Rebel Hearts

1. Jesse

1

JESSE

“ O ne hot creamy load, coming right up,” I murmured as I turned to the espresso machine. My friend Brooklyn raised his eyebrows and glanced back at the customer, but the woman had already turned her attention back to her phone.

“You’re in fine form this morning,” Brooklyn said after I handed over the requested double-shot mocha latte with extra whipped cream.

“What? I’m always snarky.” I took advantage of the break in activity to walk around to the front of the glass case of baked goods and shine it up with a rag.

“Yeah, but not usually in front of customers.” Brooklyn folded his arms and gave me a hard glance. “What’s up with you? You’ve been acting weird since you walked in here this morning.”

“Ugh, I don’t know.” I tilted my head back and groaned at the ceiling. “Or, well, actually, I do. It’s just that I can’t do anything about it.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really.” I walked back around the counter and began cleaning off the espresso machine in preparation for the ten a.m. rush of customers. Working this close to Chatham University’s campus, we were guaranteed to fill up with undergrads desperately seeking caffeine before their ten-fifteen classes started, even during summer session. “Because it’s everything. My house. My relationship—or rather, lack thereof. My future—or again, lack thereof—here in Savannah. My life is just a dumpster fire right now and the only thing I can think to do about it, I’m not sure I want to do.”

“Jesse, your life is not a dumpster fire,” Brooklyn said with a laugh.

“Fine, okay, maybe it’s just like, a trashcan fire in a dingy parking garage. But it’s definitely on fire, you have to give me that.”

“I mean, yeah, you’ve seen better days,” Brooklyn said, smiling. “But come on, what happened to the upbeat Jesse who’s chipper no matter what the hour?”

“He died a slow and painful death at the hands of his loud, undergrad housemates,” I grumbled.

I’d been living in a group house for a little over a month now with five other guys, twenty-one or twenty-two-year-olds who had a truly astonishing capacity to stay up partying night after night and still make it to class or work the next day, not the least bit hungover. If I weren’t so frustrated, I’d be impressed. But their Animal House lifestyle didn’t mesh well with my four a.m. wake-ups to get to the cafe and start baking every other morning, and after a month of living with them, it was really wearing me down.

“Well, at least you have them to blame instead of Tanner,” Brooklyn said. “So that’s a fun change.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’re still blaming him. He’s still the reason I’m in this mess. Him and his ridiculous twenty-two-year-old boy-toy.”

Tanner Carmichael had been my boyfriend for more than a year when I left my home in Miami to follow him up to swampy Savannah after he’d taken a teaching position at Chatham University. It wasn’t tenure-track or anything, but teaching Modern Sexuality and the Media had still seemed more stable than hosting reality TV shows about drunk college students on spring break. I’d convinced myself that this move meant he was finally ready to settle down, and get serious about our relationship.

Instead, he’d cheated on me—with a college student, of all things. I guess he just couldn’t get enough of them. And when I’d caught him, he’d asked me to move out of the apartment we shared. So it was his fault that at twenty-eight, I was living in a dilapidated group house with a bunch of frat guys. Rent-wise, it was all I could afford.

“And I one hundred percent agree with you that he’s an asshole,” Brooklyn said. “But I also think you’re better off without him. You wouldn’t want to be with someone who treats you the way he did.”

“I know. I just wish…I just wish it didn’t feel quite so much like I failed.”

“You didn’t fail. You just happened to fall for a guy who turned out to be a lying jerk. That’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“So why does he get to be the one who ends up happy with a new man, and I’m the one left alone?”

“Well, first of all, he’s not happy with a new man, he’s happy with a zygote. And second of all, do you really think he is happy? Or is he just a sad stereotype of an aging gay man with a midlife crisis who’s trying to recapture his glory days by sleeping with someone young enough to be his son?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Eww, when you put it like that…”

“Doesn’t sound so enticing, does it?”

“No, not really,” I sighed. “But it still sucks.”

I knew Brooklyn was right. At forty, Tanner was twelve years older than I was, and eighteen years older than Quentin, the fifth-year senior he was currently sleeping with. Growing older was something Tanner had always worried about. It was one of the reasons I’d thought maybe he’d finally want to take our relationship to the next level. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Well, that’s why you just have to kick his ass in the marathon. You’ll get your revenge and, since you’ll be all lean and muscle-y from training, you’ll look hot while doing it. Show him what he’s missing.”

“See, the problem with that plan is that it requires me actually running the marathon.”

