Chapter 22
“I can’t do the pancake makeup anymore. I’m breaking out… You would care if you were auditioning all next week…”
One thing about living in the back cottage of a beach house is that you can hear quite a bit of everything. This includes some of Mike’s phone calls. “Of course I’ll still be in character. The creepiness isn’t all skin-deep.”
I almost laugh at that one.
“What? No.” He trips over something and swears.
“No, of course not. And how would I know if she’s home?
… We do not live together… She’d eat me alive and then grind my bones to make plant food for her cactuses…
No. No. I’m not going to give her the message…
That’s right, I’ll freely admit it… No, you can’t be afraid of her too.
She is your sister! Fine. Fine!” He hangs up, tosses his phone down, and snarls.
Passionate, that neighbor of mine.
I check my hair, my makeup, and my flower crown before bouncing through the gate.
Mike looks up from his saw, and his expression is a mix of exasperation and something more dangerous. “Why are you wearing flowers?”
“It’s SummerFest.” The way Princess Kitty’s owner explained it to me, it’s the day when La Jolla celebrates the summer solstice, but it happens at the end of August when May gray, June gloom, and no-sky July finally dissipates, the tourists leave because school is in session, and sunshine and heat finally kick in for a few glorious weeks when the locals have the beaches to themselves.
“Huh.” Mike stands there a moment, blinking. What was he thinking? That I was regressing? That I was reverting to some magic fairy, crystal-clutching woman who aspires to influence and nothing else? “They still do that?” He heads into his kitchen with a stack of cut baseboards.
I follow. “Apparently. I have to film content for a client later and was told crowns aren’t optional.”
“Filming?”
“Princess Kitty 2000 pays extra for filmed coffee chats.”
“What are those?” Mike lays the boards carefully on the floor.
“A cat pushes random buttons on the floor, and I respond with enthusiasm, much the same way I do when I’m babysitting my nephew, Eaton.”
Mike’s smile surfaces. “You can’t wear silk flowers for SummerFest.” He grabs his keys from the hooks on the interior of a cabinet door.
I feel a pang of envy. How is it even possible to have this level of organization on a construction site?
“Come on,” Mike says.
“Where are we going?”
“To Adelaide’s.”
We drive across town to a smart flower shop in downtown La Jolla. Mike lives a charmed life, so naturally there is a parking space ready and waiting for him when we pull up.
“Hi. We need a crown for SummerFest,” Mike says to the florist. “Can you build it on this?” He passes over my diadem of silk flowers and ribbon.
“Oh, um…” The florist frowns. “What flowers were you thinking?”
“Cactuses,” Mike says casually. “Really prickly ones.”
The florist’s eyes grow wide. “Oh, well… We could do succulents.”
“Close enough. How long? The SummerFest waits for no fairy queen.”
“Come back in forty-five minutes.”
We exit the elegant flower shop and head toward Girard Avenue. “What are we going to do for an hour?” I ask, arms folded across the front of my lacy off-the-shoulder sundress. “I have a schedule to keep here.”
“Right, those reruns of Starship Cruiser won’t watch themselves.”
“Mike!”
“Everything is always accusations and arguments. Did your parents ever let you out of a courtroom?”
“No, they brought the courtroom home, to the car, to the dinner table. The only escape was fiction, but even then I had to wade through years of legal thrillers before I realized there were other genres.” I have to jog a step to catch up with him. “Where are we going?”
“Other genres?” Mike says, a smirk poised on his lips. “Like military science fiction?”
“Starship Cruiser is a utopia of humanity’s future.”
“With battleships and hierarchy of command?” He stops in front of a dazzling gift and stationery store. The kind that sells the type of expensive fountain pens that Mom is always buying for Dad, and Dad is always losing. I let him borrow one of mine one time, and I haven’t seen it since.
“I’m not going in there.”
“Would you relax?”
“I can’t go in there. I don’t have any money or willpower when it comes to expensive fountain pens.”
“I’d tell you to close your eyes, offer to hold your hand, but I don’t want to be prosecuted within an inch of my life for whatever injustice you’d leap to, so I’ll just say this—there are books inside.”
“What?” I stand on tiptoe, trying to see past the fountain pens and cases of artisan costume jewelry.
“Lots of them. Warwick’s has the best shelves in all of San Diego. Their shelf talkers read like poetry. Come on.” Mike holds the door open for me, and I enter, darting not at all smoothly past the pens to the section of books.
It’s magical. So many shelves of so many beautiful books. More than enough to get lost in for an afternoon, but not too many to get overwhelmed. “How did I not know about this place?”
