30. Mac
If I wasn’t already in love with Shelby, I’d fall all over again watching her eat.
She spends all this time constructing the perfect bite. “You need to get the ratio right, see? Like a bit of the base, some of the meat, and then just enough sauce.” She swirls the fork around on the plate before holding it up, then giving a little nod, like she’s telling it she’s good to go. Then she pops it past those pretty bow-tipped lips and closes her mouth, chewing for a full few seconds before closing her eyes and moaning.
When she opens her eyes, I’m staring.
She giggles. “I know. I’m ridiculous.”
“I love ridiculous,” I say.
She smiles, those gorgeous liquid eyes melting my insides, and I want to tell her right now. I want to scream it from the rooftops.
Instead I reach into my pocket and pull out the little box. It’s a white cardboard jewelry box, the kind my sister used to collect when we were kids, with a little square of plush fluff inside. I made sure not to get a fancy one. I didn’t want Shelby to jump to conclusions and freak out.
The last thing I want is for her to jump into the ocean to get away from me.
She doesn’t notice it at first. It’s fair. She’s still too involved in her food. Plus the restaurant is dimly lit and loud, with people talking at every table, the clink and hum of dishes and service staff. And under it all, music. Coltrane, I think.
The restaurant Shelby chose to take me to is a modern fine dining place right downtown, with an incredible menu and fresh, locally sourced ingredients. She introduced me to the chef as well as the manager, who sat with us for a good twenty minutes, giving me a thousand new ideas for the Dinghy, despite it being the busiest time of night on the busiest day of the week.
Despite the world being convinced I’m a small-town boy through and through, I actually don’t mind visits to the city. Mostly for the food, which I just can’t get out in Redbeard Cove—unless I make it myself. But ingredients are easier to get here. And new poncey-ass cooking implements from my favorite kitchen supply stores.
But I also like being in the city now and then for the contrast. Noise, so I can enjoy the quiet back home. Hustle and bustle, so I can slow down once I step off the ferry.
“God, this is so good I think I might just order it again to take home,” Shelby says. “How’s yours? You’ve hardly touched it!”
I look down at my pistachio-crusted halibut. It’s fucking gorgeous. Delicious too, but I stopped eating after the first bite. I inhaled my appetizer—a frisée salad with pine nuts and a balsamic reduction, as well as the fresh oysters. But now, knee-deep into dinner with that box on the table and the words I want to tell Shelby sitting on my tongue, I suddenly can’t eat.
“You okay?” Shelby asks, frowning.
“Never better.” Nervous as fuck, but still on cloud fucking nine with Shelby Jones.
I glance down at the box on the table.
Shelby’s eyes follow mine, and she frowns. She’s finally noticed the box. Her eyes snap to mine. “What’s that?”
I rub my hands over my thighs. I’m sweating. I’m also wearing nice pants, which I hope I don’t wreck. I want to tug at my tie. It feels suddenly tight. “I, uh, I got something for you. I mean, I didn’t buy it.” I say the last part quickly. “I found it. I thought?—”
Fuck, I sound like a blubbering idiot. Annoyed with myself, I take a swig of wine. It’s fucking delicious, but I hardly taste it.
“Maybe just open it.” Or don’t.
Shelby takes the box, and I immediately start to panic. It’s too much. It’s a tell. It’s going to show her how fucking obsessed I am with her and?—
She opens it.
Her mouth falls open. “Mac.”
She lowers the box onto the table, pressing both hands to her mouth. When she meets my eyes again, they’re wet, already spilling over. Fuck me.
“You—it was gone, Mac.” She looks confused. “It was in the middle of the ocean.”
“Yeah,” I husk, taking another sip of wine. “It took me a bit to find.”
She reaches into the box and pulls out the necklace. The blue camel; the one she lost that first day.
“The scuba gear,” she whispers. “You went diving for this.”
“Just a couple times.”
Almost every day for weeks. I never actually expected to find it. It was just something for me to do. It’s insane that I actually did, with all the nooks and crannies down there, not to mention the bull kelp. But it was therapeutic, going down there every morning. It gave me time to think, in the quiet of the deep, the color of Shelby’s eyes.
“It was a lucky fluke, really,” I say. “It landed on a boulder. It’s pretty shallow between there and the island, but I never would have found it if it had fallen just a few feet over.”
Tears are running down Shelby’s face. She stands up, then walks over to my side of the table. “Stand up.”
I clear my throat, setting my napkin on the table. I’m vaguely aware of the tables next to us, still too busy to pay much attention to us.
But when I stand and Shelby throws her arms around me, letting out an audible sob, people start to turn.
I don’t notice them, though. I only feel Shelby, melded to me like half of my soul.
“I love you,” she whispers in my ear, and I’m so astonished all I can do is hug her back, my arms wrapped around her as tightly as if she were a life ring and I was a drowning man.
