Chapter Twenty-Eight - Summer
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Summer
Brooks scheduled our date for the following day and I took advantage of the fact that Nate and Lennon were both scheduled to work so that I could prepare. I hadn’t been on a date since I was 18 and even then it ended up not really being a date, more of a prison sentence, so I don’t know what to expect from this.
After setting up the cafe for the day, as has become my standard routine, I make a coffee and come back upstairs for an ‘everything’ shower. Brooks told me to dress warm but wouldn’t tell me what he has planned but that I should also wear shoes that are comfortable to walk in on all terrain.
His vague instructions don’t give me much to go on so I do my best with what I have and after video calling Alex to get her opinion on outfits, I settle on a mid length knitted dress and some boots and I hope that its suitable for whatever he has planned.
I’m nervous, excited, and I don’t know what to expect. I know yesterday we kind of spoke through some things and I said I’d forgiven him, but it will still take us a little while to get back to the trust we had before, but the only thing we can do now, is try .
I’m already ready for the date and I don’t want to sit twiddling my thumbs, making up worst case scenarios in my head because I’ve been known to do that and the last thing I need right now is for my head to be filled with doubts, so I head downstairs hoping Lennon can give me a distraction until Brooks shows up.
As I get down the stairs though, I hear Brooks’ deep voice chatting with Fred and Grayson. The three of them are sat at the table closest to the counter so they’re able to see the staircase and in turn, me, as I descend.
“Sweetheart, you look great.” Fred says. He’s the first one to notice me and he stands from the table, and it causes Brooks and Grayson to look my way too. The cafe is still open for business but it’s unseasonably warm for a November afternoon so I can only imagine that people are making the most of the weather while they can, so the cafe is relatively dead, only one other table is occupied but even then, I feel shy at the attention.
Brooks stands as well, walking closer, looking me up and down, taking in the outfit. He reaches me, an arm going around my wait and he kisses me cheek before whispering in my ear, “You look beautiful, Princess.”
“Thank you, Brooks.” He doesn’t look too bad himself. He’s wearing a white striped short sleeve shirt which I didn’t think would look good on anyone but he wears it like a model would with some simple black trousers and loafers. He looks effortless but so damn handsome.
“What are you doing here so early?” I ask as he guides me out the door, leaving me to wave goodbye to our friends that I didn’t even have a chance to say hello to.
“I wanted to see you and Grayson had to drop off his truck,” he says casually, shrugging .
He takes my hand, taking me to Gray’s truck that’s parked outside the cafe, opening the door for me and helping me in. He leans over to buckle my seat belt, pressing a kiss to my lips before closing the door and getting into the driver’s seat.
He drives us up the road, towards his house, but before we get there he pulls off to the side, driving down a dirt road that I hadn’t noticed before. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.” Is all he says, grabbing my hand in his and letting them rest in my lap.
We stop after driving down a steep hill and around the back of his property, coming to a stop at the start of the sand. “Why did we drive if we were only coming here?” I ask, stepping out on to the sand.
“You’ll thank me later when you don’t have to walk back up.” He comes round to my side, taking hold of my hand and pulling me closer. “Now, do you have any more questions or will you just let me take you on a date?”
I smile up at him, taking in his features in the golden light. He really is beautiful and even there’s tiny scars littering his face, presumably from a life time of playing hockey, it only adds to his charm.
I lean on to my toes, pressing a kiss to his mouth. He deepens the kiss, pulling me closer by the waist, a hand running up my arm to my neck and holding me there, angling me into a better position.
A small noise makes its way out of my mouth and I can feel Brooks smile through the kiss, he gives me one last peck before pulling away. “Right, lets go before we get too carried away.”
Taking my hand, I allow him to guide me down and around the cliffs edge to the piece of beach you can see underneath Brooks’ house. As we clear the last piece of cliff leading on to straight beach, a large gazebo appears with a wooden platform and sheer curtains covering three sides of it with a fire pit placed in front.