“Maybe you’re functionally illiterate. Would explain why you had to quit your day job.”
“Har-har.” I run my finger across shelves of glossy spines.
“Mike! Hi!” A kindly looking man gives Mike a quick hug. “I thought that was you.”
“Hey, Sam. Happy SummerFest.”
Sam’s laugh is tight. “Indeed. Do you have a minute?”
“Forty-five, in fact.” Mike winks at me, and I roll my eyes.
“Would you excuse us?” Sam says before leading Mike away.
I check out the view of Mike’s retreating backside before turning my attention to the science fiction/fantasy section. I’m dying to browse the romance section and sniff out where they keep the Shakespeare, but Mike has enough ammo against me.
“You need to stop staring at my butt whenever I walk away.”
I jump and yelp at Mike’s words. “Don’t sneak up on me.”
“Sure. Just as soon as you stop staring.”
“Uh-huh. Is that what Sam wanted to talk about?”
“He booked a reading to celebrate SummerFest, but they canceled at the last minute. I’m going to fill in.” Mike reaches behind me and grabs a flower crown, one similar but so much nicer than the tacky thing we left with the florist. He tugs the circlet onto his head. “Is it on straight?”
“Wait.” I adjust it so the price tag is in the back. “What are you reading?”
“A selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets.” Mike runs a hand through his hair. “Would you mind staying? Filming a couple for me?”
Heat creeps up my neck. “No, that’s okay.”
“Please.”
My knees literally feel weak. “Okay.”
Mike slips me his phone. “Thanks.” He tugs me by a lacy sleeve to where the chairs are set up. “I think here might be the best shot.”
“Um, which sonnets?” I try to sound casual. I do, but I’m close to falling apart.
“Oh, the chestnuts, for sure, but I was going to read the room a little bit. Why? Do you have a favorite?”
All of them. Because he’s highlighted and annotated all of them. The sloped blue ink. The wit. The intense feeling. “‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life.’ Sonnet 75.”
“‘Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day…’”
“The idea of it, anyway,” I clarify. “You know, the tension of being still so obsessed with a lover even when they are yours. It’s hot, even if the execution is a little tamer than some of the others.”
“Is that a challenge, Bea?”
“What? No!”
But Sam is already introducing Mike to the little assembly. “A local treasure. A classically trained Shakespearean actor. We’re so glad he made time for us today. Michael Benedick.”
“‘Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you,’” Mike says, opening the book. “In honor of summer’s return to our shores, some of Will’s most-loved sonnets. I’ll save his best for last, but I thought I’d start with my neighbor’s new favorite, 75. Hope you enjoy it, Bea.”
It’s a cliché to say you could listen to someone’s voice all day, so I’ll say that I would drive cross-country, zero out my 401(k), and go without all kinds of necessities, forgoing sleep and subsisting off of Peanut M&Ms and flat Diet Cokes to hear Mike read poetry.
I’d even go back to practicing law if it was a means of supporting that habit.
It isn’t just his voice—that’s warm and rich, silky like fine Swiss chocolate with the barest scratch of a crackling vinyl record.
It’s what he does with the rest of himself.
His body becomes a tuning fork, amplifying some of the most beautiful words the English language has ever produced.
I see the tension in his shoulders, in the creases that form between his eyes when he reads 75.
And when he crests some lines only to pause on specific words—alone, pleasure—I catch some of that same energy, feeling that same thrum deep inside.
I was wrong. I was so wrong about this being a clunky sonnet. It’s hot. A sexy push and pull between sharp and languid sensuality.
Thank goodness I can hide behind Mike’s phone.
I can stare at that little screen all I want.
It doesn’t matter where he looks. I have a job to do.
I’m filming, and if I happen to enjoy how he locks eyes with me through the lens of his phone, it doesn’t matter.
He’s supposed to. I am holding the camera, doing a job, so what if I enjoy the heck out of it?
Like any good performer, Mike finishes strong with exactly the sonnet everyone wants to hear on this day celebrating summer. He delivers it like a man who is daydreaming, except I know Mike. He delivers it like a villain daydreaming.
“‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’” The words are languid but also pulsing with an undercurrent of calculating intellect.
I’m still under their spell even when the crowd, which has grown since Mike began, breaks into applause.
“I’m David Jenkins, a local author,” a young man in the audience calls out. “Do you narrate audiobooks?”
“Ababababa,” Sam says, making a cross with his fingers as if warding off evil. “We do not speak of such things here in this palace of the written word.”
The audience laughs.