Chapter 6
SIX
Love is something you see and you’re like, “Ooh, I LOVE that.”
“The guy at the counter wants oatmeal.” Iris, one of my two employees, gestured over her shoulder.
“Do we even have oatmeal?” I turned away from the oven where I’d just pulled out two dozen blueberry sour cream muffins. The smell wrapped around me and I smiled. Props to the baker; they looked amazing.
“I don’t know. No one’s ever asked for it before.” She tucked a lock of blonde hair streaked with hot pink behind her ear. “Unless it was in cookie form.”
I wiped my hands on my apron. It was bright yellow with Sit-n-Eat written boldly across the front and a tiny muffin dotting the i. I’d gotten them last month after deciding we needed to jazz things up around this place. “Get him oatmeal then.”
“Oh, Jorge,” Iris said in a sing-song voice. “You got some oatmeal laying around?”
Jorge Benitez was my other employee, and he manned the kitchen. He grumbled something about boring gringos and started rustling around on a shelf. Ten seconds later, he slapped a box of instant oatmeal packets on the counter. “Found it.”
“Thank you, sunshine.” Iris blew Jorge a kiss just to annoy him. As was her way.
He shot her the least sunshine-y look ever, playing along. Iris laughed; Jorge grinned.
“He want eggs or anything else?” Jorge asked.
Iris pulled down a bowl and dumped the contents of the packet in. “He says he just wants oatmeal. Plain.”
I made a face. “Who likes plain oatmeal? It’s like eating mushy cornflakes.”
“Obviously no one told him that.”
Curious, I peeked over the top of the swinging door separating the dining area from the kitchen. “Who is it?”
“All the way at the end, dark hair, glasses, big shoulders, square jaw.” After mixing in a cup of water, she stuck the bowl in the microwave. “Very big hands. You see him?”
Normally, I would have commenced with objectifying the man right along with her (don’t judge, I have to have my fun where I can get it), but I was too busy gawking. There, scrolling through his phone like he didn’t have a problem in the world, was Gilbert Dalton.
A streak of something hot shot through me. Clearly annoyance.
“He’s not all that,” I muttered.
“Seriously?” Iris gave a low chuckle. “He has hot accountant/history professor/but knows his way around a toolbox energy.”
“Is that even a thing?”
Iris arched an eyebrow. “It’s totally a thing.” She peeked over the door at Gilbert and fanned her face with a hand. “It’s definitely my thing.”
“Whatever would your boyfriend say?”
“Have you met Aidan? He’s got accountant/history professor/but knows his way around a toolbox in training energy.”
I laughed. She was not wrong.
With a wink, she pushed open the door with her hip. “Told you I had a type.”
When I’d moved to Two Harts, Iris had been a sullen, sarcastic seventeen-year-old with a potty mouth and aspirations of becoming a card-carrying member of the Emo Girls Club.
She’d sported dyed-black hair, black lipstick, alt rock t-shirts, and Dr. Martens.
She was also Mae’s little sister, so practically family.
It was strange how two people could be so alike and so very different all at the same time.
Neither sister was one you wanted to get in a verbal battle with. Unless you enjoyed getting cut into teeny-tiny pieces by the perfect blend of word choice and attitude. Then go for it; it’s your funeral.
Iris had started working at the café over a year ago when I’d finally convinced Ollie we should open for breakfast. The Sit-n-Eat was a town staple, having been around for decades.
And for decades, it had only been open four hours a day, five days a week, to serve lunch.
Lunch was whatever Ollie said was for lunch that day.
No substitutions. If a patron disagreed, it was no skin off Ollie’s back. He wouldn’t argue; he would ignore you.
The first time I suggested opening for breakfast, he didn’t talk to me for three days straight. Don’t get me wrong. I talked to him. Constantly. Wore him down finally. And now, despite Ollie’s less than compromising attitude, the café was always busy when it was open.
A bell dinged behind me, pulling me from yet another woolgathering session. I bet I had enough wool at this point to make blankets for half of the state of Texas. A bowl of oatmeal appeared in the pass-thru window. “Order up,” Jorge yelled.
“I got it,” I said when Iris turned away from the group of grumpy old men she was cracking (dirty) jokes with. That girl knew how to get her tips.
Carefully, I picked up the bowl and reminded myself to stay calm and friendly.
As I lay in bed last night, I’d thought of a plan.
If he moved in next Saturday, his time would be up at the beginning of August. I had to change his mind about selling by then.
Which meant he needed to fall in love with Two Harts and see the roots he had here.
