36. Chapter 36
Chapter thirty-six
I have to work the day after Mom and Eddy show up. Seeing Belinda is not on my list of desires, but I won’t be doing it much longer.
It’s nearing the end of my shift, and I’m getting antsy, watching the clock slowly creep to two in the afternoon. Right at two, I’m ready to get out. I hang my apron, tuck my earbuds into my pocket, and then Belinda is walking in, leaning against the counter, blocking my way to the exit.
“Hi,” she says softly.
“Hello,” I reply, curt. She hasn’t tried to talk to me directly since the dinner at her house. Instead, I get frustrated mumbles as she shuffles around the diner, picking up the slack that she created. I’m not particularly interested in starting a conversation now. Or ever. Especially not right before I tell her I quit. No point in continuing to work here if I’m not saving for anything. I don’t need the money anymore.
“I think we should talk.”
“You think we should?” I snap. “I’d say try talking to your daughter.” Then, just to add salt to the wound: “Oh, wait. She left.”
Belinda’s lips thin. “I don’t want to talk about Gigi. I want to talk about you.”
“We have nothing to talk about, Belinda.”
“We do!” she exclaims. “Yes, we do, Cade.”
My jaw ticks. I cross my arms over my chest. “You have one minute,” I snarl. “I’m giving you one more minute of my time.”
And not a minute more.
“Well,” she stammers. “I just—You really got me thinking. About the kind of person I want to be.” Oh, god. I nod once, and she swallows her dismay. “And I want to help people. People like you, Cade.”
“So, what?” I spit. “You are keeping me here to tell me you’re abandoning the restaurant and doing what, exactly? Becoming a nurse? A nun?”
“I’m investing,” she says, “in people like you, with big dreams. People who want to be something.” She hands me something from her pocket, a folded paper.
I take it, albeit reluctantly, and when I unfold it, I want to crumple it into a ball, and ditch the slip of paper into the nearest trash. Set it on fire with the lighter in my pocket. Make it disappear.
“What in the fuck,” I mutter, “are you doing handing me a check for thousands, Belinda? What in the ever-loving fuck—”
“I know she cares for you,” Belinda says softly, not looking at me. I can practically hear the gears turning in her mind as she wonders why I’m not crying at her feet in gratitude. “She had such joy in her eyes, telling me about your tattoo shop, everything you wanted to do. I thought if maybe I helped to make that possible—”
“That what?” I exclaim. “Did you think Gigi would come crawling back? Want to be best friends?”
Her lips thin, her eyes closing for a moment. Of course, she fucking thought that would work, that giving me money for my dream would be the ticket to winning Gigi back, roping her back in. Make Gigi think she’s changed, cares more about someone else than herself.
Too bad that’s impossible.
My jaw ticks. I clench my fists, unclench as I try to no avail to relax my jaw muscles. “She told me you abandoned her as a baby,” I tell Belinda. “You know, my dad wasn’t around for me and my brother, either. In fact, I’ve got no clue who the guy is. But it’s not like he saw us when we were born, stayed for a few weeks, and then decided, you know what? This isn’t for me, being a parent, caring about something other than me. Jesus, Belinda. You don’t even realize how bad of a person you are. You think you’re a good mom.”
She glowers at me. “You know nothing about my relationship with my daughter.”
“I know the truth,” I reply, flat. “I’ve seen it all summer. I’ve heard it from Gigi. You’re selfish. Conceited. Demented, I would argue.”
Belinda winces, but I’m in too deep to stop now.
“For you to look at someone as perfect as your daughter, as loving and absolutely selfless as Gigi, and not love her with everything you are? You must be absolutely heartless.”
What does that make me?
Belinda opens her mouth to speak, then closes it, waiting, sinking down as if to make herself appear small, meek, harmless. “Cade—”
I take a steadying breath, square my shoulders, clear my throat to fight the tightness there, to fight coming completely undone thinking about Gigi.
Thinking about how incredible she is.
Thinking about how much I love her.
“You are absolutely heartless, Belinda.”
