Chapter 18
Turns out the old adage is true: the best way to get over one guy really is to get under another. But after a week of faking interest in Zo’s mystery bachelor number two to distract her from her Ro fixation, I’m the one left staring at another questionnaire, with Ro Jackson on the brain.
His popcorn should already be buttered, as his rapid-fire predate texts hit my phone, but my notifications have been disturbingly silent for days.
I hadn’t even wanted time away from him like this. I’d just meant to gently walk us back to the friend zone.
But walk gently, I did not:
Monday, 9:17am
Ro: E! What’s up?
Me: Life is life-ing as usual.
Ro: lmk when you’re ready to escape again
Me: I wish. Zo’s keeping me booked and busy with these dates.
Ro: Ah, I see.
Ro: Let her know I’m almost done with the site.
Me: I can’t wait to see!
Ro: Come through. I’ll give you a preview.
Me: She’d kill me if I saw it first.
Ro: come anyway
Me: Ha I can’t today. But good luck finishing up.
Me: I’ll hit you later.
But of course, I didn’t. And neither did he.
What I did do is reread the exchange so many times this week that I’ve nearly memorized it.
But being able to recite every word forward and back still hasn’t helped me figure out which of us is avoiding the other.
And after so many days, our silence is starting to feel more and more like a final word.
I’m actively trying to pretend that prospect isn’t eating me up inside when a knock at my door saves me from my thoughts.
“Ready to go again?” Zola says, like the madam she is.
“Round two,” I say, monotone. “Bring it on.”
But then I realize we’re down a man. “Where’s your sidekick? I thought collecting my dowry was a two-person job.”
“Mom left while you were in the shower.”
“With who?” I say, the words so sharp on my tongue that I taste copper in their wake.
Zola shakes her head. “Honestly, I didn’t even ask.”
I’m mid eye roll, pushing past Zola, when she pulls a folder from behind her back. I’m not mad at her, but I am mad that we’re back here again. Even if I shouldn’t be.
“Don’t you want to see his picture?” she asks, attempting to breathe some levity into the moment, with a half-hearted shoulder shimmy.
“Oh,” I say, not really caring either way. “Sure.”
Seeing a stranger’s face and learning that he’d want the ability to rewind time if he could isn’t going to change today’s outcome, but when your sister does a little dance, you read the file anyway.
—
There are no signs of life at the café Zola’s directions have led me to, so without my permission, my brain does its Dateline thing: Death at the Diner, Café Crimes, Lured to the Luncheonette.
I’m texting Zo to confirm the address when the front door swings open, and a very tall, very dark, very handsome man steps from the restaurant’s interior.
I lock my doors immediately.
“Kaia?” he asks, shielding his eyes from the glare of the evening sun.
I nod and roll down the window, but I keep my phone in hand. Just in case. “James?”
He smiles his confirmation.
“It looks like this place is closed,” I say, ignoring the fact that having come from inside, he’s very likely already aware. “Do you know anywhere else nearby?”
James stuffs his hands in the front pockets of his jeans so completely that his shoulders round and slump. “It is closed,” he says, smiling wide enough to reveal the slight gap between his front teeth. “But not for us.”
Oh yay. The first date of every girl’s dreams—all alone with a total stranger at an abandoned location with a Sub-Zero walk-in freezer.
As I commit James’s features to memory for a possible future police sketch (early to mid-twenties, Black male, five foot ten, brown eyes, tight fade), he pulls a hand out of his pocket to grab the cloth apron slung over his shoulder.
He unfolds it, displaying the embroidered word that mirrors the one scrawled across the café’s green awning: Josephine’s.
“You work here?”
“Yeah. It’s my spot actually. I own it.”
Slightly comforted knowing this guy’s legal name is on the deed, I open the car door fully. “So it would be a really bad business model to bring women to your own restaurant to—ya know.”
I make a knife motion across my throat, but smile brightly as I do it. The two gestures balance each other out nicely, I think.
James’s eyes go wide and his skin goes ashen. He spins to face the darkened dining room and Sorry, We’re Closed sign at his back. “Oh shit!”
Seeing the scene through my eyes draws quick beads of panicked sweat from the ridge at James’s brow. His genuine horror at his misstep gives me the confidence I need to finally join him on the sidewalk. He’s too squeamish for homicide.
