Chapter Twenty
twenty
adrian
Gabe offered to pick me up for dinner, but I took my time getting ready, partly because kissing Hope is replaying on a loop in my mind—the gentle yielding of her mouth, the needy pressure of her hips against mine, and how the pleasure is destined to end with the pain of separation—but also because I was hoping he’d get impatient and head to the restaurant without me.
No luck. I emerged from my room to find he’d let himself in and was waiting in my kitchen, dressed for a night out in a short-sleeved chambray button-down and jeans, with his laptop, tablet, and phone spread out across the table. He must’ve sensed my mood, because he kept quiet the entire drive, unusual for him. As we pull into the restaurant parking lot, I suppress the urge to open the passenger door and tuck and roll, making a break for it.
The moment I step out of the car, though, I’m grateful I didn’t stay home. The tantalizing aroma of barbecued meat and fresh-baked rolls wafts from the tin-roofed restaurant. Horizon Line Grill is tucked under live oaks and loblolly pines, flanked by a porch lined with wooden benches for nights when the dinner rush line spills outside. Sunset comes early to this pocket of town, and shadows stretch long across the ground, our feet crunching on the gravel walkway.
Gabe halts at the bottom of the porch steps and blocks my way. The hum of laughter and conversation from inside is muted out here. Not too late to go back home, except he’s my ride. Plus, tonight’s about celebrating a great day at work, and I promised Hope I’d keep things professional. And then you went and kissed each other. Twice.
A topic I can’t broach with Gabe, not without exposing Hope in the process.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on or do I need to guess?” He holds up a hand. “Disclaimer: I’d go with the former. It’s healthy to talk things out, and it’ll satisfy my craving for juicy gossip.”
Despite my tumultuous emotions, I grin. I really am lucky to have him. Friends have come and gone my whole life, but I hope this friendship lasts beyond Shark Science Crew , wherever life takes us. Still, I can’t level with him. Hope deserves discretion. Besides, what happened between us is nothing more than chemistry that keeps getting the better of us.
“Nothing’s going on.” It’s the same line we fed Marissa earlier, and without waiting to see if he accepts it, I move to step past him, but he’s nimble despite his flip-flops, and cuts me off.
“Okay, a guessing game it is.” He taps his clean-shaven chin. “We just spent a lovely day taking pictures of actual baby sharks, so your sour mood can’t be work-related.”
“Sonograms,” I say, even though I know he’s baiting me. “And they’re fetal sharks.”
He merely raises his brows. “People are already watching the heck out of the teaser video—”
“You got that up already?”
“What do you think I was doing while I was waiting for you to finish getting presentable?” He ticks off his fingers. “You helped out some fellow scientists, broadened the public’s perception of shark research, and managed to do it all with a minimal awkwardness with your ex-girlfriend.”
My smile evaporates.
“Oh.” His eyebrows bounce above his frames. “It’s the girlfriend part, isn’t it?”
“Ex.” My jaw clacks shut, biting out the word.
“Just to clarify, we’re talking about the ex-girlfriend you hugged today?”
My mouth twists. “Habit.”
“Right, right.” He leans against the banister, and I calculate my odds of getting around him and making a break for it. He must notice, because he straightens up, arms crossed. “So you got swept up in the moment?”
“Exactly.”
His eyes narrow. “But you full-on airport-reunion hugged your ex-girlfriend. You picked her up by the waist and swung her around like you’d just made it home after an unplanned sixteen-hour layover and she didn’t freak out about it.”
“Would you quit calling her that?”
“What, your ex-girlfriend?”
The term is accurate, but feels so detached, not at all like my messy, deep feelings for Hope. “She’s our colleague.”
The crickets start up, and I can hear the hum of engines from the nearby highway. “No disrespect,” he says. “What I’m wondering, is who she is to you.”
“Our summer research assistant,” I tell him, sticking to the line we agreed upon, even though my lips tingle at the memory of her mouth on mine, the rush of desire it’s prudent we deny. “And I know the hug was a mistake.”
