25. Vivienne
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Vivienne
The bar is wide open to the water.
I was expecting something dark and dingy with sticky-floors.
Some place that smells like spilled beer and cigarettes, where the lighting is bad and everything feels vaguely damp.
But Westerly Point keeps surprising me. Scuppers is beautiful in its own rough-edged way.
There’s a mounted marlin above the bar that has clearly been there since the nineties, and the walls are covered in so many neon signs and old surfboards and framed fishing photos that you can’t find the actual wall anymore.
And one whole side is just open to the ocean.
Fishing boats knock softly against the dock below.
A few people are still out on the waterfront despite the weather rolling in.
The lights from a few boats out on the water are starting to reflect on the surface, making it seem like the whole harbor is breathing.
I almost didn’t come.
I’d been sitting on the edge of the cottage bed for twenty minutes after I got home, still in the black dress, hands in my lap, trying to figure out if my legs worked.
They did. They just didn’t feel like mine yet.
That happens sometimes. After. Everything goes a little distant and feels a little borrowed.
Kind of like I’m operating myself from slightly outside my own body.
Frannie had texted three times. The third one just said do you know what a scupper is? and then a fish emoji, and I didn’t know what that meant, but it was enticing enough that I put my shoes back on anyway.
I’m glad I did. I’m sitting here now on my second glass of wine with the warm pre-storm air moving through the open side of the bar, and Frannie is talking with her hands about something that happened during service last month.
I’m still a little shaky around the edges.
I can feel it if I pay close enough attention to that low tremor that lives in my chest for a few hours after.
But nobody’s looking at me like I’m breakable.
Nobody’s tiptoeing around me. Frannie is talking.
Cora is listening. Iris has her feet up on the booth and is picking the olives out of her drink one at a time.
Normal. Just completely, unremarkably normal.
I hadn’t known how much I needed that until right now.
There’s a storm coming. I can feel it heavy in the air.
The wind blowing off the water is electric, making the back of my neck prickle.
Out on the horizon, the clouds are stacking up, lit from underneath by flashes of lightning out over water.
But here, right now, it’s still warm enough that I left my jacket on the back of my chair an hour ago and haven’t thought about it since.
“Okay but what did you say?” Frannie asks. She’s leaning forward on her elbows now, chin in her hands, fully invested.
“I said, ‘I appreciate the offer, but I think you might be confused about what a restaurant consultant does.’”
Iris sets her drink down. “You did not.”
“I absolutely did.”
“To his face?”
“That’s generally where you say things to people.”
Cora makes a sound that is almost a laugh. She’s got her arms crossed on the table, losing a fight against smiling.
“He thought you were a food critic?” Frannie asks, eyebrow raised.
“He thought I was a food critic who was also available for private dining events.” I take a sip of wine. “In his home.”
“Was he at least attractive?” Iris asks, giggling.
I think about the guy in question. A restaurant owner in Cleveland two jobs ago, who had worn an ascot un-ironically and referred to his open kitchen as a “theater of gastronomy.”
“In a very specific way that stopped working the moment he opened his mouth,” I say. “He had very strong opinions about his backsplash.”
“His what?” Frannie and Iris say at the same time, their voices overlapping.
“Tile,” I clarify. “Handmade. Imported from somewhere in Italy. He showed me photos of it before he even showed me the menu.”
All three of them lose it at the same time. Frannie drops her head to the table. Iris covers her mouth, but it doesn’t help, the laugh escaping anyway. Even Cora, who I’ve come to understand laughs at approximately nothing, is laughing. It’s loud enough that the guys at the pool table look over.
Across the bar, the jukebox kicks into something low and brassy, and someone whoops in recognition.
“How many of these jobs have you done?” Iris asks. She’s tucked into the corner of the booth, her blonde hair loose, looking more relaxed than I’ve ever seen her outside of our dinners in Crescent Bay. She’s on her second martini and looks slightly delighted by the ascot guy.
“Twenty, maybe? Twenty-five?”
Iris sits up straighter, her eyes widening. “In five years?”
“I’m very fast.”
“That’s a different city every three months or something insane!” Frannie pulls her wine toward her. “Do you even own furniture?”
“I own very excellent luggage.”
