Chapter Four
MARINA
PAST
I fling the towel from over my shoulder onto the counter, swiping the rings of condensation off the bar top. The towel tugs against my grip as it gets stuck on the lingering stickiness coating the wooden top.
“Night, Marina!” Rosalie calls out as she pushes on the big oak door.
“ Ciao ! I’ll see you when I get home.”
She salutes me as she steps out into the night air. “Probably not, hopefully I’ll be sleeping like the dead by the time you’re home, and if I’m not, then please kill me.”
I just smile, shaking my head as I throw the towel back over my shoulder.
I’ve been working in this bar for the last three months, gaining the experience I need before opening a place of my own.
Rosalie has become a part of my everyday life, and she’s the one person I’m not inclined to kill at five a.m. every morning when she wakes me up, getting ready to go for her morning run.
Flatting together in an apartment with thin walls doesn’t exactly suit sleep-ins, and Rosalie goes for a run every day.
Even Sundays .
It’s absurd.
Sundays should be purely reserved for rest. That’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow, cursing Rosie when I hear the door shut at five and then trying my best to fall asleep again.
I smile down at my shoes just thinking about my best friend. I never really had a best friend back at home in Ruby Cove. My circle of friends mainly consisting of my cousin and his dickhead friends.
Don’t get me wrong, I love those boys. But I always wanted a girlfriend, and Rosalie was the first person to welcome me to Sorrento three months ago, and we kind of went from there.
When I look up, piercing green eyes are looking straight at me. “Jesus!” I swear, throwing a hand over where my heart is beating erratically in my chest. “You should really announce yourself when you enter a room, hotshot.”
A smile pulls at his lips. “But then I wouldn’t get to see pretty moments like that, when you had that quiet smile on your face.”
Quiet smile.
I shake my head and look back down at my feet. Quiet smile. I guess that’s exactly what that was.
“Sorry,” he says.
I tip my head, meeting his eyes again. “No, you’re not.”
He scrunches up his nose. “Not really.”
I just shake my head, reaching down under the bar to grab him a hazy beer, the same as last night, before I place a paper coaster in front of him, followed by the beer.
I feel an odd sense of comfortability with this man, and I'm not quite sure why. It’s like when you just have a bad gut feeling about someone, but for him, it’s a good feeling.
He tips the neck of the bottle in my direction before taking a sip.
I can’t help the way my eyes focus on his throat as he swallows down the cool liquid.
His eyes catch mine, and the look in his gaze is anything but the look he gave me last night when he seemed so unsure of himself.
No, this look is like he knows exactly what’s going on here, and I’m not sure that I do.
“So this is what you look like when you’re not trying to pick up chicks,” I tease, falling into the tone I used last night.
He just nods, looking down at his outfit of a blue linen button-up shirt and a pair of shorts. He looks just as good as he did in his pilot’s uniform, if not better.
When I saw him for the first time yesterday, he looked like he had no idea what he was doing here, but the way he looked at me was like I was the anchor to his confusion.
Then he got up close, sat at the bar, and stared at me.
If anyone else had done what he did, I would’ve given them side-eye and moved to serve someone else.
But I got stuck in his gaze, and I think he got stuck in mine.
I've never had such an intense interaction with someone I’ve just met.
Then I put his captain's hat on my head like it was nothing, and he let me. Something about his presence was immediately calming, and I didn’t know quite what to do with it.
“Who says I’m not here to pick up chicks?”
I raise my eyebrows, looking around the empty bar. “‘Cause there’s none here.”
His eyes narrow in on mine, and I feel my temperature spiking. “Just one.”
I pull my bottom lip between my teeth, looking down at my feet.
In any other universe, this would be absurd. Too forward, too abrupt, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like my mind is lying to me in telling me I’ve never met this man before.
He rubs a hand over the stubble that dusts his jawline as he laughs. “Sorry.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s okay, I just—you don’t know me.”
He smiles. “I don’t even know your name.”
I frown. I never told him last night. I asked for his name but he never asked for mine. “Marina. ”
His grin widens, like that pleases him. “Well, Marina. Tell me something about yourself.”
I sigh, my brain all of a sudden forgetting every single fact about myself. What’s something interesting about me? Why does this always happen? His gaze is fixed on me, and it flusters me more than it should.
“I wasn’t prepared for twenty questions,” I laugh nervously.
“That’s okay, I can start.”