“I just thought it’d be cool to do a private cooking lesson,” James says, adjusting the thick black frames of his glasses. “Fuck, when did I get so bad at this? I wasn’t thinking. I guess it’s been a while.”
I peer through the window at the purposefully mismatched chairs and the salvaged wooden tables dotted with yellow daisies. The whole place is giving hipster-farmer adorableness, same as the man before me.
“Well,” I say, stepping back to meet the worry in his eyes, “for me, it’s basically been forever, so why don’t we go inside and be terrible at it together. But you should know that I shed like a dog and I’m gonna leave my fingerprints everywhere.”
James pinches the spot under the bridge of his glasses before digging his hands back into his pockets with a shrug. “I don’t know how to respond to that.”
I nod decisively, smiling at how little this date feels like a date so far when I tell him, “That’s fair.”
—
“How’s the wine?” James asks from behind the bar.
Working in this space where he’s so obviously at home has given James a confidence he didn’t have outside. Every movement is choreography, the entire café an extension of his lean body.
Watching James do his thing reminds me so much of seeing Ro in his element at the gallery—a person doing exactly what they were born to do.
It’s not the first time I’ve thought of Ro since I got here.
My fingers itch to check for a missed text or call, but after a week of silence, I know I’ll only be disappointed.
“It’s delicious,” I tell James from my reclaimed barstool, hands clasped together in my lap to keep them from my phone.
“I wasn’t sure if we should start with white or red,” he says, not knowing I would’ve been just as happy with fermented grape juice poured from a plastic bag. “My ex only drank white. But our first course tonight is heavier, so I wanted something that could stand up to it.”
I add that little tidbit to my growing mental list of things I’ve learned about James’s ex in the past twenty minutes.
Like how she helped him source the furniture from local flea markets, convinced him to partner with a bee farm that offered the CBD honey she liked in her tea, and there was something else about the café’s name being tied to her grandma, but that particular detail is fuzzy because I was too busy not checking my phone.
“Well, it’s great,” I tell him, taking another sip. “The whole place is. How long have you had it?”
James bites at the inside of his cheek. His full lips twisting to allow for the expression. “It’ll be two years next week.”
“I can see how much it means to you. I’m always jealous of people who’ve already found their passion.”
It seems the Ro honesty effect is happening now even in his absence.
James pulls out the stool next to mine and sits facing me with bent knees spread casually wide. Though my body’s still positioned ahead toward the bar, I’m acutely aware of how close James is at my side. I see the moment he realizes it too.
He rises from the seat he’s only just taken, circling the bar to retrieve the wine bottle neither of us need. “Remind me what you do.”
“Teaching, I guess. Or I should be.”
“Should be?” he asks, needlessly replenishing the two small sips I’ve skimmed from my wineglass.
“I just graduated a couple months ago, so I should already have a teaching position lined up for the fall. But I’ve been watching openings get snatched up for months, and I can’t make myself care. I don’t really think I’m meant to teach.”
This newfound emotional promiscuity is absolutely Ro’s fault, but James isn’t helping. He’s doing that bartender-therapist thing—wiping the same spot of nothingness from the wood between us. The hypnotic motion of his towel keeps me talking.
“Eventually I’m sure I’ll just do it anyway. It’s not like any other overnight passions have dropped into my lap lately. Maybe teaching’s as close as I’ll get.”
James’s hand pauses mid-circle. “What’s the rush? Is there a deadline on passion?”
“You ask that as someone who’s already found theirs. That’s what Josephine’s is, right?”
James considers my question, but from the look on his face something’s not fitting quite right.
“I don’t know. I gave up so much for this place, so I need it to do well.
And I’ve been lucky so far. But sometimes it feels like spite’s driving me more than passion.
Like I gotta prove it was all worth it.”
I return his smile, easily. “Well, I for one will always drink to spite. And to these little cheese crisps,” I say reaching into the snack bowl beside my glass. “These are ridiculous.”
James melts at the compliment. “I can’t take credit. It was my ex’s idea to serve a signature bite with every bar order. I would’ve been good with peanuts.”
My chewing slows as James’s ex makes yet another appearance.
And another:
“Her tolerance was basically zero. If she had a sip of wine, I had to feed her. Probably why she thought everyone needed a snack with their drinks.” He plucks a crisp from the bowl. “There’s actually no cheese in ’em if you can believe it.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, my ex was lactose intolerant—”
“Oh.”
“So I did a cashew cheese instead.”