“That’s not the same thing.” Iris points at me.
“It’s better. Furniture doesn’t have wheels.”
Frannie turns to Cora with the expression of someone building a case. “She doesn’t own furniture.”
“I have a lamp!” I protest. “In storage.”
“A lamp.” Iris sets her drink down.
“It’s a good lamp.”
Cora tilts her head. “What kind of lamp?”
“A good one!”
She picks up her cider and takes a sip. Frannie loses it first, tipping sideways in her chair, and then Iris is laughing too, and then I’m laughing because it is funny.
The lamp and the luggage and twenty cities and not one piece of furniture to show for it.
The absurdity of my entire life reduced to excellent luggage and one good lamp.
The storm pushes a warm gust through the open side of the bar. Frannie grabs her napkin before it goes, and that makes us laugh harder at nothing, just the spontaneous laughter of people who are warm and a little drunk and in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.
“Okay but where was the best one?” Frannie asks, wiping her eyes.
“Besides this one? Carmel,” I say without hesitation. “Small place, maybe eight tables. The owner had been running it for thirty years. He didn’t need me. He just wanted someone to tell him he was right.” I smile at the memory. “He usually was.”
“And the worst?”
“Ascot guy.”
“Obviously,” Iris deadpans.
I lean back in my chair and look out at the water with a smile.
The water has gone almost black and the storm is close enough now that I can feel it in my bones.
Someone’s left a light on in one of the cabins across the harbor, and it throws a long yellow stripe across the surface that breaks apart and reforms every time the water moves.
“I like it here,” I whisper to the room.
Iris leans back in her chair. “We like having you here,” she says. “For the record. Whatever happens after this job” — she swirls her drink — “you should come back and visit. Often.”
“She’s not leaving yet,” Frannie says firmly. “She won’t leave at all if it’s up to me. I might hide her laptop or something when it’s time so she has to stay!”
I look at the three of them. Frannie still indignant on my behalf. Iris watching me with that open expression. Cora turned slightly toward the water, giving me the privacy of not being looked at directly while still being completely present.
The realization hits me square in the face.
Friends. This is what friends feel like.
“I’ll come back,” I declare. “I promise.”
Iris nods like that’s settled. Frannie looks appeased.
“The marlin would miss her too much,” Cora remarks, gesturing at the mounted fish with her cider.
We all look at the marlin, and it stares back with glassy indifference, unmoved by our affection.
“I think that marlin has seen some things,” I claim.
We all raise our glasses and drink to the marlin, to the storm coming in, and to this specific warm night with these specific people, with the water right there and the jukebox playing.
It feels like the beginning of something. Or maybe the middle. Maybe I’ve been in the middle of it for weeks and only just noticed.
The door bangs open with the storm breeze, and Roman comes through it already talking, his bandaged hand raised like a trophy.
Beckett is right behind him, hair damp from the rain that’s starting outside.
Hayes files in after him, hands in his pockets, looking exasperated like he’s been listening to Roman complain for hours and has not a second of silence.
Wesley drifts in behind them, unhurried as usual, stopping to say something to the bartender on his way past like he, again, has nowhere particular to be.
And then Callum steps into the doorway.
He just stands there, one hand on the doorframe, letting the others go ahead. His eyes move across the bar, scanning, before they find me.
And I forget how to breathe.
He’s slightly wet from the rain. His dark hair is damp and curling more than usual, drops of water still clinging to the ends.
His henley is darker across the shoulders where the rain has soaked through.
His sleeves are pushed up to his elbows, revealing both forearms completely covered in ink, the tattoos glistening slightly from the moisture.
Even from here, I can see the small white scars scattered across his hands and the burn marks on his inner wrists, all that evidence of years spent in kitchens.
The low light from the bar catches the angles of his face. The strong line of his jaw, the fullness of his mouth under that mustache, the particular blue-green of his eyes that looks more gray right now in the dim amber glow.
He’s stunning. So beautiful in a way that shouldn’t be legal. He’s rain-damp and tattooed and looking at me like I’m the only person in this entire bar.
A smile flashes across his features, just for me, and he stays there for just a moment longer in the doorway, just looking at me, before he lets go of the frame and comes inside.
I’m still not breathing as I watch him cross the room.