Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Stella
After ending my call with Rhys, I’m smiling.
He was actually less gruff and guarded than usual.
In fact, if Rhys was as personable in real life as he was on our phone call, I might take his calls.
I won’t ever go back to screaming like a giddy teenager every time I see him—like I did the first time we met—but I’d at least pick up when he called.
I might even consider having dinner with him.
The car ahead of me inches forward, and I follow.
On impulse, I pull up my Christmas playlist and hit play.
“Fa-La La-La Land” blasts through my staticky car speakers, reminding me that this is the Rhys James I thought I wanted to grow up and marry.
Luckily, those dreams ended long before we had our real-life hallway collision.
I refuse to have that run-in be my forever meet-cute moment. Rhys and I will not be retelling that story to our grandchildren while holding hands and gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes.
Nope. My meet-cute will involve romance, insta-love, and me wearing a killer outfit. The kind of meet-cute Mom and Dad had. That’s a story worth telling.
Not, I made a damn fool of myself because he was even more devastatingly handsome in real life than he was in any of his posters I’d hung on my bedroom walls as a teenager.
Not, I jabbed his shoulder to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating.
And definitely not, I told him I’d planned our wedding when I was thirteen.
Every time I think about that moment, I relive the humiliation of it. The smell of weed drifting from the apartment next door is still etched in my senses, along with the concrete, rough and cold under my bare feet.
My meet-cute will not involve weed in any form—or rough concrete, or a metal apartment door with chipped black paint slammed in my face. I will not settle for anything less than the ideal meet-cute. Not when Mom and Dad’s love story is part of my origin story.
So, after confirming my meeting with Danny at VibeHouse tomorrow and with perfect meet-cutes still in mind, I call Mom. She answers on the first ring.
“Stella? What’s wrong?” Thirty years in America and she still has her Italian accent.
“Nothing, Mamma. I just wanted to talk to you,” I say and stop myself from smiling at the guy in the car next to mine. Lesson learned there.
Mom asks me a million questions about how I’m doing, even though I’ve only been gone for a week, and I’ve talked to her nearly every day. She tells me about my step-niece, Charly, and all the progress she’s making before switching to FaceTime so Charly can say hi to me.
“Mamma, I’m driving.” I swing my gaze from the stopped traffic to take a quick peek at Charly, who’s waving wildly at me, her eyes magnified behind tiny glasses.
“Hi, Charly! How’s my girl?”
Traffic moves, and I peel my eyes away from the screen to accelerate. While I drive, Charly chatters excitedly, and I force myself to keep my eyes on the brake lights in front of me.
I love it all, but fifteen minutes later, I still haven’t gotten what I called for, and I’m almost to Georgia’s. At the first opening I have in the conversation, I interrupt Mom and Charly’s running dialogue.
“Mom…I want to hear the story of how you and Dad met,” I say.
“You’ve heard that story a thousand times,” she exclaims, but there’s no real resistance in her voice. She loves telling the story.
“Make it a thousand and one. It’ll help me feel less homesick.” I exit the freeway and then pull into a park overlooking the ocean.
“He was stationed at Camp Darby near Livorno,” Mom starts, her face still on my screen, and I sit back to listen.
“One night he came into the restaurant where I worked and…” She slaps her hands together to mimic the explosion of love that happened in that moment.
“I didn’t speak English. He didn’t speak Italian, but I fell in love with him the second he smiled at me.
His blue eyes reminded me of the Adriatic… ”
I never saw my dad’s eyes in real life, but I know the color she means. Rhys’s eyes are that blue. His hair is black, though, while Dad’s looks dark blond in the pictures I have of him.
Mom tells me all the things she’s told me so many times.
Her meet-cute was my favorite bedtime story.
The way she and Dad danced that night, under the lights in the little town square, while a live band played.
They held each other close even when the musicians played faster songs.
I suspect she embellishes a few parts, but I drink it all in, like I always have.
She finishes the way she always does. “My biggest wish for you is to have that kind of love once in your life.”
“Me too, Mamma,” I sigh.
But I leave out my goal to not fall in love until I’ve checked everything else off my 30 Before 30 List. I want the kind of meet-cute Mom and Dad had, but not the same ending their story has.
I’m just enough of a realist to understand I have no control over that.
