3. Reagan
REAGAN
By the time I push through the door at Lea’s, the coffee shop I keep as a second office, I’ve lost the permanent spot eleven times in my head. I still have prep and a full service ahead of me to lose it a few more.
That’s the trouble with a two-day head start on bad news. You get to lose the thing over and over before it’s even gone—a little preview screening, matinee prices.
Marchetti hasn’t decided. I’ve decided for him, in the dark, staring at my ceiling. The spot goes to the guy the resort’s flying in from Denver, the one with the forearm tattoos and a résumé full of kitchens I’ve only ever read about. Of course it’s him. It’s always the guy from Denver.
“You have the look of a woman who’s been arguing with a ceiling,” Lea says, already pulling my cup.
“The ceiling started it.”
“Uh-huh. Regular?”
“Regular, plus whatever’s strongest, plus a second one I’ll pretend is for someone else.” I dig for my card. “Slept about three hours. Now I’m out here rebuilding a personality from the studs before I have to go be a professional.”
“You can rebuild on the house if you sit a minute.” Lea slides the first cup across, then looks past my shoulder, and something in her face rearranges into a small private delight. “Or don’t sit. Company’s here.”
I turn, and Reid Callahan is holding the door open with one shoulder, dark hair damp at the edges, a thermos hooked in two fingers. He’s looking at me like he came down a mountain on purpose.
He did come down a mountain on purpose. I can do the math. Dust on his boots, the hot part of the day still coming off him—he’s come straight down off that ridge, where he’s spent the afternoon. This time of day, he ought to be up there with the crew, not down here holding my door.
Nobody drives off a mountain in the middle of the afternoon for the trout. He came for me. And my heart goes warm and stupid before I can stop it, right before the rest of me remembers the golden rule. The nicer a thing feels coming in, the more it costs going out.
“You’re supposed to be on fire watch,” I say.
“I was on fire watch.”
“And now you’re on coffee watch.”
“Coffee’s a decoy.” He lets the door swing shut behind him. “You’re the assignment.”
“Smooth.”
“Smooth.”
“I’ve been up since four. You get what’s left.” He steps up beside me at the counter, and Lea—traitor—slides him a cup he didn’t have to order, then drifts to the far end to polish something that doesn’t need it. “You didn’t sleep.”
“I slept great. I sleep like a champion. I’m a professional sleeper who moonlights as a chef.”
“Reagan.”
“I lost the job four times before my feet hit the floor, eleven by the time I got here,” I hear myself say, which is the truth and therefore not something I meant to hand a man over an afternoon coffee.
I take it back the only way I know how, which is louder.
“It’s fine. It’s a numbers thing. Twenty-three-year-old seasonal versus a guy with a following and a pedigree.
I’m not the bet you make. I’m second choice. Scraps. Leftovers.”
There. Now he knows how old I am and how doomed I am, all before he’s had his first sip. Efficient.
He doesn’t argue the age. He doesn’t argue the doom. He sets his thermos on the counter and looks at me with that stillness he brought down off the mountain, and asks, “Who taught you to bet against yourself first?”
It’s not a fair question to put to a person on just a few sips of coffee. I take a long swallow to buy time. It buys me nothing.
“Nobody taught me. Self-taught. It’s my one real talent.
” I tighten my hold on the cup. “You want the origin story? It’s boring.
Older brother got the car and the college fund.
I got told I was independent, which passes for a compliment until you’re thirty and realize ‘independent’ means they never had to try.
My mom’s exact words when I told her I got into culinary school.
‘That’ll be good for you.’ Not proud. Relieved. One less kid to worry about.”
Reid doesn’t say I’m sorry. I would have hated I’m sorry. Instead, he says, “So you got good at losing before anybody could make you.”
“I got efficient.”
“You keep using that word.”
“It’s a good word. It’s the only kind of winning I get. If I lose first, on purpose, ahead of schedule, nobody else gets to do it to me.” I say it quickly, still trying for a joke, and the terrible part is watching him take it seriously. “You’re not drinking your coffee.”
“I’m not thinking about my coffee.”
“That’s a waste of good coffee.”
“Reagan.” He leaves the coffee untouched and turns, and the cold laminate against my hip is the only thing holding me up.
He’s close now. Close enough that I have to tip my head.
Close enough that the whole shop shrinks to the eighteen inches between his mouth and mine.
“For the record, if I were placing that bet, I’d have put it all on you the second the trout came out. ”
“You don’t even know me. It’s been two days.”
“I know you put the whole gold town in the brown butter and dared me to taste it. I know you’d rather crack a joke than take a hit.
I know you’ve spent twenty-three years being told you’re the independent one and turned it into a knife you keep pointed at yourself.
” His hand comes up, tucking the loose piece of hair behind my ear.
His thumb grazes my jaw, and I forget every word I’ve ever plated.
“That’s not nothing to know. That’s the important part. ”
I should say something funny. It’s my move—the only move I have—and I open my mouth to make it. But nothing comes out but his name.
“Reid.”
He kisses me.
It’s a slow kiss—one hand still at my jaw, the other finding the small of my back and drawing me off the counter until there’s no cold laminate left.
Just heat. Just him. The scrape of two-day stubble, the taste of black coffee, something underneath it that loosens the knots in my shoulders one by one.
I make a sound I’ll deny later. My hands find the front of his jacket and hold on.
He kisses me with the certainty of a man who came down a mountain knowing exactly what he was driving toward, and for a handful of seconds, I let myself be a person who gets kissed like this.
A person good things happen to. A person worth the drive.
Then Thursday walks in.
Not really. Really, it’s my own brain, which can’t leave a nice thing alone, sliding the calendar across the counter.
It reminds me that by tomorrow morning, he drives south and Marchetti hands my spot to Denver and I’m standing in Lea’s kissing the single most losable man in Colorado, feeding my own knife a fresh target.
I pull back first. “Okay,” I breathe. “Okay. That was—okay.”
“Reagan.”
“You have an early truck south tomorrow, and I have a doom to attend to.” I’m already reaching for the second coffee—the pretend one, the one for someone else—turning it into something for my hands to do that isn’t him.
“Great way to make Thursday worse, by the way. Ten out of ten. Really thought it through.”
“Look at me.”
I don’t. If I look at him, I’ll kiss him again, and if I kiss him again I’ll want it, and if I want it I’ll have handed the universe the exact thing it takes from me every single time.
Also, I just kissed a customer in the middle of Lea’s, in a town where Lea by herself is a broadcast network, two days into the week that decides whether I have a career. If it gets back to Marchetti before Thursday, I’ve given him the excuse he’s been looking for.
“I have prep,” I say, to my own hands, because his face is not a safe place to put my gaze right now. “Thanks for the—for coming down the mountain. That’s a lot of mountain for a kiss you’ll regret by Thursday.”
“I won’t regret it Thursday.”
“Everybody regrets me by Thursday. It’s kind of my thing.”
I get the door open and step out into the gold afternoon, pointed down Prospect toward the kitchen and the service that’s supposed to save my life. I leave before he can tell me otherwise. Because he might mean it. And a man who means it is so much worse than a man who doesn’t.