“A mutual mistake?” His tone is mild, but his shoulders are set. It occurs to me that this conversation isn’t entirely for my benefit, and I’m as pleased by his concern for her as I am chagrined at my behavior. Without all the details, I can see how it might look fishy. Even with all the details, it still feels complicated as hell.
I have to give him something, though, or else he might bring it up with Hope, and that’s the last thing she’d want. “We hung out the other day, after we shot the video. Talked.” A few diners make their way down the path, and we step aside to let them by. “Reminisced, I guess. I think the nostalgia bled into today, and we got carried away.”
He nods, accepting this. “Gottta be honest, I worry about the two of you. This has to be tough. Five years together and you never mentioned her to me.” I never told him how long we dated either, so I’m guessing Marissa filled him in. “There’s got to be a story there.”
“We had plans to move in together, she changed her mind.” I shrug, hoping he’ll be satisfied with that.
“After five years?”
“Plans change. People change.”
“But she’s single, after all this time—”
“Gabe.” I cut him a look. “Can we eat? I’m starving.”
Arms crossed, he regards me for a long moment before letting me by. I waste no time moving past him, up the steps and into the restaurant, the spring-hinged screen door banging shut behind us. The place is packed. I’m in no mood for crowds, but this is our usual spot. Good food, great service, and the owner is a family friend.
Sure enough, I spot Rhonda by the bar, her gray hair cut in a short bob. She locks eyes with me, smiling, and is already halfway around the bar by the time I thread my way through the maze of tables.
“Give me a hug, mister!”
She wraps me in a tight embrace, and the weight on my shoulders eases. Rhonda’s basically family. She and Mom were roommates in college and remained close friends. We even vacationed a couple times with her family back when I was a kid. After her divorce, Rhonda decided to quit her job in law to buy this place.
She pulls away and throws a stained towel over her shoulder, rosy cheeks flushed. “Why didn’t your mother tell me Hope was back?” I glance toward the table where Marissa’s seated with the other scientists, but Hope’s nowhere to be seen.
Rhonda follows my gaze. “She went to the bathroom, but ah—” she reaches out a hand, beckoning someone behind me “—here she comes now.”
Hope appears by my side, wearing a flowy printed sundress with buttons down the front, jostling against me as someone steps up to the bar in the crowded space. Rhonda gets pulled away to help clean up a spill at a high-top table behind us, but in the chaos, another group wedges us in, trying to get the bartender’s attention. We’re stuck together for the moment, crushed between the other patrons.
“You’re late,” Hope says, rising on tiptoe so I can hear her. The buttons on the front of her dress press into my arm, and I don’t dare look down. “The others are about to leave. They’ve got a long drive.”
Guilty, I glance toward the table again and see she’s right. Liam is shaking Marissa’s hand, and Sylvia rises, her jacket over one arm. Never should’ve let my personal life interfere with a work dinner. “My bad. Gabe and I got caught up talking.”
Her eyes flash to my face. She’s so close that I can make out the tiny flecks of amber in her eyes, her usually-bare lashes darkened with mascara. “About what?” Concern knits her wide brow.
“He was worried about, well—”
“Us?” Hope’s mouth turns downward in a frown. “He saw?”
I shake my head, but before I can explain, Rhonda appears from behind the bar.
“I sure saw,” she says with a wink, and my heartbeat accelerates to a dangerous pace. “I watch every one of Adrian’s videos.” My pulse returns to normal as I realize what she meant. She points at us with the bar towel in her hand. “You better not disappoint with the baby shark content you promised.”
I open my mouth, but Rhonda’s not done. She turns toward Hope, leaning in to speak over the noise. “Now, before I get pulled away again, what do you think of the transformation?”
“Transformation?” Hope gives the room a puzzled once-over and I can tell what she’s thinking. This place looks the same as always. Cane-backed chairs flank circular tables of knotty pine. The bar is held up by glossy white tongue-and-groove boards and the barstools could use a reupholstering. The overall feel is more homey than trendy, but unfortunately, Rhonda’s not talking about the décor.
“I have your ex-boyfriend to thank for the inspiration. Or is it boyfriend now?” Rhonda asks, a gleam in her blue eyes.
