Chapter 31
CHAPTER 31
“Try this,” Cam says, pushing a matte black, oversized cup my way.
I peek into it. I’ve never seen a cup like this. Inside the cup is a little well, open on one side, and full of a light-colored creamy sauce. “What is that?”
“White chocolate sauce. The heat of the coffee is constantly warming the sauce, which in turn mixes into the coffee.”
“Why don’t you just put the sauce in the coffee and mix it all up at once?”
Cam blows out an irritated breath. “Because that would be one hundred times less aesthetically pleasing.” She nods toward a glass canister on the counter with a little sign that says ‘Treat your dog, too.’ “Grab one for Ruby.”
I do as she says, tucking the small treat into an inside pocket of my purse.
Cam grabs the cup and leads me to a table against the far wall. She pulls out a chair and sits down, and I take the booth side opposite her. “Ready to put that pretty handwriting to good use?”
“I don’t think it’s as good as you think it is,” I warn her, taking a drink. The sweetness hits my tongue, and explodes. Coupled with the caffeine, it’s a formidable duo.
She waves away my protest. “Here you go.” She tosses me a bag of chalk pens, then points to a huge chalkboard leaning against a wall.
“These are the entries?” I ask, nodding at the glass bowl filled with folded pieces of paper sitting on the table beside us. She reaches for it and sets it in front of me. “Choose one.”
I choose one at random, and look up at her. “He who sits in jelly has his ass in a jam?”
Cam shrugs. “Dani said almost anything goes. Use common sense limitations.”
I select a hot pink chalk pen from the bag and go over to the chalkboard, copying the words and adding some flair to the letters.
Together, Cam and I hang it on the wall. She pulls her phone from her pocket and backs up a couple feet. “Smile big. I’m going to spread the word on social.”
I do as I’m told. Cam snaps the photo, spends a moment adjusting the filter and cropping it, then types out a caption. “Posted,” she says proudly, smiling at me. “I tagged you.”
“I haven’t posted anything in a long time,” I remind her. “Tagging me is mostly useless.”
She shrugs. “Certainly can’t hurt.”
Cam’s newest employee, Laramie, waves at her from the register. “Duty calls,” Cam says, dropping a kiss on my cheek and gathering the pens and glass jar. “Stay here as long as you like. I saw you brought your laptop with you.” She throws a glance at the navy blue leather case on the seat beside me.
Cam disappears, and I pull out my computer.
Jill’s assistant emailed a couple days after we spoke, telling me Jill was interested in taking me on as a client. When I finished jumping up and down, I signed my name on the electronic document her assistant sent. Now the real hard work begins.
Gabriel said to use our story. Even after my on-the-spot pitch to Jill, I second-guessed using it. Is it possible to write our story objectively? No. Even so, it’s a story I want to tell. So I sat down, closed my eyes, and pulled myself from inside the scene. I stood outside, viewing it as a bystander, doing my best to watch us fall in love and make mistake after mistake. That’s when I decided to move forward with it.
Writing at Gem is a nice change of scenery, though I do miss Ruby’s warm body lying across my feet beneath my desk. Eyes on my computer, I pick up where I left off yesterday, immediately immersed in a world I once considered pure magic.
Ninety minutes later, I blink hard as I’m siphoned from that world. Three tables away, a woman wearing earbuds speaks loudly while staring intently at her screen. A person on the screen gestures and talks. The woman says, “When did the symptoms begin?”
Hmm. Odd.
I try to tune her out, but when she asks, “Is it a burning itch?” my focus flies off the rails and crashes to the ground.
I look around me to see if anyone else is hearing what I’m hearing. Power in numbers, or at least a shared ‘Can you believe this lady?’ look.
Two tables to my left, a man sits alone in front of a laptop. On his table is a scone and, judging by the full, steaming cup of coffee beside it, I’d guess he sat down recently.
Our gazes connect. He does a smiley smirk thing, side-eyeing the loud woman who is still having a one-sided conversation nobody wants to listen to. He looks back at me, and shrugs.
“I think she’s a tele-doc,” he says. “Her last conversation wasn’t this cringey. Something about an ear infection.”
“I must’ve missed it,” I answer, glancing at my open computer.
He pushes up his sleeves, revealing a shiny silver watch. “You looked deep in thought.”
His comment steals the beats from my heart. He could’ve made that assessment with a two-second glance, but I have a feeling that’s not what happened.
