Chapter 39
I love when I can hear Mike’s music. I’m not talking about the full-volume blast. But the times when it is obviously not meant for me to hear.
I catch only a few bars when the wind blows just right and the surf is retreating before another break.
The music mixes with the gulls and the waves, and I feel cozy.
Content. The opposite of lonely. I’m a part of something.
I’m connected to someone. And that someone has the good sense to listen to music in the morning.
Lying in my own bed, in my own cottage, on the first Friday morning in December is a type of freedom I never had before.
But I have it now, and this freedom means space to dream.
And even though my dream of Mike being this deep, introspective, literary genius has burst, the dream of a life with someone who loves me is still very real.
I pull on a robe over my periwinkle silk sleep set and slip through the privacy gate.
Mike’s Dutch door is open… Well, the top half is. I let myself in. “Mike!” I call.
A power tool buzzes at the back of the house.
“Mike!”
It cuts off. And there might be some grumbling. “It’s ten a.m., Bea. I waited until ten a.m.”
He appears in the kitchen with a carpenter’s angle in his back pocket and a pencil tucked behind his ear. His black waves look almost like curls this morning.
“I know. I came to say thank you.” I open his fridge to get the cranberry juice, but not before I steal a blackberry. Mike has taken to keeping them pre-rinsed in a bowl on the middle shelf. Convenient.
“You came to say thank you?” He pushes the fridge door shut. “Then let’s hear it.”
I freeze, on tiptoes no less, struggling to reach a blue glass at the back of his cupboard. “Thank you.”
He folds his arms across his chest, apparently waiting for more.
“For being so considerate and neighborly.” I jump a little and manage to hook a finger in one of the glasses. “Do you want some?”
“Of my own cranberry juice that I bought myself this morning and was saving for after I finish finally grouting the shower? No. Please. You enjoy.”
“If you insist.” I pour myself half a glass and take a sip. Oh, I make a face. “I don’t know why you don’t buy the kind with sugar.”
“Here it comes.”
“Here what comes?”
“The real reason you’re here. Go on, let’s get this over with.”
I take my cranberry juice with me into Mike’s living room and feel all kinds of jealous and bothered. The view is spectacular. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You insult me. I insult you. We bicker back and forth until you are convinced there is no more meat to pick from my bones. Then you bounce away to dust your cacti or walk someone’s dog or buy a Ferrari, and I get back to work.”
“I don’t dust my cacti. I spritz them. And I’m taking care of someone’s miniature horse this week in addition to four of my regular pooches.” And Porsches are more fun to drive than Ferraris, which is why I own one, but that is beside the point.
“My mistake.”
“And aren’t you glad I saved you from making more of those in here? Admit it. I was right to tell you to paint over the wood.”
“I just painted over the paneling so you’d stop hounding me about it.”
“I love how your ears turn pink when you lie.”
“And I love how you’re so desperate to see me in the morning that you can’t even bother to change into real clothes.”
My cheeks heat at that one. “Says the man who takes his shirt off at every opportunity.”
“And you would know how, exactly? Did you buy a stepladder to see over the privacy fence?”
“That’s your fantasy, right? To find a life partner who’s just as twisted as you are.”
“Who said anything about life partner?”
I did. It’s all I’ve thought about since my Thanksgiving chat with Mrs. Miller.
It’s what keeps me outside listening to Mike work on his lines or straining to hear his music.
I still want the space and time to call the shots in my own life.
But my hopes and dreams of flexibility and independence have expanded to include a partner.
If I can’t have a soulmate who underlines Bronte and Byron and fills the margins of Shakespeare with clever annotations, maybe having a man who reads those authors is the next best thing.
Maybe it’s enough.
I down the rest of my cranberry juice, but not without shuddering. That stuff is bitter. “Mike.”
“Bea.”
“I was so very grateful to sleep in today. And you were so kind to put me up when I was locked out. I wanted to thank you.”
“So much so that you had to scamper over in your silk sleep set and pour yourself a glass of my cranberry juice.”
“Well, it’s new. And no one but me has seen it before. Maybe I needed to preen a little.”
Mike sinks onto the sofa and massages a spot above his right eye. “Of course you did.”
“It’s cute, right?”
“Freaking adorable.”
“So…one of my clients has season tickets at Snapdragon Stadium, and I was wondering…” The words won’t come.
Oh, who am I kidding? I’m never getting over the books.
Asking Mike out would just be me leaning into the soul-mate fantasy I concocted.
I can’t keep pretending there is more to us than that.
This is Mike Benedick. He flirts with every woman he meets and flirts with all of humanity when he’s onstage.
He’s an actor. It’s his job. It was one thing when I thought that there was all this substance behind it, but things are different now.
“Are you asking me out, Bea?”
I laugh. Screech is more like it. “Oh my gosh. Funny. Hysterical. I was wondering if you were on speaking terms with literally anyone besides, of course, yourself who would appreciate two tickets to the bowl game.”
For a moment, Mike looks…disappointed. “Very neighborly of you. Unfortunately, I’m busy tonight.”
“You are? Doing what?”
“Buying more cranberry juice.” He rises. “I don’t mean to be rude, but the grout is going to set with or without me. Keep the tickets. Enjoy the game, Bea.”