end of the road.

  “Now that’s something you don’t see every day,” Edgar said, clearing his throat.

  “Not in Kinley, you don’t,” Maureen agreed. “Must be tourists.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek. “I know exactly what it is.”

  It was someone I’d been dreading seeing as much as I’d been yearning for him. Someone I’d wanted to see for years, but now that it was finally happening, I thought I might pass out from stress. It was the reason why I’d needed a big enough distraction last night to stoop to the level of hooking up with the human embodiment of slime.

  “Did Herman finally win big on one of his scratchers and buy up five Benzes?” Edgar asked, chuckling as he turned a page in the newspaper. “Crazy sucker.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not Herman. It’s Gavin Bell.”

  2

  Gavin

  “Wow,” I said, pulling in a deep breath of fresh, saltwater-infused air. “You know what? Could we just steal a minute, take this all in, and give thanks for the incredible milestone that today represents?”

  As I held out my hands in the plentiful morning sun, Royce stifled a yawn and Natalie’s eyes remained glued to her phone. A light breeze was rustling the trees as we stood outside the lobby of the Waterview Cottages, the closest thing that Kinley Island had to a resort.

  It wasn’t a resort, of course—it was a few dozen bungalows nestled between maple and fir trees on top of a not-too-tall hill, nothing like the Ritz Carlton and Four Seasons luxury accommodations that I usually arranged for my team.

  But I wasn’t focusing on that. I was remaining positive. I was channeling gratitude. And being back on Kinley Island, a place I’d escaped over a decade ago, wasn’t even going to come close to breaking my positive focus.

  And if I had to try my hardest to enjoy my time here, I was going to pretend my team wanted to be here, too.

  “Isn’t the sunlight rejuvenating?” I asked them, beaming. Royce crossed his arms, leaning back against his Mercedes.

  “Of course,” he said, unconvincingly.

  “Aww, come on,” I said. “We haven’t seen the sun in two weeks back in Seattle! This is amazing.”

  “We’re wearing suits, Bell,” Natalie said, giving me a polite smile. “Kind of hard to bask in the sun.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” I said, straightening my own slate-gray Prada jacket. “This week, while we’re on the island, do feel free to dress however you’d like. The people here aren’t much of the suits type, anyway—a button-down is A-OK with me.”

  “Wait, am I hearing things?” Royce said, standing up straight again. “Gavin Bell, are we going to see you in casual clothes for the first time?”

  I cocked my head to one side. “I don’t know about that,” I admitted. “A suit is my place of power. But I mean it. Dress how you’d like. We’re here to make connections and form relationships. We want to blend.”

  They both looked skeptical.

  I understood, I really did—blending wasn’t really my typical state of being. For the past ten years, through college and working my way up the corporate ladder, I’d fiercely wanted to stand out. Be the best. Earn every gold star that I could.

  But to be successful here on the island, I knew I was going to need to slow down a little.

  “Alright. What do we think about this: we’ll check into our rooms, relax a while, and group up again at two this afternoon? We have a lot of strategy to discuss for the week.”

  “Can we do eleven instead?” Royce asked. “I’ve got the conference call with headquarters at three.”

  Even just hearing the word “eleven” sent a wave of nervous energy through me.

  At eleven I had to meet up with Hunter, and unlike everything else, I was not prepared for it.

  “I’ll let headquarters know to push back the call,” I said quickly. “I have another obligation.”

  “Another obligation, already?” Natalie said, tossing her long, brown ponytail back. “Gavin’s already got himself a hot date set up on the island, it sounds like.”

  It was hard not to react.

  I wasn’t prepared to tell them that I was meeting my lifelong best friend for lunch, and why I would be nervous to meet my best friend at all. I wasn’t ready to explain the concept of Hunter Wilson, or what he meant to me, to anyone.

  Nobody could understand what his smile did to me—that smile that always looked like it was holding back a joke. Or how his sleepy eyes were the closest thing I knew to home. How being with him sent me back to being a teenage boy again, lost in a crush so desperate I could feel it like my own pulse.

  I was open with my team about a lot of things, but when it came to my personal life, I was a locked box. I’d always kept my private life separate from work, and I wanted it to stay that way.

  Truth be told, there usually wasn’t much private life to speak of anyway. I was in love with my work, and that usually filled up every spare moment of my days. I thrived on operating as a clean machine: early rising, exercising, goal-setting, and getting things done.

  I’d been nervous about meeting with Hunter for weeks.

  But that wasn’t important.

  I was here on Kinley Island to make the biggest business decision I’d ever made. A decision that could propel me and my entire company into lifelong success, changing the future of Kinley Island and Seattle forever.

