14. Tobias
CHAPTER 14
Tobias
W ith visiting hours long over, I emerge from my mom’s room, bone tired. Today was…different. Both at the bookshop and after with Harmony. Well, maybe not crazy as much as unexpected. But in a good way.
As usual, when my mom is in the hospital, or out of her element, her dementia symptoms worsen. The medication they gave her helped somewhat, but she was still confused and talking nonsense most of the time.
I head down the hall to the elevator. I’m hungry despite the sandwich I shared with Harmony earlier, but it’s the call of my bed that’s winning. Part of me thinks of driving through McDonald’s. I don’t love their food, but it’s the only all-night drive through available. That’s Port Haven for you—a small town with only a handful of traffic lights and one late-night fast food place.
I walk through the mostly empty waiting room in effort to get to the doors I can leave through when movement catches my attention out of the corner of my eye. When I glance over and find Harmony, I almost fall flat on my ass.
She’s still here?
“Hey… I thought you might need a friend.” She stretches her arms over her head and smiles.
“You really should’ve gone home. It’s extremely late, Harmony,” I tell her. It may be well after nine, but I have to admit that I’m glad she’s here. That I have someone to talk to on the way home. Someone to keep me awake. Someone to just…be there.
How did she know that’s exactly what I needed?
She looks at me as if announcing the time doesn’t phase her. “In case you didn’t know, I don’t have a lot of friends in Port Haven. Or any, really. It’s not like I had plans to cancel. I caught up on my shows while I waited and texted back and forth with my cousin. Oh, and I finished my chair picnic.”
“You have an odd sense of entertainment,” I mutter. She seems like she really enjoyed her little food party. It has to be hard for her, moving up here, not having family or friends with her. Maybe the change in scenery is what kept her here. But it feels like there might be something between us. There’s a connection, a current between us every time we’ve brushed against each other that joins us as much as it excites us. And I think she feels the weird magnetic temptation I’ve been fighting too.
“I get tired of being alone in my apartment sometimes,” she admits. “So, to be around people for once felt nice.”
So, she is lonely.
I tell myself this isn’t about me. About the weird attraction that obviously is only one-sided. Why am I so attracted to this girl? I can’t help but be reminded of our age difference when I take her in. Her life seems like a grand adventure, where all the turns are exciting. She’s not tied to anyone or anything and is free to make mistakes or change things up. Me? I’m in a holding pattern and can’t—won’t—let myself experience life’s best for fear of tying someone down with the burden of taking care of me when I’m old.
She starts gathering her things and joins me as I head out. I put a couple of bucks in the valet tip jar stowed in the podium and grab my keys since the valet is long gone. My Jaguar is parked in an easily accessible spot.
Harmony gives me her address, and I start driving once she’s buckled in. She lives in a nice area on the opposite side of town from me with single homes and lots of trees.
The Port Haven streets are unlively as I drive. This is considered late in a small quiet town on the Northern California coast. When we’re almost to her place, my stomach gives a loud grumble.
She giggles, letting out this delightful little sound that ends in a snort. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh, but that was the loudest rumbly tummy I’ve ever heard.”
Rumbly tummy.
Her phrasing is so youthful, yet I can’t say I don’t like it. More than the phrase, though, it’s her smooth voice that illuminates me from the inside out. That makes me feel like this new current of life is buzzing through me.
I try to push away my feelings, but they persist. I am, one thousand percent, into Harmony. I have been since the day I ripped her liquor license notice off her front window, only I didn’t realize it then.
She’s much more mature than a normal twenty-something. I love how carefree she seems to be. I mean, the chair picnic? That’s kind of adorable, right?
And the pink in her hair gives off this fun part of her personality. It’s not a direct message or an ‘f you’ to society specifically, but it’s clear it could swing that way if she wanted it to. On the opposite end, there’s this seriousness to her. It comes through in how she puts her all into the café and work.
Once we pull up to the curb, Harmony points to her separate yard entrance, and I pull up a little more so I’m directly in front of it.
“This is exactly where I park my Jeep. You know, when it’s not at the shop.” She unbuckles herself, and I don’t know what it is about her today, but she’s got this softness, almost an innocence, about her that has me wishing I was ten years younger and in her actual orbit.
She shifts in her seat, giving me her attention. “You’re hungry and tired. Come on in and let me make you something to eat. That way, you can go home and sleep instead of having to wrestle up food.”
“Thank you, but I was planning on just sleeping anyway.”