Which maybe I am. I am without her, that’s for fucking sure.
“I was going to say that first,” I whisper back. “I had it all planned out, Shelby.” She pulls back to look at me, but I don’t want to let her go.
“Really?” She asks it like she doesn’t quite believe it.
“Shelby, I’ve been fucking gone for you since the beginning. I’m kind of surprised you didn’t see that.”
She laughs through her tears. “I…Deanie told me the same thing, but I didn’t believe her.”
I think of Lana. “I’m pretty sure everyone at home knows,” I say sheepishly.
She smiles, then kisses me. Her lips against mine make me forget the whole damn world, the way the whole restaurant is staring. The way a woman’s walking up to our table and I don’t even notice she’s coming our way until she speaks.
“Bryony?”
Shelby breaks our kiss, turning to the woman.
She goes stiff in my arms.
I let her go, but only far enough that she can face the woman.
I recognize her, from the day I met Shelby. A thin, severe, silver-haired woman in a business suit that suddenly makes me dislike something I love.
“Mom!” Shelby exclaims. She steps fully away from me now, though her fingers stay curled around mine. She looks like she wants to give her mom a hug, which kind of breaks my heart. And pisses me off. By all accounts, this woman has only made life hell for Shelby. Shelby doesn’t talk about her much, except for that one night when she confessed she missed her.
“You remember Mac?”
“I do,” her mother says. It’s not with the same kind of disdain as before, but it’s not with much warmth, either.
“Mac, my mom, Vita.”
“I remember,” I say.
“What are you doing here?” Shelby asks.
“I could ask the same question of you,” her mom replies.
“We’re here for a visit,” I say. “Shelby’s still up in Redbeard Cove, with me.”
I know I sound like an asshole. But my protectiveness has come out hard. This woman has caused Shelby so much pain.
Vita winces slightly, and the smallest flicker of guilt goes over me.
“Well. I’m here with your father,” Vita says.
“Where is he?” Shelby asks, almost hopeful sounding.
“He’s waiting outside.”
Shelby seems to shrink. “Oh.” That word is so small.
Vita’s eyes cast down. Suddenly I wonder if my anger has the right target. Shelby doesn’t talk much about her father. Just that he wasn’t around much when she was young. And that he doesn’t defend her to her mother. But why the hell isn’t he here saying hello to his daughter?
“He’s angry, Bryony,” her mother says, as if reading my mind. “He’s been angry for years. I’m not sure he’ll ever stop being angry.”
Vita’s shoulders take a sudden nosedive, and when she looks at her daughter next, her eyes are wet. “I was hoping…maybe we could talk sometime. On the phone or…maybe in person. If you’d be amenable.”
Shelby seems to consider this.
The server comes by then. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he says. “Is everything okay? With your meal, I mean.”
I know he’s mandated to come by here at certain times. Still, I give him a nod. “It’s good, thank you.”
The waiter ducks his head as he turns and leaves. I wince, realizing too late how curt I sounded. Not much pisses me off more than people being rude to waitstaff, but I was so hung up on what was happening here with Shelby, I just was.
“I won’t keep you,” her mother says, straightening her spine again.
But Shelby moved aside for the waiter, and Vita’s eyes drop to the box on the table.
When Shelby sees her look, she says, “It was for you, Mom. I lost it, but Mac found it again. He took days. Weeks, actually. It’s a miracle.”
Vita looks away abruptly. “Please call me when you have a moment, Shelby.” She glances at me, but it’s long enough for me to see the red in her eyes. She’s trying not to show her daughter she’s crying. “Mac.”
Then she’s gone, striding away at a clip, her heels silent on the tightly piled carpet.
When I look back at Shelby, her eyes are running over with tears again.
“Want to get out of here?” I ask.
She nods.
I throw a few hundreds on the table. It’s much more than the bill, but hopefully it’ll make up for me being a dick to the server. A moment later, we’re in my truck, Shelby telling me where to take her.
When I turn off the engine, the sounds from outside filter in through the open windows in my truck.
A huge clang reverberates through the cab, followed by a distant shout from someone a hundred feet up a solid wall of steel.
“This is where you come to think?” I ask.
Shelby laughs. It’s the first smile I’ve seen since we left the restaurant, and though she’s still crying, it gives me a glimmer of hope that what just happened might not have ruined the whole night.
We’re at a shipyard down at the harbor, and even at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, the place is alive with activity. Massive cranes like dinosaurs lean over enormous ships bigger than whole buildings. Shipping containers in blue and orange and red swing from chains as they’re loaded onto the ships.
“You used to be able to drive right down there,” she says. “One time when I was a kid, they even let me and my friend board a ship to look inside. It was grain transport or something; it was just a giant cavern with, like, thousands of tons of grain down at the bottom. I don’t think we were really allowed to be there.”