I just nod in response, and suddenly I find myself desperate for whatever information he’s about to share. He’s so interesting to me and I don’t know a single thing about him, yet .
I can’t help but lean my elbows on the bar and get closer to him. It’s almost instinctual. But as I close the gap between us, I unknowingly lean close enough that I catch the faint scent of some kind of manly soap coming off him.
God . I don’t know if that’s a cologne or just the smell of his clean skin, but I want to be wrapped up in that smell forever, to be suffocated by it. My mind drifts to the image of this man soaping himself up, lathering a bar over his skin and?—
“I like to box.”
My focus draws back to the man sitting in front of me, seeing that he is, in fact, not showering, and I am not sitting on a little stool in the corner of his bathroom, watching like a little perv.
He is sitting in front of me and opening up to a stranger.
My eyebrows draw together. “Like… pow pow ?” I mimic little punches into the air.
He chuckles. “Just like that.”
“Huh.” I rest my chin in my palm. “I didn’t expect that.”
Now it’s his turn to frown, but his smile still curves his lips. His face is like the physical description of being intrigued.“Why not? Not buff enough for your liking?”
“Well, I haven’t got a good look at what’s beneath that shirt so I couldn’t really say.”
Oh, that really just came out of my mouth.
I stick my tongue in my cheek to stop it from roaming along my bottom lip, because the way he’s looking at me is like he didn’t expect me to say that, but he liked that I did.
Before he can offer to take his shirt off right here and now, I say, “But no, that’s not it. I just wouldn’t pick you to do something so…violent with your spare time.”
“It doesn’t have to be violent,” he says calmly. “Most of the time, it’s just about letting off some steam. I spend a lot of time in the air, so I like to get my feet on solid ground and let out some of the adrenaline I build up being up there.”
I bring my other hand to cup my face, leaving me in front of him looking far too interested in what he has to say, but not caring a single bit. “You still get that kick of adrenaline after doing it for so long?”
“Who says I’m not a rookie?”
I tip my head. “I don’t know. Something just tells me you’re not.”
He just smiles in answer. “Yeah, I still get that kick. I’m not sure if it’ll ever fade. I hope it doesn’t.”
I can’t even imagine the feeling. Flying a whole plane full of people up into the sky and thousands of miles across the world. It’s insane really. I can see how that feeling wouldn’t wear off.
“Do you just fly internationally? Wait, where are you from? How old are you?”
He chuckles, and my body instinctively leans closer into him. The sound lights my nerves on fire.
“California. Twenty-five. And yeah, I pretty much exclusively fly internationally, unless I’m going home, but I don’t do that very often.”
“Why not?” I sound like an annoying kid with all the questions, but I can’t help myself.
He hesitates, taking another sip of his drink that had been left abandoned. “I think it’s your turn. Are you from around here?”
Okay. Family, rough topic .
I nod. “Yeah, a little town about an hour from here. I moved to get some experience in bar management before I…” My voice tr ails off.
Not many people know I want to open my own place, but something about Miles makes me feel like I can just say it like it’s fine.
Maybe it’s because he’s a hotshot pilot with a big important job, or maybe it’s simply because of the way he’s looking at me in this moment, like he’s hanging off every syllable that falls from my tongue.
“Before you what?” he asks.
“Before I try to open a place of my own.”
Miles smiles like that’s the best news he’s ever heard. He looks around the space we are sitting in. “Please make it less sticky than this place.”
I bark out a laugh. “I try my best with that rag, I swear, but I think it’s a bit too far gone.”
“The smell is revolting.”
“The smell?” I ask, my lips perking up in a smile.
“Of the stickiness. Can’t you smell it?” he says, his eyes widening.
I look around as if for the answer. “I guess I got used to it?” I shrug.
He shakes his head. “That’s horrible.” And he’s so serious that I can’t stop another laugh from escaping my lips.
He should be offended, I’m laughing in his face. But he just looks at me like he can’t quite figure me out. Either that, or he’s completely figured me out in the whole twenty minutes we’ve been talking.
“What do you want it to be like then? I feel like you’re the type of woman to have it all mapped out in your head.”
I tip my head. “What makes you think that?”
He frowns. “I don’t know, I just do.” Just like how I just knew he wasn’t a rookie pilot. “Am I wrong?”
I just shake my head without taking my eyes from his. “No.”
“Tell me, what is Marina’s bar going to look like?”