His family had lived in Two Harts for over a hundred years.
Two Harts was a great town. Number two hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred best small towns in America…
even if that had been in nineteen eighty-seven.
I slid the bowl of oatmeal in front of Gilbert. “Thought you’d have left after the meeting yesterday.”
Setting his phone aside, he leaned back in his seat. “I was too excited to watch Kangaroo’ed Three to make the drive back.”
My face heated. “You didn’t.”
“My favorite line of yours: ‘You’ve hopped right into my heart.’ Really loved the play on words. Hopped…kangaroo. Powerful stuff.” His eyes sparkled with amusement.
Maybe calm and friendly were going to be harder than I thought.
I pointed at the bowl of mush. “Can I get you some sugar for that?”
He shook his head. This morning, he wasn’t so formally dressed, still neat, still with perfectly parted hair. I think his dark-orange henley had been ironed.
“Syrup?”
“No, thank you.” He crossed his arms, his eyes steady on my face. They weren’t brown like I’d thought, but a dark navy-blue. And judge-y. Very judge-y.
I resisted the urge to fuss with my apron or straighten my hair. “Fruit, then. I have some nice blueberries.”
“I’m good.” He was openly inspecting me now, from the top of my head to as far down as he could go before the counter got in the way.
I mimicked his position, crossing my arms and staring right back.
I tried not to look at his hands. But now that Iris had brought it up, I wanted to see what the fuss was.
They were big, with long fingers. Not elegant, like a piano player, but strong, useful.
They were clean, too, tipped with trimmed nails.
His left pointer finger had a black spot on the nailbed, a bruise from hitting it with something heavy, like a hammer.
As the daughter of a contractor, I’d seen that injury more than once.
Expression unreadable, his head cocked to the side. I squirmed. It reminded me of dress code checks in school when I was a kid. He did give off strong principal energy. The hint of gray in his hair, the stern expression. Except younger and kind of…hot?
Did I think he was hot? No, of course not. This was Ollie’s grandson, and he held my future in his admittedly very nice hands.
I straightened, refusing to wilt under his inspection. “How about some walnuts?”
“Can I just get a spoon?”
“Sure thing.” I hustled over to the silverware tray to grab him one.
He was not hot; he ate plain oatmeal. There was clearly something wrong with him. Tragic disease that took away all his taste buds?
“Very smooth there, boss,” Iris said.
I snagged a spoon. “Do you know who that is?”
“I’m kinda hoping he’s the new male model for my art and the human form class. I would ace that assignment, for sure.”
“First, gross. Second, that’s Ollie’s grandson.”
“No way,” she breathed, turning to face him. He was back to messing around with his phone.
I elbowed her. “Don’t stare.”
“I’m not staring. I’m reevaluating everything I know about genetics.”
“Go away.” I pointed the spoon at her. “Far, far away.”
Iris grinned and headed to the other side of the café. I hurried back and set the spoon on a napkin beside Gilbert’s bowl.
“Thank you.” He unfolded his napkin, placed it on his lap, and took a bite of his breakfast, seemingly uninterested in me.
I should walk away. There was plenty to do but I was curious about him. The two of us were strangers and yet our lives were entwined in ways neither of us had expected. Like that red string of fate people talked about. Although in our case, the silver duct tape of destiny might be more appropriate.
“How can you possibly enjoy eating oatmeal like that?” I blurted.
He shrugged. “It’s oatmeal.”
I pressed my palms onto the edge of the counter. “I think it’s one of the signs of being a psychopath. You know, right after lacking empathy, or something.”
Spoon inches from his mouth, he paused. “It’s just how I eat it.”
“Fascinating,” I said. “So, do you go by Gil?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Not even when you were a kid?”
He sighed. “No.”
“You look like a Gil.” Whatever that meant. He didn’t look much older than me, even though he gave off much older energy. He probably owned a grandpa sweater somewhere. And not ironically. “Can I call you Gil?”
“No.”
I decided then and there to always call him Gil. “How old are you?”
His spoon clinked against the side of his bowl when he set it down and crossed his arms, glaring at me like a ticked-off teacher. Which, I’m not going to lie, was a look I saw often in my younger years. “Thirty-one. Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess it seemed like something people who own a house together should know about each other.”
“We aren’t going to know each other for long,” he said.
I held my hands out and took a step back. “I guess I can put ‘sensitive about his name’ on the list after psychopath.”
“What list?”
“The list of things I know about you.”
His head tilted. “Are you really keeping a list?”