“What do you mean problem? You’re not quitting, are you?” Brooklyn looked at me accusatorily.

“It was never my idea in the first place!” I threw my hands in the air. “I only signed up for it because Tanner got it in his head that he wanted to run it, and I thought it would bring us closer. Now that doesn’t matter, so—”

“But you can’t just quit,” Brooklyn protested. “You can’t give up!”

“It’s not giving up if I never even started,” I rationalized. “Come on, we both know that the only marathon I’m likely to complete is one spent on the couch, watching all of Law and Order seasons seventeen through twenty-three.”

“Look, I get that Tanner is the worst, but you can’t let him—ouch, what was that for?” Brooklyn cut off and looked at me, aggrieved, when I kicked him. I just stared, panicked, over his shoulder. Eventually he followed my gaze, and I heard his intake of breath when he saw what I was looking at—Tanner and Quentin walking into Cardigan Cafe.

Shit.

As much as I tried to joke about it, as much as I tried to tell myself I was over it, seeing Tanner in the flesh brought home the fact that I very much wasn’t. This was actually the first time I’d come face-to-face with him since the breakup. I’d seen him around town a few times, but each time I’d turned a corner, altered my route, or just plain ducked behind a bush until he’d passed by.

No chance of ducking this time. Tanner gave me his patented ‘ I’m too good for you and everyone in here ’ smile as he walked up to the counter. I couldn’t believe I used to think it was sexy. I took a deep breath. I was going to have to talk to him. Dammit.

“Jesse,” he said, “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“Right. Because I’ve only been working here every other morning for the past nine months.”

“Still, I couldn’t be sure I’d see you. What a pleasure. How are you?”

How was I? He had some nerve, asking that. Waltzing into my coffee shop like he owned the place and acting surprised to see me. He’d probably planned this, just to rub my nose in his post-break-up happiness. The only consolation I could find was that Quentin, standing slightly behind Tanner and staring at the floor, looked as uncomfortable as I felt.

“I’m fine, thanks.” I bit the words off and forced myself not to say what I really wanted to. “Can I take your order?”

“Oh, of course,” Tanner said, glancing up at the menu. “I’m just not sure what I’ll have yet. Quentin, do you know what you’re getting, hun?”

Quentin mumbled something that might have been coffee and I punched small coffee into the point-of-service system.

“Jesse, oven emergency!” Brooklyn’s voice called out behind me, and I turned to see him stepping out from the kitchen with hot-mitts on his hands.

When had he disappeared back there? And what possible oven emergency could we be having? We’d finished the morning baking, and Brooklyn wasn’t due to put a new batch of muffins in for another hour.

Brooklyn whipped the oven mitts off his hands and shoved them against my chest. “Can you go take care of that?” he asked as he brushed past me. “I can take over up front.”

I looked at him, stunned into inaction, as he walked up to the register and greeted Tanner and Quentin all over again. Then I shook myself, turned, and walked back into the kitchen.

I stopped short. Brooklyn had taped a piece of paper to the wall of the kitchen, scrawling, ‘ Stay here till I come get you ,’ on it in blue marker.

Well, at least nothing was burning. But I felt a little humiliated that Brooklyn had decided that I couldn’t handle myself in front of Tanner and Quentin. Though, on second thought, maybe I was better off back here.

My breath was still short, and I couldn’t tell if I wanted to cry or punch something. Maybe both. I felt stupid for caring this much. Stupid for getting worked up over a guy who wasn’t worth my time, a guy who’d dumped me over a month ago. And yet.

I’d just hoped, for so long and so hard, that things with Tanner were going to work out. That his commitment issues and moodiness would go away if I could just stick it out long enough. That I’d finally get the happy ending I’d been craving.

I should have known better. But after years of feeling like an ugly duckling, I’d been defenseless when Tanner walked into my bar back in Miami and started flirting with me. And he could be so charming, so damn sexy when he wanted to be. The thought that a guy who looked like him—a guy who was on TV, who’d been in magazines, who had a Wikipedia page about him, for God’s sake—would be interested in me had seemed like a fairy tale.

So I’d hoped against hope that when I followed Tanner up here, when he invited me to live with him, it meant that things were finally falling into place. I’d felt guilty, leaving my mom with only my sister to take care of her, but they’d both told me that it was time to follow my dreams for once.

And that’s what I’d been doing. I’d even enrolled in online classes to finish the business degree I’d started back home. And I’d fallen in love. Not with Tanner. That was already a given. But with a ramshackle old bed and breakfast on Summersea Island, a two-hour car and boat ride away.

