15. Callum #2
And now, watching her sit in this office surrounded by papers and stress and the weight of my entire future on her shoulders, I want to give her that.
“A walk?”
“Yeah. You know, that thing where you put one foot in front of the other and move through space?”
“I know what a walk is, Cal.”
“Then come on.”
She looks at my hand like it might bite her if she reaches for it.
I’m asking too much. Overstepping. She probably wants to be alone to decompress without me hovering.
She doesn’t look up from my outstretched hand. “What about dinner prep?”
“Roman’s got it. I’ll put him in charge.”
“You never leave during prep.”
She’s right. I don’t. I haven’t in years, probably.
But the thought of staying doesn’t even cross my mind right now.
The restaurant — my entire world for the past two years — feels distant.
Like something happening to someone else at this moment.
All I can think about is getting her out of this office.
Getting her outside, away from the stress and the spreadsheets and everything we just sent off.
All I can think about is her.
“I’m leaving today.”
“Callum.”
“Vivienne. Please.” I wiggle my fingers, trying to entice her. “Just take a walk with me. Get some air. Eat something that isn’t coffee beans. We both need a break.”
She studies my face, and I can see her processing. Weighing whether this is a good idea.
I want her to say yes. So badly.
Then she slowly takes my hand.
Her palm is warm against mine. I pull her up out of the chair, maybe a little excitedly, and she stumbles slightly, catching herself against my chest.
For a second we’re so close. I can smell her floral shampoo and see the flecks of gold in her hazel eyes. I can feel the warmth of her breath on my lips.
Then she steps back quickly.
“Sorry,” she says.
I want to pull her back into me, but she’s already grabbing her jacket from the back of the chair, shrugging into it. I lead her out of the office and through the kitchen, my hand at the small of her back. Roman looks up from the prep station and raises his eyebrows when he sees us together.
Here we go.
“Going somewhere, Chef?” He says with a shit eating grin.
“We’re taking a break. You’ve got dinner prep?”
“Obviously.”
“Good. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Take your time,” Roman says, his smile entirely too knowing. “We’ve got it handled.”
He’s going to give me so much shit for this later. Him and Frannie both. Probably Cora too. The whole staff is going to have loud opinions about me taking Vivienne for a walk.
But I grab my own jacket from the hook by the back door anyway, and we head out into the afternoon.
The fresh air hits us immediately. The coastal wind smells like fish and seaweed. The sun is past its peak but still painfully bright, painting everything in that warm late-afternoon light.
Vivienne stops on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, closes her eyes and tips her face up to the sun.
“God,” she breathes. “When was the last time I was outside during daylight?”
She looks younger like this — softer, almost — the stress lines around her eyes smoothing out and her shoulders dropping from where they’ve been hunched around her ears for days.
Beautiful.
“Day three, maybe?” I say.
“That’s pathetic.”
“No. I would call it dedication.”
She cracks her eyes and looks at me from the corner, head still tilted toward the sun. “Where are we walking?”
“Wherever you want.”
“You’re the local. You pick.”
I think about it for a second. There are a dozen places I could take her.
The pier’s nice. The beach is obvious. There’s that overlook point north of town, the farmers market, and the old lighthouse that doesn’t work anymore but tourists love.
But none of those feel right. I find myself wanting to show her more.
I want to show her the parts of Westerly Point that matter to me.
The places I talked about in Paris when I was homesick and exhausted and missing everything about this town.
I want her to see it and to understand why I came back.
“Come on,” I decide. “I’ll give you the full tour.”
We walk down Main Street. Past the shops and restaurants that make up downtown Westerly Point. It’s quiet this time of day. It’s that weird lull between lunch and dinner when the tourists are back at their hotels and the locals haven’t ventured out yet.
Vivienne walks beside me, hands shoved in her jacket pockets, looking at everything like she’s trying to memorize it.
I wonder what she sees. I wonder if it matches whatever picture she had in her head from my descriptions.
I hope it does. I hope it’s even better.
“This is the bakery I told you about.” I stop in front of a small storefront with a hand-painted sign. “Best sourdough I’ve ever had.”
“Oh yeah. The one that is better than anything you had in Paris?” she asks skeptically.
“Way better than anything in Paris.”
“That’s always been such a bold claim.”