I gasp in shock. I wasn’t here not long ago and this set-up wasn’t here then, but the gazebo looks like its been built into the beach, a permanent fixture. I look at Brooks questioningly but he’s looking ahead with a smirk on his face, noticing my look but refusing to acknowledge it.
He brings me closer, helping me up on to the platform. There’s a table set up in the middle, set for two, with a candle alight on top with two chairs facing the water. It’s a large space, with a wooden bar counter along the back ‘wall’ with a cupboard underneath.
“What the fuck?” I say, not meaning to say it out loud.
“Do you like it?” Brooks pulls out a chair for me to sit, and I do. He walks to the counter behind us, opens the cabinet to retrieve some wine glasses before grabbing wine out of a cooler I hadn’t noticed.
“How the hell did you do this?” It’s like I’m in a daze. “Did you build this?!” I ask, watching as he pours the wine and hands it to me, he grabs another bottle out the cooler and pours himself his own glass.
He shakes his head, “No, Grayson did it mainly and then I helped. Cheers,” he says, holding his glass out to me. The glass clinks together and I take a sip. It’s a good wine, a fancy white wine that is probably hard to pronounce.
I’m still trying to make sense of what’s happening and how they managed to get this built on a public beach.
“Is this…” I gesture to the new structure, “A permanent fixture or do you have to take it down?”
“No it can stay up, it’s pretty solid to withstand weather if that’s what you mean.” He goes back to the cabinet and grabs two dishes covered in foil placing them on the table in front of us, along with some serving utensils.
“I guess I’m trying to ask how the hell you pulled off building a structure on a public beach.” Brooks takes the foil off the dishes revealing a salad and then some kind of tomato pasta.
He puts a serving on each of our plates and sits down next to me, turning in his chair so he’s facing me. “I didn’t. This is my beach.”
I blink. And blink again. “What?”
He laughs. “The beach came with the property, that’s why there’s stairs by my house coming down here. I’m not here enough to use it so I figured I would keep it open to the public. Not many people come so far down this way anyway,” he says, putting a forkful of pasta in his mouth as if he wasn’t saying he owned something most people dream of.
“So you own this beach?!” I almost choke on the sip of wine and he reaches over at pats my back as I cough.
“I mean, not intentionally, but yes.”
“Wow. So you’re just going to keep this here, let people use it? How nice of you.” He hands me my fork, an indication he’d like me to start eating considering he’s already a few bites in.
“I think so. As I said, it’s not like that many people come down here.” He shrugs.
I take a bit of pasta, its so rich and somehow also creamy for a tomato pasta and it might be one of the best pastas I’ve ever eaten, or that may just be the company and the location playing a part in the whole experience. Or the fact that I’m so hungry because I think I was too nervous to try and eat anything other than a granola bar this morning .
The rest of the meal was spent talking, indulging in more wine than we probably should have. Or I should have, because I found out that he’s abstaining from alcohol for a while, which is commendable, especially in his line of work where it can be easily attained and abused.
After we finish the meal, I help him clean up, throwing everything into the cooler so that we can just dump it in the truck when we leave.
“Did you make the food?” I ask as he starts lighting the fire pit and laying a blanket down on the sand that he had hiding in the back of the truck.
“I actually ordered that from the restaurant at the end of the pier,” he says, sitting down beside me once he’d got the fire going.
“No wonder it was so good, their pasta is to die for,” I say, remembering the chicken Alfredo I’d had the first time we had dinner.
“Yeah I could tell how much you enjoyed it,” he says and I look over at him and there’s a heated look in his eyes and they’re flicking from my lips, to my eyes, to my chest.
“What do you mean?” I ask, my voice small.
His hand comes up to brush the hair off my shoulder, lightly tracing my collarbone, then up my neck, his hand coming to a stop at the base, holding me there.
“When you enjoy something, like that pasta, you moan and ever since that dinner, they’ve all I’ve been thinking about.” His voice is distracted as he continues rubbing small circles in to the pulse point of my neck.
At his words, a blush floods my face and I can feel the warmth traveling my neck and to my chest which just makes Brooks look that much more intently, a smile curving on his lips .