“Ex,” I say, saving Hope the trouble. “She’s just here to work with us for the summer.”
Rhonda tilts her head, appraising us. “So it’s strictly business between you two?”
“All business,” Hope says. “Nothing but science.”
I venture a glance and see she’s got what I call her yearbook smile on: too many teeth and frozen eyes. We’re screwed.
Once again, I wish I would’ve stayed home. Not only did I miss the chance to network, making the evening pointless, but Rhonda knows Hope and I too well. She’ll see right through us.
Surprised Gabe hasn’t chimed in to rescue me, I glance around and find him at the table where Marissa’s saying goodbye to the others. A moment later, my pocket buzzes and I pull out my phone.
Gabe: I told them we had car trouble. You can follow up over email.
Adrian: Thanks, I owe you one.
Gabe: I saw you clock Hope in that dress. Co-workers, remember?
My face flushes, and I scratch at my beard. Once again, my body not catching on that the attraction to Hope is a dead-end road.
“Everything okay?” Hope asks.
“What? Yeah.” I tuck the phone against my chest, worried she saw. “Did you want to go say goodbye to the others?”
“I already did before I went to the bathroom. It would be weird to go back over there now.”
“Gotcha.” I blow out my cheeks, at a loss what to do. I did not expect to be alone again with her so soon, but I’m starving, and I doubt Gabe plans to leave without eating. Sure enough, I turn and see the other biologists are gone, but their seats have been taken by a couple of Marissa’s friends. My cousin’s an extrovert, while I’m somewhere in the middle. I love to be around people if I know them well, but I’m okay with long stretches of solitude.
Hope’s a straight up introvert though, and I turn back to find her shoulders drooping. I lean down and say, “I didn’t drive, but I can order you an Uber.” Her eyes swing toward mine. “If you wanted to get out of here, I mean. It was a long day.”
The rattle of shaken ice interrupts us, and I glance over to see Angie on the other side of the bar with a cocktail shaker. “Hope Evans,” she says. “About time you stopped in.” Angie pours a lurid green cocktail, and a server takes it away. The surly general manager at the previous establishment, she stayed on when Rhonda took over and ended up buying into the restaurant as co-owner a few years back.
“How’d you know I was in town?” Hope asks.
“This guy’s Insta.” Angie hitches a thumb toward me, and I distract myself from all this embarrassment by imagining all the ways I’ll make Marissa’s life miserable for suggesting we come here tonight. “Rhonda is fully addicted to the shark content.”
“You bet I am.” She reappears and places a menu in front of us, for Hope’s benefit, since I’ve got it memorized. “Not every day a kid I’ve known since he needed swim floaties makes it big. And the sharks are way cool.”
Angie grimaces. “To each their own. Leave the ocean to the fishes, I say. I prefer a cabana in the shade any day.”
“Ooh, cabanas. Now there’s an idea.” Rhonda’s eyes take on a dreamy look and Hope turns to see what she’s looking at.
“Stop with that nonsense,” Angie says, tsking. “We don’t need to do any remodeling. Bad enough you’re experimenting with drinks and plastering our logo on everything.”
“It’s called branding,” Rhonda retorts. “Adrian knows all about it, right?”
Fighting to keep a straight face, I hold up a neon logoed cocktail napkin that would look more at home at a Myrtle Beach boardwalk bar than this cozy spot in Murrell’s Inlet. “These are new.”
A tiny snort comes from Hope, and I catch her eye, giving a small shake of my head. If she loses it, I will too. Angie grunts in apparent disgust and stalks off, muttering to herself.
Rhonda leans across the bar to whisper, “To be honest, I could care less about innovating. But Angie’s reactions are priceless, and our customers don’t care about this stuff one way or the other, so what’ve I got to lose?”
Hope lets out a laugh and Angie pops back through the swinging door to the kitchen, eyes narrowed in suspicion at the merriment. Whistling, Rhonda bobs her gray brows with a conspiratorial smile and moves off to take someone’s order.