“Who were you with?”
“Jessica and her best friend. Her friend’s dad worked in the shipping office, so he probably pulled some strings. He was such a nice guy. I remember wishing he were my dad, even back then, when Jessica was still…well, when everything was good.”
I reach for her hand. Outside, a man shouts something in a different language from the dock. Tagalog, I think.
“I’m sorry,” I say, looking at Shelby in the passenger seat. “What is it you said to me? Family is hard?”
She laughs softly, this time without much humor. “Something like that.”
Shelby touches the necklace at her throat. She put it on at some point. “She called me Shelby. Did you hear that?”
I did. I hadn’t thought much about it, but I remember now her mom called her Bryony the last time we met.
“Maybe it’s her way of reaching out to you?”
Shelby grips the necklace tight in her fingers, pinching her lips like she’s trying to keep it together. Like she doesn’t want to hope her mom might want her as badly as she wants her. Fuck, I just want to pull her onto my lap and tell her everything’s going to be okay. Even if I don’t know if it is.
She sets the necklace softly on her shirt. “Finding this necklace…it’s the single nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.” She looks out at the cranes. Then she turns to me. “Did you mean what you said before, Mac? That you love me?”
“Yes.”
My heart thumps as the silence stretches out between us. She said I love you to me, but what if she takes it back? What if she decided it’s too hard, that loving me would mean something more, something like family, and yes, family is so fucking hard it’s not worth it?
“Okay,” she says. “Then I guess I’m moving to Redbeard.”
My heart does a full loop-de-loop. “What?”
“Well, we can’t be in love with each other and not be together, can we?”
“But your business…”
She looks away. “It’s fine. I can figure something else out.” She glances over at me and smiles. “I’m creative. And slightly ridiculous. Maybe I can make posters for the businesses in town. Maybe I can be your assistant when you become mayor.”
“What?”
She laughs. “You’d make the best mayor. Everyone knows it.”
“My dad was mayor. It’s not for me.”
“No? I bet your dad would be beside himself if you decided to run.”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat. I can’t say I haven’t thought about it before, but I don’t like the limelight. Besides, I don’t want to think about it now. Shelby said she’s moving to Redbeard.
Which I can only assume is permanently.
I reach over and pull her to me, but hugging her isn’t close enough. I back my seat up, then pull her right up onto my lap. Then I bury my face in her neck, inhaling her scent. My whole body feels loose, like I’m ascending into fucking heaven. And the back of my nose tightens too. I think I’m going to fucking cry. “Do you mean it, Shelby? You really want to leave everything you have here?”
I think of her apartment, done up with camels everywhere, plants lovingly attended to. The pretty neighborhood, the views, the bustling street downstairs. And her job?—
“I love you, Mac. It’s a no-brainer.”
I can’t see her face, but I’m lost in those words. She loves me. I never dared to think about what we could be. I didn’t dare dream of a future with her. But now she’s holding it out to me on a platter. The woman I love is here, in my arms.
I look her in the eye, brushing hair from her cheek. “We don’t have to decide all the things now,” I say. “But just know, you could never be my assistant.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because you’re the kind of person who comes up with the big ideas, Shelby. You’re a leader. An innovator. A gorgeous, perfect, brilliant woman. If anything, I should be your assistant.”
Shelby laughs then. Long and hard. “You couldn’t take direction from a drill sergeant.”
I chuckle, my chest vibrating. “That’s not true.”
She sighs, leaning into me. “You know, it’s okay that I don’t have the relationship I always wanted with my mom. Definitely not my dad. And it’s okay if I never find Shelby Fox, either. I’m beginning to think she doesn’t exist. Maybe Mom will tell me where she really is one day. Or at least what really happened between them. But it doesn’t matter.” She strokes my face, her palm warm on my cheek as she looks in my eyes. “You and Nate, you’re my people now.”
My heart grows so big it feels like it’s going to explode right out of my chest.
“And I do always say, a business is all about its people…” Shelby frowns, then her expression shifts.
I love watching the way her thoughts run right across her face. I love her face. I love everything about her, right down to her elbow jabbing into my gut as she twists sideways to face me.
“Mac, I’ve got it!” Shelby exclaims, her face lit up like a Christmas tree. “It’s the people!”
“What?” I’m deeply confused, but her excitement is still contagious.
A container thuds into place outside, making the truck shake. “The missing piece, for R2D2. It’s the people, Mac. Not the town, not the menu. Not the patio or the design, though those are all part of it. It’s the people.”
I still don’t quite understand what she’s talking about, but I say, “Do you want to go home now, Shelby?”
She jumps off my lap, which sucks for me, but I’m too happy for her to mind. “Then let’s go home.”