“Try it sometime. You’ll see.”
She peers through the window. The shop is closed. They’re only open in the mornings, but you can still see the empty bread racks on the old wooden counter.
“You used to talk about this place all the time in school.”
I don’t remember talking about it that much. But I probably did. Westerly Point had a way of coming up in almost every conversation whether I meant it to or not. I’d talked about it so much our classmates had started rolling their eyes.
“Did I?”
“Constantly. You’d describe the bread like it was a religious experience.”
“It kind of is.”
She laughs, shaking her head, and the sound wraps around me.
I’ve missed that laugh. I’ve missed it so much.
I want to keep making her laugh. I want to keep seeing that smile spread across her face and light up her eyes.
I want to find every stupid joke and story I can think of if it means I get to hear that sound again.
I point out other landmarks as we go. The bookstore where I used to hide as a kid when I needed to escape my brothers.
The hardware store my dad and Wesley still get all their boat supplies from.
The bar where my brothers and I got our first fake IDs confiscated.
Hayes tried to argue with the bouncer using actual legal jargon, which somehow made it worse for us.
“You had a fake ID?” Vivienne asks, obviously delighted in me breaking the law.
“I was seventeen and stupid. Wes was nineteen and even more stupid. Beckett and Hayes were thirteen and somehow the worst of all of us because Hayes should have been smart enough to say no.”
“What happened?”
“The bartender was my dad’s friend. He took one look at the IDs, called Dad, and made us sit there until he showed up.” I can still remember the look on Dad’s face. Disappointed but trying not to laugh. “We were grounded for a month.”
“All of you?”
“Wesley was technically an adult so Dad couldn’t ground him. But he felt bad that we got in trouble, so he grounded himself in solidarity.”
“That’s actually really sweet.”
“That’s Wesley. Stupidly loyal.”
Vivienne asks questions about everything — what it was like growing up here, what my brothers were like as kids, whether I always wanted to be a chef.
And I tell her. I tell her about cooking with my dad on the boat, heating canned soup on a camping stove and making sandwiches with whatever we caught.
I tell her about watching cooking shows late at night after everyone else was asleep, dreaming about kitchens that were nothing like our cramped house with its tiny stove and mismatched pots.
She asks, and I answer, and it’s easy. It’s so easy I forget for a while that we spent five years not talking at all.
And that we’ve spent the last few weeks dancing around each other like strangers.
Right now, walking down Main Street with the afternoon sun warm on our faces, we’ve found our way back to something that feels like us.
Almost like before.
“I always thought you just came out of the womb knowing how to cook,” she teases.
“I burned everything till I went to Paris, basically. Ask my dad. He still won’t let me forget the time I almost set the kitchen on fire trying to make pancakes.”
“How do you set a kitchen on fire making pancakes!?”
“I was twelve and confident. It’s a bad combination.”
She’s smiling, and it reaches her eyes for the first time in days. “I would have loved to see that.”
“You would have laughed at me.”
“Obviously.” She’s grinning now.
“You’re the worst.”
We turn down a side street, and I realize I’m taking her toward the water without consciously deciding to. My feet just know where they want to go. Like they’re taking me home. And taking her with me.
“You know,” Vivienne says after a moment, “I’ve been visualizing this place for years.”
My heart kicks hard against my ribs. “Yeah?”
“You talked about it so much in Paris. You’d describe everything in such detail.
The bakery with the best bread in the world.
The water where you learned to fish. The way Main Street looks when the sun hits it just right.
” She gestures around us. “I had this whole picture in my head of what Westerly Point looked like and what your home was like.” She stops walking, and when she looks at me, the softness in her eyes makes my throat tight. “This is even better than I imagined.”
Heat spreads through me, starting at my throat and working its way down to my fingertips. She’s been thinking about my home. And the life I described to her in those exhausted conversations when we were both running on fumes and bad coffee.
In some way, it’s like she has been carrying this place with her all these years.
At least, that’s what I’ll tell myself.
“Really?” I ask, my voice thick with emotion.
“Really. It’s —” She turns in a slow circle, looking around at the old brick buildings, the street that slopes down toward the harbor, the coastline visible in the distance. “It’s beautiful, Cal. I can see why you came back.”
“It really is. I never actually wanted to leave in the first place.”
“Then why did you?”