I nod. “Hard at work over here.” I’m not uncomfortable knowing he was watching me. It’s the fact I like it that’s making me uncomfortable.
He’s attractive. His dark blond hair is mostly straight, with a slight wave at the bottom. It’s long-ish, or at least long in my book. I’m not sure if hair that falls to the chin is really all that long. He wears a heathered dark gray hoodie and jeans. His jaw is square, his cheekbones chiseled.
He looks nothing like Gabriel.
He glances at my screen. “Do you mind me asking what you’re working so hard on?”
His eyes bulge. He hears it at the same time as me, and all I can do is purse my lips to keep from laughing.
He looks mortified. “I guess I shouldn’t end my sentence in a preposition.”
One loud sound of “Hah!” bursts from me. The tele-doc woman sends a ‘do you mind?’ look over her shoulder, and I laugh again. The man shifts, folding his leg so his knee rests on the bench and he faces me. His arm lies along the back of the booth.
I mirror his posture. We’re now two feet closer, simply because of a shift in our positioning.
“I’m working on a book,” I tell him.
His head tips to the side. “A book about…?”
“A romance novel. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“It toes the line of women’s fiction. Possibly.”
“Should I pretend to know what that is?” His tone is light, and slightly apologetic. “I mostly read science fiction.”
“Women’s fiction is when the journey is about the woman. Romance is when the journey is about, well, the romance.”
“Ahh.” He nods. “I’m intrigued. Tell me more?”
The tele-doc starts up again, as if she’s not in a quiet coffee shop. He scoots closer on the bench, and now we’re only a couple feet apart. Flecks of ocean blue are interspersed in his emerald green eyes, topped off with unfairly long eyelashes. He waits for my response.
I shake my head. “I’m not telling. I don’t even know your name.”
He smiles. A full, real, all-tooth, giving the sun a run for its money type of beatific grin. “Hudson. Like the river. But my mom calls me Huddy.”
“What do you prefer to be called? Hudson or Huddy?”
“Huddy, by everyone else.” He gazes at me through those long lashes. “By you? Hudson.”
I feel his answer down deep, between my navel and a part of me that disappeared a while ago.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Avery.”
“Avery,” he repeats, his voice deepening.
Please do not say A Very .
He doesn’t.
Something happens to the air between us. Suddenly it’s heavy, thick, as if we’re in the south in the dead of summer. Hudson looks at my lips. I touch them automatically, gently pinching the lower between two fingers. His gaze lifts, and he focuses on my eyes.
The tele-doc says the word ‘rash’ and I want to throw Hudson’s scone at her.
Annoyance flickers across his face. “Do you want to get out of here?” He stumbles on those last two words, and I find it endearing.
I point at his full coffee, his open laptop. He looks to where I’m indicating. “I don’t care about any of that.”
I swallow, hardly able to believe what I’m about to say. What I’m about to do. “Then, yes.” I haven’t thought about another man since Gabriel, but it had to happen sometime, right? I wasn’t prepared for that sometime to be today, but I don’t think I’d ever be prepared, so…here we go.
I close my computer, tucking it back into my bag. Hudson does the same. I head for the small counter where the used dishes go, sliding my cup across the wood grain.
Hudson appears at my side. He’s taller than I would’ve guessed. I watch as he deposits his uneaten scone and full coffee beside my empty cup.
I turn to him and touch the sleeve of his soft sweatshirt. “My sister and her girlfriend own this place. The next time you’re here, tell them you know me, and I said your order is on me.”
He nods and opens his mouth to say something. Whatever it is, he changes his mind.
He leads the way out of Gem. Camryn must be somewhere nearby, because I feel holes burning into my back.
We walk out front, and Hudson motions to a restaurant nearby. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m always hungry.”
Hudson smiles. “Greek ok with you?”
I nod, and send a quick text to Camryn telling her where I’m going, then I silence my phone.
The food is good, and the company is better. Hudson tells me he works in commercial real estate. He’s training for a rim-to-rim Grand Canyon hike. He has a secret affinity for old western movies, and he’s named after the Hudson River because his parents lived in Manhattan when he was conceived. Now they live across the river, in New Jersey. Hudson came out here for the sunshine and never went back.
There are sparks, and plenty of them. It’s not like it was with Gabriel, where the attraction was more like rapturous magnetism. Hudson’s fingertips graze the top of my hand while I talk about my dad and Cam. Something inside me awakens. It’s been so long since I’ve been touched.
