Chapter 7 #2
I smack his arm with the back of my hand as his laughter breaks free.
Still chuckling, he opens the passenger door of my vehicle for me. “Your chariot awaits. Unless you want to drive?” he teases.
Rolling my eyes, I hoist myself into the seat, aggressively buckling like I’ve got a bone to pick with the seatbelt.
My car smells a little unfamiliar. The blend of mine and Saylor’s scents—shampoo, soap, perfume, aftershave, a touch of fresh laundry.
It all melts together to create something totally foreign.
Something pleasant actually, borderline intoxicating.
Before he puts the SUV in drive, Saylor pulls out his phone, thumbing a quick text.
“Who are you messaging?” I ask as if it’s my business.
“The friend I told you about. She suggested a burger place about twenty minutes from here. Riptide, I believe.”
I can’t help my smile. “Riptide is still here?” I laugh, settling into my seat and my own glee, which is a nice momentary reprieve from the pain of this day.
“You know it?” Saylor asks.
“Oh yeah. Me and Whit spent a couple obligatory summers here. There’s probably still grease in my veins from their burgers and fries because we ate there so much. They have the weirdest, best burgers. We’d always order the same thing then swap halfway through.”
“Great,” Saylor says, flicking on the blinker for nobody. We’re alone here, the only car trying to make a getaway. “What a perfect way to honor Whitney today. What’s the usual order?”
“Oh, I’m sure the menu’s changed.”
“Tell me anyway. Call it one more Whitney story.” At the bypass, he checks left-right-left-right with exaggerated caution, like someone who’s borrowed something valuable and is terrified of damaging it.
“Whit would get the spicy Hawaiian burger with barbecue sauce and pickled jalapenos, and I’d get…a different one.” I catch myself, remembering how weird this sounds to other people.
“A different one? Care to elaborate?”
“Not particularly.”
“Celeste. You asked me to plan your funeral. We’re way past bashful. Come on, out with it.”
“You’ll judge me.”
“Are you a lettuce-leaf bun kind of girl?”
“Woman,” I remind him. “And no.”
“Then, spill. I promise no judgment. Probably.”
Air leaves my lungs in a slow surrender. “It’s…a burger with a brioche bun, slathered with a bacon-and-berry compote, and a drizzle of a creamy peanut-infused reduction.”
Saylor is quiet for a long time. Just the sound of the blinker as he passes a red Hyundai going ten under the speed limit. When he’s safely reset into the right lane, he steals a glance in my direction. “Did you just try to make a peanut-butter-jelly burger sound fancy?”
Heat rises in my cheeks. “I said what I said.”
He bursts out in laughter. “Maybe I didn’t lie to the valet. With half a spicy Hawaiian burger, and your weird Frankenstein mash-up, we might both end up spewing from one end or the other.”
“We?” I ask, lifting a brow.
“Oh, yeah. I’m in this. Pickle for pickle. Oh wait, gross. You don’t put pickles on the peanut butter burger, do you?”
“What? That’s crazy.” My awkward laughter is an obvious confession. I tried pickles on it once. I didn’t hate it as much as I should have.
When our laughter fades, Saylor reaches across the center console and grabs my hand just for a moment before releasing it. “I’m sorry I asked you out earlier. I got swept up in the moment and it wasn’t the right timing.”
“It’s fine, Saylor. There’s been a lot of heightened emotions today. It’s natural to want to feel close to someone. I am not upset. We can just forget about it.”
“Yeah, maybe, but still. And I’m sorry for the future too.”
My head whips around. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a preemptive apology.”
“For what?”
He looks ahead at the road with feigned nonchalance. I swear I see the corner of his lips twitch into a smile. “For when I ask you out again.”
Riptide looks exactly the same.
That’s the first thing that hits me—not nostalgia, not sadness, but the sheer stubbornness of a place that has refused to change.
The same sun-bleached wooden sign with the wave logo.
The same screen door that doesn’t close all the way.
The same neon beer signs glowing in the window, one of which has been flickering since two thousand six, and evidently will flicker until the sun explodes.
The memories come at me next, wrapped up in the enduring smell of grease and salt and something sweet—the buns, maybe.
They bake them in-house, or they used to.
The aroma itself throws me into a time machine, and suddenly I’m twenty-one years old, sitting across from Whitney in the corner booth, splitting a basket of fries and arguing about whether Orlando Bloom or Viggo Mortensen was the superior Lord of the Rings love interest. Whitney was team Viggo.