  I was not here to obsess over Hunter.

  “I’m just meeting with an old friend,” I said.

  “Mm. ‘Kay. Then two o’clock sounds great,” Royce said, nodding once. “I’ll have the demographic reports you asked for last night, ready for you to look over.”

  “Brilliant. You’re a superstar, Royce.”

  The sound of tires on gravel came from behind us and in another mom
ent, Jack’s car pulled up after Natalie’s and Royce’s.

  We all looked a little silly driving around together in a fleet of Mercedes CLS coupes, but the company cars were just one of the many ways I liked to give back to my executive team. Nat, Royce, Jack, and my assistant Vance had all come along for my first week on the island. They might as well have been extensions of my own body—they were fiercely hard workers, and sometimes it felt like they knew me better than I even knew myself.

  “Do me a favor and get Jack up to speed for me?” I told Nat and Royce as I swung open the door to the lobby.

  “Consider it done,” Royce said. “Two o’clock in your cottage.”

  “And Royce?” I said. He turned back to face me. “Take a nap. Take care of yourself. I saw your email from three forty-five this morning. Rest is restorative!”

  “I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Bell,” he said, a smirk on his face.

  “Not a chance,” I said. “I’m going to start removing one percent of your yearly bonus for every hour of sleep you lose on my behalf.”

  “Alright, alright, naps, yes,” he said, waving me off before walking over toward Jack’s car.

  Natalie and I shared a glance.

  “You know he’s never going to do it,” she said.

  “I know the man subsists on energy drinks, Snickers bars, and two hours of sleep a night,” I said. “But I’ll get through to him someday.”

  “And that’s what I like about you, Gavin,” she said, “your optimism, even in the face of idiocy.”

  She smiled and headed after Royce, and I made my way into the lobby. The hardwood floor creaked under my shoes as I walked inside, and a small fire was crackling away in an iron fireplace at the side of the room. And oh, goodness—there was an actual rocking chair in one corner of the lobby, right next to a cluster of potted plants near a bay window. Kinley Island sure hadn’t changed.

  I strode over to the front desk where a young woman with curly blonde hair was stationed, smiling warmly at me.

  “Good morning,” she chirped.

  “It really is a good morning!” I said. “Can you believe the sunlight?”

  I was caught off guard when instead of responding, her brow furrowed, and she began studying my face. Her eyes danced across me, and her jaw dropped just a little.

  “Wait, are you…” she started before looking down at the computer in front of her, tapping away for a few seconds and checking something on the screen. “Bell. Gavin Bell? You’re who is checking into the executive suite? Holy cannoli.”

  “Guilty as charged,” I said, still a little confused. She didn’t exactly seem like the type who’d follow Seattle real estate development enough to know me by name….

  “Oh my Gosh, Gavin, it’s been so long!”

  I bit the inside of my lip, trying to slyly look at her nametag. Zoey. Zoey. Did I know a Zoey from Kinley Island?

  “God, you look so different!” she said, the smile returning to her face. “People said you moved away to the city to do business stuff, but… you look like you should be on TV!”

  “Zoey,” I said, plastering a wide smile on my face. “Right. Yes. We had English class together.”

  “And chemistry,” she said, “...and art! And I think algebra, too. God, how is your dad doing?”

  I bit my lip. It wasn’t a sore subject, exactly, but parents weren’t something I loved talking about. My dad and I weren’t on good terms, and Mom had died a long time ago.

  “My dad’s down in Portland now. Remarried.”

  “Wow,” she said. “You and he moved out of Kinley at the same time, huh? I remember your folks from Bell Camera. We always took our disposable cameras there after family trips.”

  I nodded. My parents had owned and operated Bell Camera, a one-stop camera, video, and photo development store for twenty years. In the late seventies all the way into the nineties, it was successful—people even took the ferry boat in from Seattle to get their cameras repaired there, knowing that my parents did a very thorough job.

  And then with the advent of camera phones and digital cameras, it had all come to a screeching halt. My parents had nearly gone bankrupt, closed the store when I was in high school, and then soon after, my mom had died. I was seventeen.

  My father had always used the store as an example for me throughout my childhood. When they were successful, he tried to instill a business ethic in me: we only got here through hard work. Then later, he’d done a sharp heel-turn, using the store as an example of why I needed to go into finance or law or medicine—something sustainable that would never go belly-up.

  He was still deeply bitter about Bell Camera to this day—not that we spoke much.

  “Remember when they came and took all our eighth-grade graduation photos?” Zoey asked.