She shakes her head, refusing to accept my answer. “No, you really should eat. I’m not taking no for an answer. Come on. ”
I know I shouldn’t, but I break all too quickly and follow her through the yard to her apartment. The inside is nothing like I expect. It’s meticulously clean with colorful art lining the beige walls. For some reason, I imagined an explosion of pinks and purples. Those colors are here and there, but not in excess.
She hands me a bottle of water. “Sorry, I don’t drink, and I haven’t been to the store lately, so water is all I have.”
“Water is fine. If this is too much trouble, I can go home.”
She puts a hand on my shoulder, and it’s followed by that familiar tingle that travels all the way to my balls. What the actual fuck was that?
“Don’t be silly. I have food, just not a lot of choices in the beverage department. It’ll be nice to cook for someone other than me for a change. I admit…” Her voice trails off as she turns back to the refrigerator. “Sometimes, I just go with heat-and-eat options. I don’t see a reason to make something only for myself.” She pulls a shoulder up toward her one ear as she sorts some veggies.
I move to what has to be the world’s smallest breakfast bar. I sit on one of the funky stools that are neatly tucked under it. I nod to her walls. “You have interesting art.”
“Oh, thanks. Most are painted by my mom. A couple by me.” Her cheeks blush into this cute peachy color that warms her face and my entire body. “My mom is an amazing artist. Dad and I have been trying to convince her to do a gallery showing, but she says it would take the fun out of it for her. Maybe one day she’ll listen to us.”
She looks up from pulling together a few different ingredients. Her eyes connect with mine, and I swear I feel it all the way to my soul.
“She and I did the mermaid murals in The SeaSong and the parking lot. She sketched them, though, so it was kind of like painting a color by number thing for me but without the numbers.” She says this all while chopping up a sort of veggie medley. I wander over to take a closer look at the art that lines her living area.
There are a few different beach-at-sunset paintings. All of which are marked with a bold, dark purple V in the bottom right corner. I walk along the wall and find another one of a mermaid, also marked by a V. The next one is an abstract of colors, mostly rich purple swirls and delicate pink strokes. A few black marks marr the corner. It leaves me with a feeling of increasing excitement. I assume this one is by Harmony herself since there’s a child-like HD painted in the corner.
“I really like this one.” I point to it when she looks over.
“That’s one of my first paintings. I think I was seven or eight when I made it.” She returns her attention back to her task at hand. “My mom was teaching me about colors and how they connect to our moods and feelings.”
On an adjacent wall is a painting of a surfboard in the sand and feet with perfectly manicured toes connected to legs that run to the edge of the painting. This, too, is marked with an HD. The ones marked with the V must be by her mom.
Leaning up against the wall in the corner of the room is a well-loved surfboard with a purple stripe down the center. This is obviously not the paddle board she had at the beach—that one was pink and is still in the back of her Jeep.
“You love the water. The ocean,” I state, loving that I’m learning tiny pieces of information about her. To be in her private space, and see her in a way that I have yet to, makes my blood heat and doubles the pace of my heart.
“Yeah.” She sighs and sets down her knife to join me. “When I moved to California to live with my dad and his fiancée—now wife—we all spent a lot of time at the beach. I can’t imagine a life without being within driving distance of the ocean. My dad’s best friend, who is also my maternal uncle, taught me to surf, but even before that, my dad would paddle me out and I’d sit on his board with him. I found out later that my biological mom loved to surf too.” She grows quiet and contemplative, and I can almost feel the loss of her mother. That it’s affected her. How could it not?
“Maybe it ties me to her in a way since I didn’t get the chance to know her. But surfing also helped me bond with my dad and with my adoptive mom too.” She looks at the surfboard tucked in the corner and runs a finger over it. “This was my birth mom’s surfboard. I don’t actually use it for more than decoration. My board is in my bedroom. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed the small one that hangs in The SeaSong, but that was actually my first board. My Uncle Sammy bought it for me.”
Her love of the ocean draws my heart to hers, reminding me of those days Mom and I spent at the beach together. The sun-drenched sand. The gritty, salty sea water in my mouth when a wave would crash into me or later knock me off my board. How, whenever I looked back at my mom, there was always this massive smile gracing her lips that lit up every feature on her face.
I know the comfort the ocean can bring. I’ve felt it so many times, I’ve lost count. And while I’ll always find myself going there when I’m overwhelmed by life, I’m beginning to realize I may just have a safe haven somewhere else.