Embarrassed, I swat his hand away. “Stop it. I’m sorry if I’m vocal.” As soon as the words come out of my mouth I realize what I’ve said and how he will most probably take that given the context and cover my face with my hands to hide the shame on my face.
Brooks bursts out laughing, the most authentic laugh I’ve heard from him and even though I’m mortified I can’t help but to take a peak at him laughing so unabashedly to the point I feel like he should stop just to catch a proper breath.
“Stop.” I sound like a toddler with an attitude not getting there way and I all but stomp my foot in the sand which just causes him to start a new round of hiccuping laughs and I groan, shoving him on the arm, which does nothing which is to be expected, compared to the hits the guy usually takes, that was probably equivalent to a butterfly bumping in to him.
When his laughter dies down to a few chuckles here and there, he apologizes, “I’m sorry.” He holds both hands up in defense then grabs my face and plants a long kiss on my lips.
“No you’re not,” I pout.
He places another kiss. “I really am.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Placing my hand over his face and pushing him away.
The sun is setting and couple that with the light from the fire, it’s casting Brooks in a beautiful, almost angelic glow, that makes my heart hurt, that and the utter joy on his face and the way he’s looking at me… I don’t think I ever had a chance when it came to him.
Which is why I have to bring this up now.
“Brooks… what are we doing?” I ask. I need to know the next steps of whatever this is before I can commit to anything with him. If this is just fun, I don’t think I could ha ndle that.
“We’re on a date, Summer,” he says, leaning his elbows on his bent knees.
I give him an ‘are you serious’ look, “No, I know that. I mean—”
There’s a soft smile on his face as he interrupts, “I know what you mean,” He looks away at the sea for a second before he continues, “What do you want out of this?”
I think for a second, picking at my cuticles, a bad habit I’ve had since I was a kid. “What do you want out of this?” I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment and tell him what I really want if he doesn’t want the same.
“Uh-uh, I asked you first, Princess.”
I let out a steadying breath. “I just want you,” I confess, my voice small and I avoid looking his way to see his reaction, and even though it should have been one of the hardest confessions I’ve ever made, I feel a sense of release as the words leave my lips.
I feel one of Brooks’ hands come up, stroking my hair and then turning my head to face him.
“Are you sure? Because having me means not having me around for the majority of the year. It means only seeing me through a screen a lot of the time.”
I nod. “I know what it means.” I thought about it all last night, I could deal with the hockey stuff as long as I knew that I could trust him to come back, trust him to keep me safe, trust him to not hurt me and the only way that’s going to happen is to try in the first place. My old therapist would love this progression.
“As long as you’re in this for real, I’m in this too.”
The most beautiful smile forms on his face, and I can’t help but to mirror the expression. “I’m in this, Princess. You’ll just have to bare with me, there’ll be some learning curves for us both.”
“I know,” I say, nodding.
I lean forward, kissing him, pressing my body into his, almost straddling him in the process which causes an unwanted image to pop up in my mind.
I pull away and he looks at me concerned.
“Who was that girl? The one you were with in the bar?” I ask. It was never really a big deal to me, we weren’t together and I had bigger things to worry about at the time but it’s best to start with complete transparency.
“Not my finest moment,” he groans, hanging his head and I laugh, “I don’t even remember her name. I was drunk as hell and I saw a pretty white dress,” Brooks huffs out a laugh, “I called her by your name and it abruptly ended and I went home alone.”
I raise my eyebrows, trying to smother my own laugh, “You said my name?”
He nods, grimacing. “I saw you wearing that white dress once, way back before we ever spoke properly and I guess it’s been burned in my memory ever since,” he says softly, and I little part of me beams at the thought he was thinking of me when he was getting with someone else.
I press one last kiss to his lips before standing up, pulling Brooks up with me. “Get rid of this fire, I’ll pack the truck, we’re going home.”
“Yes ma’am.” He salutes and starts snuffing the fire out while I pack up Grayson’s truck.