  “Of course!” I said cheerily, though I barely remembered. I also tried hard never to think about my time at school. Over the past ten years my biggest goal had been to try to forget my time on the island, and especially high school, but at the present moment it was impossible to ignore.

  This was one of the many reasons I didn’t visit my hometown. It was time to change the subject to one that didn’t make me want to take up residence under a pile of mud, and I was a master at steering a conversation.

  “And how are your folks doing, Zoey?”

  “Oh, they’re good,” she said. “Still at the paper.”

  “Gotta be hard, with the internet, right?” I said. I remembered, now: Zoey’s parents ran the island’s local paper, and they were passionate about it. “Newspapers are classic, though.”

  “In Kinley, everybody still reads them,” she said. “Mom and Dad were worried for a while, but they’ve held out just fine.”

  “You guys have an incredible space up here,” I said. “The view of the water, all the trees—what a remarkable property.”

  “Wow, thank you,” she said.

  “Certainly the best place to stay in Kinley.”

  She nodded, letting out a long sigh. “Well, I wish more people thought so,” she said.

  “Oh no,” I replied, “business not so hot?”

  “Nope.” She shrugged in defeat. “Seems like every year we get less and less tourists coming through.”

  I looked at her earnestly. “Zoey, that’s exactly why I’m back on the island,” I said. “I want to bring more tourists onto Kinley, too. And not just tourists, residents. Businesses.”

  “We need another coffee shop so bad,” she said. “Marshall Barrowfield started one up, but it was so weird—who wants a coffee shop where the cheapest thing is six dollars?”

  Marshall Barrowfield. Hearing that name stung.

  “I hadn’t even realized he was still on the island,” I said.

  She nodded idly.

  The guy had been awful to me as a teenager, but in my long journey into self-help books and self-improvement, I’d learned that I needed to forgive and move on. I was living my best life now, even if Marshall had been an ass to me in high school.

  I was here to make Kinley something beautiful, not to get bogged down in how it used to be.

  “Coffee shops will definitely be a part of it,” I told her. “I want Kinley to be the next hot neighborhood in Seattle.”

  She laughed. “Oh, that’ll never happen,” she said. “Seattle folks hate the ferry boats. And they kinda hate us, too.”

  “I know about the rivalry as well as anyone,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be so sure. People can be convinced.”

  She looked at me like I was a puzzle she couldn’t figure out. “What kind of business are you in, again?”

  “Land development,” I said.

  She stared at me blankly.

  “Basically, my company finds places that have potential and turns them into something great. Kinley’s got a lot of open space, and it’s so close to Seattle. If we transform it—build new infrastructure, attract businesses, connect it to the city—there’s no limit to how much it may grow.”

  She n
odded, her expression a little glazed over, like she was too polite to tell me she thought it would never happen.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” I said. “But I promise, if things go my way, Kinley will have so many visitors, they’ll be banging down your doors.”

  A mixture of shock and trepidation crossed over her face. Not quite the reaction I was hoping for, but it was a start.

  “But don’t worry,” I said. “For this week, it’s just me and my four colleagues. And we cannot wait to enjoy this beautiful property.”

  “Gosh,” she said. “Gavin Bell. I just didn’t think I’d ever see you back in Kinley.”

  “Happy to be here,” I said, though it rang false in my mind. I wanted it to be true, so badly—I wanted to be able to make myself enjoy Kinley, to have it be a place that wasn’t just a source of anxiety and memories I’d rather forget.

  I was trying hard as I could to be positive.

  “Alright, here is your room key, Mr. Bell. I mean—Gavin,” she said as she slid a card over to me. “You’re in the executive cottage, all the way at the top of the hill. Can’t miss it. The key also grants you access to the gym and pool between six in the morning and ten at night.”

  “Zoey, you’re a superstar,” I said, taking the key and slipping it into my pocket.

  She beamed at me.

  “I’ll be sure to call up the cottage management tonight and inform them of the wonderful service. You have an excellent day,” I said, nodding at her before striding out of the lobby.

  “Thank you!”

  I’d felt my phone buzz no less than ten times during the past five minutes it had been in my pocket. I fished it out as I walked back to my car, swiping lightning fast through the various requests, questions, and stock alerts that had popped up on the screen. Business didn’t stop, no matter what time of day it was, no matter where I was.

  I might have been in Kinley again, but I was still Gavin Bell, CEO of Alto Ventures. And I had to make sure I didn’t forget that. Kinley wasn’t going to suck me back in.

  I opened the door and slid onto the buttery leather of the driver’s seat.