God laughs when we make plans, so I’m going to control what I can—like when I fall in love.
And that’s definitely not at the age of twenty-three, which is three years older than Mom was when she eloped with Dad and moved to Paradise.
And only three years younger than she was when he died, leaving her alone in a foreign country to raise a five-year-old and a baby by herself.
I tell her I love her, then drive the last ten minutes to Georgia’s.
The rest of the night, we spend eating takeout Thai while working out what Georgia has in mind for me as her social media manager. When I tell her about Rhys and the call from his record label, she breathes a sigh of relief.
“If the terms aren’t good, don’t take it, but if they are, I think we’ve got a clear case of serendipity here.” Georgia takes her first bite of food since we started talking—a forkful of plain white rice, one of the few things she can keep down.
“Serendipity, without a doubt. Good things are headed your way, Sparky, with or without us,” Zach says through his bite of pad thai.
“With us. Because we’ve always got your back, and you still have a place here for as long as you want,” Georgia adds. “We can figure out the bedroom situation with you and the baby when the time comes.”
I scan their two-bedroom condo. It’s a decent size for a place by the beach in California, but not really big enough for three adults and a brand-new baby.
Especially when one of those adults—me—is young, single, and on her own for basically the first time.
Rooming with girls my age in college was challenging enough.
I can’t imagine a newborn baby would be easier.
“Depending on how this meeting with VibeHouse goes, I may be able to get a place of my own.”
Georgia and Zach glance at each other, and I don’t miss the flicker of relief on their faces.
Georgia looks back at me. “Don’t let our situation influence your decision whether to take whatever job they may offer.
But if you want to move out, make sure they’re ready to pay you enough that you can.
Cost of living is a lot higher here than in Paradise,” she adds with her usual go-getter attitude.
I return her smile, pushing back my disappointment she didn’t fight me a little harder about moving out. I always knew I wouldn’t be living with them forever; I just thought it would be longer than a few weeks.
But I can pivot. I can create the life I want.
That was the goal when I first crafted my 30 Before 30 List at the tender age of fourteen.
I’ve made revisions, sure, but one thing that hasn’t changed is number seventeen: Live in an amazing apartment, by myself, in a big city.
There’s no point in waiting to check that one off the list when I’ve already locked in the big city part.
“Okay. I can do that.” I raise my wine glass filled with water. “A toast to all of us getting what we want: a baller job, a place to live, and, best of all, a baby!”
With huge, happy smiles on their faces, Georgia and Zach raise their glasses. We clink them, but the moment Georgia sets hers down, her face drains of color, and she makes a dash to the bathroom.
The next morning, I meet Rhys at Frothed right before six.
The coffee shop won’t get busy until around seven, so we’ve got a little time to talk.
Britta’s saved the back corner table for us, and Rhys sits with his back to the rest of the room.
Between that, the bucket hat, and the raggedy, mismatched board shorts and T-shirt, hopefully no one will recognize him as Rhys James.
“How are you doing?” I ask as soon as I sit across from him. “We didn’t get much of a chance to talk at Archie’s the other night.”
“Yeah, good. Cheers.” He keeps his eyes on the coffee Britta already had waiting for him. He doesn’t ask how I am.
Soooo…goodbye to the man I talked to on the phone yesterday; hello guarded, closed-off, grumpy Rhys. The hat hides his face, but even so, I can tell his smile hasn’t made an appearance this morning.
“What are you drinking?” I try again.
He glances up for half a second, then drops his gaze back to his cup. “Whatever Britta’s made me.” He takes a sip, like he’s hoping to figure it out by taste alone, then sets the cup down without a word.
“Well, then I guess we should get down to business. What’s your social media goal?” I take my laptop from my bag and open a new doc.
“Nah, yeah.” He clears his throat. “I need someone to fix my story.”
“Uh-huh.” I nod. “I got that part yesterday. But what story do you want to tell?”
For the first time in the five minutes we’ve been here, Rhys meets my eyes. “That I’m not washed up. That I’m not a jerk.”
“That’s doable, since you’re neither of those things.”
He smiles—just a flicker—but it’s the first real one I’ve seen since he walked in. For a moment, I see the Andy from Surf City High who I fell for, and the larger-than-life pop star I fell even harder for.