We leave the restaurant, and Hudson points up at a newly constructed condominium building. It’s modern, with large glass windows and vines growing down the sides. “I live there.”
“Nice place.” I have to look up to talk to him. He has to look down to talk to me.
He says, “I’d like to see you again.”
We see each other three more times after that. A movie, another dinner, and a long drive to Green Haven in search of an antique dresser for his mother. He FaceTimes her while we’re in the crowded, musty store, and when Hudson trains the phone on me, I say, “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Donahue.” Then he shows her the dresser he has found. I give him a wide-eyed look, and he winks back.
On our fourth date, we go back to Gem and I buy Hudson the coffee and scone he abandoned two weeks prior.
Cam comes over to meet Hudson. I’ve told her all about him, including how he’s kissed me at the end of each date, chastely on the lips. The frustration and desire I feel at his reticence reminds me of another time, and I do everything I can to forget that.
Hudson passes Cam’s test, laughing in the right way at the right time when she makes her irreverent remarks. When he tells her he lives in the new high-rise across the street and his living room window faces Gem, she asks him if he can take a few bird’s-eye pictures of the shop.
“Just curious to see what it looks like from above,” she says.
“You bet.” He nods. “We can go do that now, if you’d like.”
“What a good idea,” she says, grinning and raising her eyebrows lasciviously when Hudson isn’t looking.
We say goodbye to Cam and walk across the street. Hudson’s place is as clean and sleek as I imagined it would be, but there are touches of warmth. Framed photos of vacations with his family. A knitted blanket thrown over the back of his brown leather couch. “My nana,” he explains when I mention it.
Hudson and I stand at the floor-to-ceiling living room window, and he does as Camryn’s asked.
When he’s finished he sends me the photos, then slides the phone into his back pocket.
“Thanks for doing that for her,” I say, hyperaware of the way the late afternoon sun burnishes his face, making him even more handsome. “I should get going.”
But I don’t move. Neither does he.
“Avery.” The low volume paired with the husky way he says my name makes me take another step into him.
He palms one side of my head and grips my hip, gently tugging me flush against him. He leans down just a little more, until his lips brush mine. “Do you want to stay?”
I nod against him, needing not a moment to consider. I want to be held, kissed, to feel like a woman again. Is that so wrong?
I’ve imagined this a hundred times, after Gabriel , what this might be like with another man. In those instances, I felt nothing but guilt for daring to imagine myself with someone else.
And so, I wait for the guilt. It does not arrive.
Not when Hudson leads me by the hand into his bedroom.
Not even a few hours later, when he orders pizza for us, and we eat in his bed, and he asks me if I want to stay the night.
The guilt finally comes the next morning, and it has nothing to do with Gabriel. I feel guilty over the absence of guilt. Over what that might mean.
Am I over Gabriel?
No .
Never. A person doesn’t get over something, someone , like that.
But I understand this is normal. Natural. Stagnation is suffocating after a while. I need to press on.
Hudson leaves for work wearing crisp navy slacks and a silk-blend shirt. He kisses me where I lie in his bed, and asks if I’m free for dinner. We agree on a place, then he tells me to turn the bottom lock on my way out.
I dress slowly, sore in places I forgot existed. I stop at Gem for coffee, knowing my sister will be there. Knowing she will see me in yesterday’s clothes.
“You’re welcome,” Cam says when she spots me.
I laugh, shaking my head as I wait for her to make my usual. “It’s like you dabble in witchcraft.”
She scoffs. “Hardly. I could smell the attraction coming off both of you. You just needed a push.” She hands me the paper cup. “Was it good?”
I wrap my hands around the warm cup and sip for an extra moment, pausing to think about my answer. It wasn’t just the sex. Hudson and I laughed. We talked long into the night. We brushed pizza crumbs from his sheets and had sex a second time. “Yes,” I finally answer. “It was really, really good.”
Cam stands on the other side of the slim counter, palms pressed on the quartz. “Was it weird?”
“No. And that’s the weirdest part of all.”
She smiles proudly. “You needed this. You needed to see that moving on doesn’t have to be monumental. It doesn’t have to be moving boxes and buying houses. It can be small steps, too.”
I touch her hand. “Does Dani know how dangerous of a woman you can be?”
Cam grins. “She has played strategy games with me. I always win.”
“I’m a strategy game?”
Cam leans over the counter and fixes my ponytail over my shoulder. “You were yesterday.”
Well played, dear sister.