I pull the check from my pocket, unfold it.
Then rip it into tiny pieces and drop it at Belinda’s feet.
I maneuver around Belinda, storming into the dining room to see if I can catch Rory. She’s grabbing orders at the window as I say, “I love Gigi. I’m in love with Gigi.”
Holy fuck, saying it out loud makes me feel like I can finally breathe. Like I can finally feel my heart beating and see this world after flatlining. I’m alive now. I have a pulse because of her.
Whatever I was doing before certainly wasn’t living . It didn’t feel like this—like she’s all that matters, like living without her is as good as dead. Like I’ve found the one girl in this world that looks at the mess I am and sees something worth fixing.
I might be worth fixing.
But her? That girl is worth everything. She’s got no fixable pieces because she’s crafted herself into perfection. All on her own.
Nothing matters to me without Gigi. I can’t be repaired completely without all of my pieces.
“Whoa.” She halts, turning to face me. “Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you’re incredibly late to that party.”
“No, I—I just realized.”
“Congratulations,” she deadpans. “We’ve known. The only one who wasn’t aware you were falling in love with her was you.”
I gape at her.
“So, how does it feel?” she sing-songs. “Being in love?”
“Shitty,” I groan. “The girl I love is a plane ride away.”
“That’s no match for love,” Rory chides. “Cade, come on. Drive.”
“I can guarantee she doesn’t want to see me.”
Rory considers this. “Maybe.”
“I’ve got a bigger obstacle than figuring out how to get to Gigi,” I tell her. A divot forms in between her eyebrows. “I’ve got a date tonight.”
My first official date, and I’m ending things with the girl right after.
I never thought I’d see the day.
I wear the same suit I wore when I went out with Gigi. It was honestly unintentional, but seeing the way Ava looks at me in it makes me miss my princess all the more.
I take Ava to the same restaurant Gigi took us to on our practice date, and for a moment, I consider ending it before we walk in the place, right there on the sidewalk.
But then I picture Gigi, her hand on that hip, rolling her eyes at me as she hears that I ditched out on a date, completely abandoning everything she taught me about how to treat a woman properly. And decide instead to lean into commitment, but Gigi doesn’t know about that part.
Not yet.
Ava and I get dinner and make small talk, her telling me about being a bank teller in Chicago, me explaining bits and pieces of my woes about the shop, how I came to Geddington Beach with the intention of running a business. I’m going through the motions for the sake of saying I did.
I can’t disappoint Gigi again.
When the waitress comes and asks about dessert, I allow Ava to lead, like Gigi taught me. Let her decide when the date’s over, she said. Not you. It’s inconsiderate. Rude.
I certainly don’t want Gigi to think of me as inconsiderate.
We share a piece of cheesecake, though I can barely eat it. I want to get the bitter end out of the way, rip it off like a Band-Aid. Ava leads me out of the restaurant by the hand, and when she stops right outside the door, her golden eyes batting as she turns, wrapping her arms around my neck, I can’t hold out any longer.
“You’re great,” I say gently, easing myself away from her. “I had a great time tonight, but I can’t keep seeing you.”
She looks baffled as she settles on her heels. “Did I do something?”
“No!” I think of Gigi, her poor broken heart. “No, you didn’t. It’s all me. I, uh…” Fuck, this is hard. “I jumped into things after a fight with this girl, and—”
“And now you and your girlfriend are fine, so you don’t need extras?” Ava guesses. “Right?”
I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose as my jaw starts to pulse. “It’s complicated.”
“I know a thing or two about complicated things,” Ava says. “Trust me.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you out. Not before getting myself figured out first.”
Gigi would be rolling her eyes so hard right now.
And I deserve every bit.
I go to Murphy’s after dropping Ava off at her rental house. I don’t feel like going home to stare at the wall and think of Gigi and how much I screwed up, so I opt for staring at people and thinking of her instead.