Savannah might not seem that different from Miami—both were hot, humid, and semi-tropical—but where Miami fronted the ocean, and felt open, breezy, and fresh, Savannah had always felt overgrown and marshy to me. Summersea, though—that was a different story. It was about as different from Miami as you could get, but it was also, critically, different from Savannah.

Summersea was a tiny island off the Georgia coast with three equally tiny towns, each filled with tiny antique stores and tiny ice cream shops and more Victorian architecture than you could shake a stick at. The majority of the island was undeveloped, though, with masses of coastal forest and rolling hills that swept down to sandy dunes and the wild ocean beyond.

The Sea Glass Inn was located in Tolliver, the tiniest and most remote of Summersea’s municipalities, and I adored it. The owner was a guy named Cam Starling, who’d inherited the place from his parents and had no interest in keeping it up. He wanted to sell it by the end of the year, and I’d been working at Cardigan Cafe and a bar called the Flamingo to save up enough to make an offer.

But that was the other part of my bad mood today. Cam had called last night. He’d always been nice—nicer than I deserved, really, taking me seriously and treating me like a real buyer. But he’d called last night to let me know he’d gotten an incredible offer from another party, and he was going to have a hard time saying no to it. He’d asked if there were any way I could offer a little more. All I could tell him was congratulations, and no.

“Alright, you can come out now,” Brooklyn called from the front of the cafe, and I poked my head out from behind the kitchen door before emerging fully from my hiding place. “They’re gone.”

“I’m both embarrassed and highly grateful,” I said, tossing him the oven mitts. “I owe you one.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to pay me back,” Brooklyn said. “After all, I do know where you live. And work. You can bet I’ll collect.”

“Well, do it while you can,” I said, leaning back against the counter. “I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be up here, and it’ll be harder for you to collect if I go back to Miami.”

“Back to Miami? Whoa, whoa, whoa. What?” Brooklyn looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “I knew you were upset but I didn’t know you were seriously considering moving. Are you seriously considering moving?”

I nodded, and Brooklyn’s face took on a look of horror.

“I just…I mean, what’s the point of me staying up here, really? My house sucks, my love life is some kind of flaming mess, and I’m working two jobs to scrape together money for a building we both know I’ll never buy, to run a bed and breakfast with a business degree I might never finish. I don’t have anything to show for my life up here except a registration number for twenty-six point two miles of torture at the end of July. Why should I stay?”

“Because I’d miss you?”

Brooklyn sounded so sincere, I was taken aback. Since the day we’d met, we’d had a friendly, ribbing relationship. And sure, now that Tanner and I had broken up, Brooklyn was the only friend I had up here. But it wasn’t like I was his only friend.

After all, Brooklyn had lived in Savannah for years, working on his PhD. He knew people. He belonged here. I’d hoped I might feel that way someday, but it was becoming clear I never would.

“Don’t look so shocked, you martyr.” Brooklyn threw me a disbelieving glance. “Of course I’d miss you if you left. Don’t be an idiot.”

“I’d miss you too,” I said helplessly. “But answer me honestly: would you stay, if you were me?”

I looked him in the eye, and eventually he gave a small shrug.

“Maybe not,” he said with a sigh. “But I refuse to accept this, regardless. I will find a reason for you to stay here, if it’s the last thing I do.”

“You just don’t want to go back to doing all the early morning shifts at the cafe,” I said, stifling a yawn. “Speaking of which, it’s about time for me to punch out.”

Brooklyn gave me a hard look. “You’re not going to go do anything stupid when you walk out of here, right?”

“Like pack my bags and be on the next bus out?” I snorted. “Couldn’t even if I wanted to. I’ve got a shift tonight at the Flamingo.”

“Then I’ll see you there,” Brooklyn said. He turned and poured a cup of our house coffee into a to-go cup for me. “And we’ll brainstorm ways to fix your dumpster fire, okay?”

“Whatever you say.” I took the cup from him with a smile of thanks.

“I mean it. We’re going to figure this out.”

“Brooklyn, I know you’re a smart guy, but I think even you might not be able to solve this one. Even without the marathon—which I’m not running, so don’t get any ideas about making that be my new passion—it’d take something pretty amazing to make me want to stay in Savannah now.”

“Well, then we’ll just have to find you something pretty amazing.”

“Yeah. Good luck with that.”

I waved goodbye and shook my head as I walked out the door. My life had never had a surplus of pretty amazing in it. Much as I might wish otherwise, there was no reason I should expect that to change now.