“Glad to see Angie’s scowls aren’t reserved for me,” Hope says.
“Nah, she distributes those as a sign of her esteem, like Marissa.” The bar area has cleared out, but rather than head back to the table, Hope lingers, and I take the chance to say, “She’s happier with you here. Marissa, I mean.” I don’t know if my cousin would love me saying this, but it’s true. “She has a bunch of work friends, but not all that many close friends. She’s missed you.”
“It’s good to spend time with her again.” Hope puts her finger on the napkin I set down, spinning it. “And it’s nice to talk to a friend about sharks without their eyes glazing over.”
I know she’s making light of it, but while many of my friends are in marine science, I get the same feeling at family reunions or the rare times I run into someone from high school, like my career is a novelty. A lot of people don’t care about sharks beyond the headlines they see on the news.
Hope’s gone quiet, analyzing the water-stained menu in her hands. “I know it’s easier if I go, but leaving without Marissa would make a scene and—”
“Why do you think I want you to go?”
“You offered to get me a rideshare. And earlier, you stormed off—”
“I did not storm off. I walked away to preserve my dignity.”
“Okay, we’ll go with that,” she says, smiling. Her lips are glossy and I catch a fruity scent whenever she leans close. Mango, I think. “But we’ve got to figure out how to act normal around each other.”
I’m not even sure what normal is in this situation. “We did today.”
She meets my eyes. “Until we didn’t.” Something in the bold way she meets my gaze, like she’s not shying away from the memory of my mouth on hers, has me hot in a second. Which is exactly what we’re trying to avoid.
Her tongue darts out, moistening her lips. “And now being at Horizon Line with you... Gosh, I can’t even remember the last time—”
“Dad’s birthday,” I say, then wish I could take back the words. It was a surprise party for his sixtieth, and Hope flew in for the weekend and helped decorate the restaurant. She climbed on my shoulders to hang streamers from the rafters. Kept trying to use my head for balance and I told her I was going to go bald if she kept yanking on my hair.
I swipe a hand over my head, locs gathered half-up. Guess it’s good I was wrong about some things.
“How is he? And your mom, is she—”
“Good. Both good. Trying to talk them into retiring, but according to them, they’ll quit when they’re done, and not before.”
She chuckles. “Sounds like them. And Marissa said they’re all about Shark Science Crew , which of course, they love you,” she says. “Not that it isn’t amazing in its own right.”
I brush that off. “I upload videos of my day job. Nothing revolutionary.”
“It is, actually. Can you imagine if we’d had access to something like this as kids?”
“That’s exactly what keeps me going on days I want to give it up and go back to the way things were. The realization that some kid might see a guy who looks like him doing shark research and realize he can too.”
I’ve told this to a lot people—in interviews, meetings, conferences—but confessing it to Hope feels different. Despite all the good that came before, I worry that all she’ll ever see is the man who gave up on a relationship with her.
She tilts her head, expression thoughtful. “Do you ever take out anyone who’s not a researcher?”
“No. We only work with scientists or groups from colleges. Why?”
“What if we did? Give kids a chance to go out on the boat. Experience fieldwork for a day.”
“Kids?” I lean back with a half-grimace. “I took Marissa’s eight-year-old nephew mini golfing once and it was rough. I can’t imagine taking kids out on the boat.”
“Teenagers,” she clarifies. “High schoolers. Give them a taste of a career with sharks, not the sensationalized stuff that’s often portrayed on TV.”
That sounds like a huge undertaking. But I don’t want to discourage her from voicing her ideas, and it’s a good one, just not sure one I’m sure we’ll be able to manage right now.
“You should bring it up to Marissa. She has more experience with outreach programs than I do.” Her day job is with an ocean nonprofit, and they might be able to partner with us for something like that in the future.
Hope glances over her shoulder. “I will, thanks. Though maybe not right now.”
I look toward my cousin and see she’s pulling out more chairs, and Gabe’s waving people over. Hope doesn’t make a move to join them, and I’m guessing her extrovert batteries are used up.