I get a beer, but I can barely bring myself to drink it with the way my stomach turns. It’s like my body knows before my brain does that alcohol drops my IQ down into the negatives. EJ’s working, and I can’t rely on him to come to my rescue simply because I’m feeling sorry for myself and need a listening ear.
“What do you want?” Rory asks when she picks up. “I’m reading.”
“I need a favor,” I say. “Can you bring Eddy to Murphy’s for me?”
“Weren’t you on a date?” she asks. “You want me to bring Ed to your date?”
“My date’s over,” I tell her, my jaw ticking. “Can you pick up Eddy at his hotel? Please? I need to talk to him about something, and he’s the only guy who will have the right answer.”
“I guess,” Rory sighs. She closes her book loud enough for me to hear. “But you owe me.”
If she was in front of me right now, she’d be flipping me off.
There’s no doubt about it.
I call Eddy next, short and sweet.
“What do ya want, kid?” he asks, voice booming into the phone, like he thinks I have a hearing problem.
I pull the phone from my ear as I say, “My friend Rory is gonna come scoop you up from your hotel. I’m in a bit of a situation.”
He grunts. “The advice kind, or the bail money kind?”
I cough. “When have I ever called and asked for bail money? Has EJ?”
“Never know,” Eddy says. “I’m prepared for it.”
I decide hanging up is better than asking more questions.
Rory gets Eddy here in record time, and he’s bitching the moment he sits beside me. “Now, why,” he moans, “did you need me here so badly, kid?”
“You want a beer first?” I ask. “Or you want me to just start firing off?”
“Oh, man.” Eddy sighs. He flags the bartender and orders a beer as he says, “What’d you do?”
“It’s what I didn’t do,” I say. “And I’m regretting it, like a damn fool.”
I tell Eddy every piece, from meeting Gigi and abhorring her lovesick personality, to realizing I don’t mind making her eyes roll in more ways than one.
“But I’m a drunken bastard,” I groan. “So, now, I’m asking you what the hell I do. I’ve never been here before, man. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“What’s your brain tellin’ ya?” he asks.
“That I’m an asshole and she’s better off without me ruining her life.”
“Did you?” Eddy asks. “Ruin that girl’s life? The one you’ve been telling your ma about? That’s a big claim, kid.”
“Well, I did,” I say. “I broke her heart. To her, that’s the same thing.”
“Broken things get fixed all the time,” Eddy says with a chuckle.
“And good things eventually all go away,” I retort. “You’re dying, Ed. And we can’t get that second shop.”
“Is that why you’re losin’ your mind? The tattoo shop?”
I sigh shakily. “It sucks. All of it. Now you’re dying, and I don’t have the shop to distract me from that. It’s—It can’t get worse.”
“You’re not the one dyin’,” he says through a chuckle.
“To be fair,” I reply, “you don’t know if you are, either. Not really.”
“I’m living like I’m terminal, kid,” Eddy says. “It’s better that way. I don’t have any regrets in life up until this point; I’m not gonna start now.”
“So, what if they determine it’s fixable? That you can be yourself again?”
“Then I’ll come back to my normal life knowing I did everything I ever wanted while I was away from it. Nothing wrong with that.”
I consider this. “So, you really regret nothing, then, huh? Lived your whole life thinking you’ve done all the right things?”
“It’s not that I think I’ve done everything right, nah,” Eddy explains. “It’s that if I do something wrong, if I make a mistake, I do my damndest to make it right. Me and your aunt aren’t perfect, kid. We ain’t. But the thing is, when I mess up, I let her know. Nothing is worth losing her.”
“But the shop—”
“What we do, my career, that’s not worth anything if it isn’t for your aunt. I love you, kid, and I’m happy to be able to have this opportunity for ya, but the whole thing… the shop. It’s not for you, it’s for her. Because of her.”
I swallow. “I understand.”
“Do ya?” Eddy asks. “If you feel anything for that girl, you tell her. I promise she’ll want to hear it. If you don’t, you might regret it when you’re fifty and have ball cancer.”
“I won’t have ball cancer,” I bite back.
Then again, I never thought I’d ever be in love, either.