Chapter Twelve
“No, I don’t fucking understand.” Baz pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to remember not to swear like a sailor in the parking lot of a church. “Explain.”
“Annulment isn’t a thing in Rhode Island,” came the reply from the other end of the phone. “In special circumstances you can ask a judge to rule that the marriage never legally existed, but I can tell you right now, getting drunk in Vegas is not one of those special circumstances. Especially when you’re in the process of adding her to your health insurance.”
“Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?”
“You can get a divorce like every other person in the state who wishes they never got married.”
Was that true? Did Baz wish he’d never gotten married? The sentiment didn’t sit right, like an oil slick on his skin that he wanted to scrub off. It wasn’t that he wished the last few days had never happened, just that he needed it to stop. The other night he’d come way too close to treating her like she was actually his wife and not...whatever the hell she actually was to him. The only way he could see to getting out of this with his sanity intact was to no longer be married to the redhead who’d invaded his home and his thoughts.
“I can start the paperwork today. ”
The door at the side of the church opened and Sabrina leaned out. “Sebastian?”
She was always beautiful, but when she wore a pencil skirt and heels, she was absolutely breathtaking. The gold chains of her necklace fell beneath the neckline of her floral blouse and her hair fell over one shoulder, fluttering in the late summer breeze. He knew what was on the end of that chain now—a delicate ceramic curlicue doubling back on itself in an intricate pattern. Knowing felt intimate somehow.
She smiled, red-painted lips pulling into a tantalizing curve, and cocked her head to the side. “You ready?”
He ran his eyes over her, lingering on the place where those chains dipped into her cleavage, the flare of her hips, the smooth skin of her bare calves. “I have to go. Don’t do anything yet,” he said into the phone, ending the call.
“Everything alright?” she asked.
“Fine. Let’s get this over with.”
He followed her down the dark hall on the ground level of St. Anthony’s to the large meeting room where the Merchants’ Association held their monthly meetings. Tessa and Jamie hovered around the refreshments table at the back of the room, adjusting the display of mini pastries Tessa’s bakery had provided. Kyla, Gavin, and Ethan sat off to one side of the bank of metal folding chairs, chatting happily with Natalia, the lingerie shop owner, and Lindsay, the owner of the fancy breakfast food truck. At the front of the room, Norm, still in his signature beanie and flannel despite the August heat, fiddled with a projector. He turned at the clicking of Sabrina’s heels along the linoleum floor.
“Good. You’re here. Let’s get started.” Norm held the remote control for the projector out to Sabrina. “How do you want to be introduced? Mr. and Mrs. Graham?”
“No,” Sabrina and Baz said simultaneously and a little too quickly .
“We’ll introduce ourselves,” Sabrina said.
“Everyone already knows us,” Baz pointed out.
Norm chuckled. “Suit yourselves.” Then, to the assembled group, “Alright, let’s get this thing started.” The crowd settled into the folding chairs as conversation died down, turning their attention to the front of the room. “We’re skipping our usual business tonight so we can come up to speed on the Vegas conference and make a plan for this year’s Food and Wine Festival. Unless anyone has anything pressing.”
A hand shot up on one side of the room and Jenny from the hair salon got to her feet. “When are we going to talk about the fact that wedding bookings are still down?”
“Temporary market dip,” Norm said.
“Maybe, but I don’t know how many years in a row my business can survive this temporary dip.” A murmur of agreement rolled through the room. “You can’t keep punting on this, Norm. We need a new plan. I don’t much care if it’s more weddings or something else entirely, but we can’t simply keep wringing our hands and taking the hit.”
Natalia chimed in, “The Food and Wine Festival has already proven there’s a real market for bringing other kinds of tourism to town. Maybe we should explore ways to do that all year, and not only in the winter.”
As the meeting quickly devolved into side conversations, Sabrina leaned close to Baz, whispering. “Do you think they’d notice if we left?”
He choked on the burst of laughter that tried to work its way past that lump in his chest. When he turned his head to look at her, she was close enough that he could count the freckles on her cheeks. He wanted to kiss each one, see if the freckles near her ear tasted different than the ones on her clavicle, see where else those freckles dotted her skin.
Where the fuck did that thought come from? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought this much about kissing someone.
He swallowed hard and turned back to the chaos of the room. “Did you go to the seminar on gamification?”
“You know I did.”
He did know. He’d spent half the lecture obsessing over the red mark that appeared on her knee when she crossed and uncrossed her legs, and the other half hating himself for even noticing it.
“Could be a solution.”
He glanced her way and she nodded, that smile lighting up her face again. “It’s at least more interesting than rehashing the workshop on public transportation and infrastructure.”
Norm shouted over the growing conversations in the room as the assembled business owners splintered into smaller and smaller groups bemoaning the declining wedding industry in town. Finally, exasperated, he stuck his index fingers in his mouth and blew, the piercing whistle cutting through the noise.