More time together might not be the best idea, but I can’t flip off caring about her comfort like a light switch. “Looks pretty packed over there. You want to chill here?” I nudge out the barstool next to me, quirking an eyebrow at Hope.
She mock-groans. “Am I that obvious?”
“Not at all, but I know you.”
Her lips press tight, but then a half smile appears. “Guess that’s not always necessarily a bad thing.” Oh, but it is. Bad for my heart. But this is my chance to prove we’re stronger than the attraction.
She climbs onto the stool, and I take a seat at the other one. Picking up the menu again, she points to a drink. “What’s a Paradise Tea?” The noise level in the restaurant has picked up, and she tips toward me, the glint of a gold necklace drawing my eyes down to the glossy skin exposed by her low neckline.
Co-workers , I remind myself. No. More. Kissing.
“It’s a—” I blink, trying to find my equilibrium “—it’s just a Long Island. Rhonda got inspired to fancy up the place and thinks they need signature cocktails. Angie is fighting her every step of the way.”
“What did she mean about having you to thank?”
“She thinks I’m some sort of branding genius. I’ve told her a lot of that is due to Marissa, and now Gabe. I’m just the talent,” I joke.
She shakes her head. “You’re more than that.”
“I know. But sometimes I don’t feel like the right guy for the job.” I rest my elbow on the bar, turning to face her. “I’m not spontaneous. I don’t up and start YouTube channels.”
“But you did.”
“I did, yeah.”
“And it worked out. Millions of followers.” She grins. “Everywhere we go, you’ve got fans.”
Glancing around, I ask, “Who?”
“Uh, the two women who own this place?”
“Now you’re just messing with me.”
She shakes her head, expression serious again. “Before, I hadn’t given it much thought. But I wouldn’t have stayed if I didn’t believe in what you’re doing. And as for your platform—” her eyes meet mine, and my breath catches “—it’s mind-blowing, what you’ve accomplished. You don’t need to hear me say it, but I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
I shake my head, throat tight with emotion. “It was really great to hear, actually.”
She shrugs. “Like you care what I think.”
“What does that mean?”
Dodging her eyes away, she says, “Nothing. Just that I’m sure you hear it plenty from people you care about.”
She’s who I care about. If it weren’t for the rules we put in place, I’d be tempted to tuck a finger under her jaw and tilt up her chin until she looked at me with those gorgeous eyes. I’d tell her how horribly I missed her. How I could have all the success in the world, and without her, it feels empty. How I would trade it all for a chance to go back in time and be there for her.
Yearning floods me so strongly that I clench my fists tight against the sensation, or maybe to hold it tight. I want to believe things would be different. That I could trust us not to let go. But the hurt of rejection is too strong to ignore.
Hope’s still watching me, and I swallow, running my thumb down the condensation on my glass. “Honestly, I’m afraid of letting everyone down. What if I feel differently about all this in five years and want out? I’m just not sure it’s a forever thing, if it’s sustainable long-term.”
“Is that so scary? It not being permanent?”
“Not for you, I guess.” I realize that sounds like a jab, and rush to explain. “You’ve never been concerned about worst-case scenarios. Or maybe you have, but you don’t let that stop you.” I smile at her. “Your parents chose your name right.”
Hope. She always told me it felt like a verb, not a noun. Not a name. An action, or worse, a concept, undefinable. But I know that’s not the case. It’s her—she’s the definition of Hope.
“They chose it because they always knew I’d come along. Just like they knew they were destined for each other.” She makes a skeptical face. “Or so they say. I sure never thought I was destined for anyone.”
I’ve had a lot of time to think about this topic since she left. “I don’t think we are.” She looks up, curious, and I feel compelled to elaborate. “I think we choose who we love. How we love.” Good lord, I just said love , out loud, two times in a row. Not five minutes since we sat down, and I’ve already gone way off-script. Straightening up, I raise my hand to catch the bartender’s attention.
Without meeting her eyes, I tell Hope, “One thing that hasn’t changed here is the hush puppies. Rhonda’s still got a knack with the fryer. Want some?”
If my mouth is full of food, no chance for me to put my foot in it.