Rugged, broody, tortured. Of course he was the finer hero.
We eventually agreed I was wrong, and she never let me forget it.
“You okay?” Saylor asks, holding the screen door open.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out thicker than I intend, like I’m shouting underwater. “I just haven’t been here in a long time.”
The interior is small—maybe fifteen tables, vinyl booths along the walls, a counter with swivel stools.
The lighting is warm and slightly yellow, the kind that makes everyone look like they’re in an old-timey film.
There’s a chalkboard menu above the register with items written in colored chalk, and someone has drawn a surprisingly talented cartoon burger wearing a cowboy hat in the corner.
I scan for the corner booth with the only round table—mine and Whit’s favorite—and it’s open. Of course it is. The universe has a sick sense of humor today.
“That one.” I point. “If you don’t mind.”
Saylor nods toward the “Seat Yourself” sign planted at the hostess station like a scarecrow in an empty field. As I remember it, this sign is code for: I’m out back smoking. Don’t rush me.
The vinyl protests as we slide into the booth.
I spot the familiar wobble in the table—the same one I’ve stabilized with folded napkins a hundred times before.
My fingers automatically reach for a napkin, folding it precisely.
Before I can wedge it under the uneven leg, Saylor’s elbow bumps the table, sending ripples across the surface.
He grips the edge and rotates the entire table with surprising force, like a parent trying to launch their kid on a playground carousel.
When he presses down, the surface holds firm.
I test it with a little shake—nothing. Whatever Saylor did, the wobble’s gone.
Eventually a waitress appears. Right around the time my hunger has devolved into hanger.
I haven’t had much of an appetite, but the last thing I ate was a mini Kind bar on Friday morning and the grief distraction has run its course.
My stomach is trying to digest itself, and I’m about three minutes away from becoming feral.
The waitress is not the teenager I expected, but a woman around my age with sun-streaked hair and a pen behind her ear. She sets down two waters and a basket of warm rolls with their famous sour-cream dip.
“You guys know what you want, or you need a minute?”
Saylor doesn’t even look at the menu. “Do you have a weird peanut-butter-jelly burger? And then a spicy Hawaiian one?”
The waitress looks over her shoulder and screams toward the kitchen. “I need a Sweet Nut and a Burnin’ Love.” She looks back at Saylor. “Circles or sticks?”
His eyebrows lift. “Sticks?”
“It’s diner talk. Sticks are fries. Circles are the house-made kettle chips,” I say, looking to the waitress who gives me a single, validating nod.
I can physically feel the memories. The soft vinyl melding to my ass, the clink and clank of a bustling kitchen.
Fryer grease, wood smoke, the sweet undercurrent of homemade ice cream—these smells could transport me back a decade in an instant.
Back when everything seemed simpler, when laughter came easier, when aging was something that happened to other people.
Back when Whit was still here. Back when I still recognized myself.
“One with circles, one with sticks, and we’ll share? Is that what you and Whitney would do?”
I grin. “Yes. That sounds great.”
It’s such a sweet sentiment, I will never ever tell him how Whitney had an aversion to potatoes of all types. We’d get our burgers without any accompaniment.
“Anything else?”
“A milkshake?” I ask Saylor. “We can share. They are huge. Whatever flavor you want.”
“I get to pick?”
I nod emphatically. Please say chocolate, please say chocolate.
“Vanilla with fudge on top?” he more asks than orders.
Fudge is chocolate. He almost got that right.
“Two cups or two straws?” The waitress’s gaze bounces between me and Saylor, trying to make it make sense.
“Two cups, please,” I say.
“Straws,” Saylor answers at the same time.
She scribbles and disappears, apparently making the final call on that herself. I settle back into the booth and for a moment, I let myself just be here. In this place that Whitney and I claimed as ours during summers that felt infinite.
There are no paper menus at Riptide. Instead, you have to order by squinting at the giant wraparound whiteboard on the far wall of the restaurant.
Regulars don’t mind. Tourists hate it. But that’s half the fun.
There are so many options, you have to panic-order in a pinch and most often the thing you thought you’d hate, turns out to be a masterpiece.
Hence my love affair with the Sweet Nut burger.
The menu looks much the same except for the addition of a new section called “TikTok Famous” which is an uncomfortable reminder of inevitable evolution.
But the counter. The stools. The wobbles.
The bones are all the same, and I needed that today. I needed familiar.
The front door screeches open, as the bells on the door protest their disturbance loudly.