“That’s enough,” he huffed. “Now Baz and Sabrina are here to tell us what they learned at that conference so we can make sure the Food and Wine Festival has its most successful year, even with Jamie and Tessa needing to take a back seat. That’s the only thing on the agenda for tonight.”
“We might be able to do both,” Sabrina said, stepping to the center of the space at the front of the room. “There was a lot to learn at the conference, and we’ve sent all the slides from the various presentations to Norm. He can make those available to anyone who’d like to review. But I think we can do better than rehash hours of slides about dynamic pricing models.” She reached forward and turned off the projector, the machine whirring as it shut down, before turning the full force of her smile on the gathered business owners. “If you really want to address the shrinking wedding market and increase alternative tourism streams, the town’s festivals should be part of the plan, and we need to be talking about gamification. ”
“What’s that?” Jenny asked skeptically.
“It’s simpler than it sounds. It’s just turning things into a game. There’s all kinds of blah-biddy-blah in the slides about exactly what it means and complicated ways to do it, but what it boils down is, you decide what you want people to do, and then you figure out a reward system for when they do it. And it’s even better if they can compete against other people, earn points over time, that sort of thing.”
“It’s a very common concept in marketing,” Gavin chimed in from the back of the room. “Like when you see those online crowdfunding campaigns and people team up to see which team can raise more money.”
“Exactly.” Sabrina beamed. “But instead of getting the tourists to raise money, we want them to make reservations at local restaurants and hotels, buy tickets to a museum, rent a kayak, come to a festival. That kind of thing. When I had my studio in Maine, the other local businesses and I did something really similar one summer. We made a passport of sorts that encouraged people to visit all the arts businesses in the area—the galleries and the art museum and the bead shop. And if you visited all the businesses on the list, you were entered into a raffle for a cash prize. We all saw more business that summer.”
Baz leaned back against the wall of St. Anthony’s listening as Sabrina—with some help from Gavin—helped the association brainstorm lists of ways they could gamify their tourist experience: a passport of local businesses that, when completed, would enter the visitor in a drawing to win a prize; a repeat visitor program that rewarded tourists who came back year over year; ways to earn extra points for leaving reviews online and referring friends to book their own Aster Bay vacations. The list went on and on. By the end of the meeting, they’d developed a rough plan for testing out gamified promotions at the Food and Wine Festival and Sabrina was swarmed with members of the association, eager to continue the conversation .
Through it all, he couldn’t take her eyes off her. She was magnetic, weaving a spell that captivated everyone in the room with each open-hearted laugh and nod of encouragement, and blossoming under their reflected appreciation. She practically glowed with it.
“She’s got them eating out of the palm of her hand.”
Baz turned to see Ethan leaning against the wall beside him. He’d been so caught up in watching Sabrina, he hadn’t even noticed his friend approach.
“She’s good with people,” Baz said.
“Unlike your grumpy ass.”
Baz shot him a look. “And she knows how to run a business.”
“Why’d she leave her studio in Maine?”
Baz shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Ethan tilted his head towards Baz’s hands. When he glanced down, he realized he was turning his wedding ring on his finger. He hadn’t even noticed he was doing it. He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Did I ever tell you I asked Stephanie to marry me the day I turned eighteen. I wanted to do what you two did, run away to Vegas and get married before our parents could talk us out of it.” Ethan said.
He hadn’t told him. Not that Baz was surprised. Ethan had been head over heels in love with his childhood sweetheart. Even when she’d gotten pregnant with Tessa at sixteen, Ethan never wavered.
“What happened?”
“She didn’t want to marry me.”
Ethan looked at Sabrina and Baz followed his line of sight to where she stood, surrounded by their friends and neighbors, like she’d been one of them all along. As though she could sense his eyes on her, Sabrina turned to meet Baz’s gaze, flashing him a bright smile that made his skin feel too tight.
“I know you don’t want to talk about how you went from hating her for ten years to marrying her, but that woman—” Ethan tilted his chin towards Sabrina, “—she’s something special. And it seems like she thinks you’re not half bad either.” Baz shoved Ethan’s shoulder without ever taking his eyes off Sabrina. Ethan laughed. “Don’t overthink it.”
“I’m not—”
“I could see those gears turning in your head from all the way across the room.”
Baz exhaled through his nose, watching as Sabrina added more notes to the whiteboard from the group excitedly chattering around her. “Just can’t figure out why she came back in the first place.”
“Does it matter?”
Baz shrugged. Maybe it shouldn’t matter, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it did. That maybe it had something to do with that pain she was in the other day, with the fact that she didn’t have—and clearly needed—health insurance.
“Then ask her about it,” Ethan said.
Right. Ask her about it. He could do that. Provided he could stop thinking about kissing her again long enough to have the conversation.