Chapter 3
3
MACY
“ O h my God, this is amazing.”
Flavors exploded in my mouth as I took my first bite of the burger we’d gotten from a roadside food truck. It was in a parking lot attached to a strip mall. All very suburban. I’d expected bland suburban food, but this was next level. This was definitely worth making the drive from the ski lodge.
“I’m five-starring this place online, for sure,” I said.
Beau looked over at me, and that suddenly made me self-conscious about the fuss I was making over my food. Way to be ladylike. I was basically inhaling a messy burger like I hadn’t eaten in six months.
“Sorry,” I said.
But when I looked over at him, something in his expression made my heart beat a little faster. A warmth I hadn’t seen before. Something told me it wasn’t like him at all.
“Glad you’re enjoying it,” he said. “This is my favorite. When I was a teenager, my mom would bring it home on Fridays after work. My little sis and I would share a carton of fries and fight over who was eating too much.”
As if to demonstrate, he reached over and grabbed a fry from the carton he’d set between us. I thought about reaching forward too, but I didn’t want to distract him from the conversation. I wanted to learn more about him.
“Was your house up in the mountains or closer to town?” I asked.
“Near the city limits,” he said. “That’s where all the neighborhoods are. We had one elementary, middle, and high school and a tiny post office, but for everything else, we had to come over to Adairsville.”
“So you lived in Seduction Summit, but you didn’t get to wake up to a beautiful view every morning.”
“We definitely went up to the mountains a lot. But it was an effort. Mom would pack up the car with food and a blanket, and we’d have a big picnic by the water.”
Weird, since we were sitting by the water right now. It was clear we had water right here.
But I got it. Driving up to the mountains to enjoy the view definitely beat this.
“And your dad?” I asked.
I hated to seem nosy, but I wanted to know as much as possible about him. There was something in his past. I sensed it in the way he went all introspective whenever this conversation came up.
I wondered if the key was the lack of a father. His mom had raised him all alone. Or maybe he had a divorce situation and a stepdad who wasn’t the best.
There was something dark about this guy, and I was determined to find out what it was.
“He’d come with us,” Beau said. “He worked a lot, but he always made time for us on Sundays. It was our family day.”
Okay, nothing dark there.
“You and your sister were close?” I asked.
He shrugged and set his burger back on the wrapper, grabbing the napkin to blot his mouth before speaking. “We kind of grew apart as teens. I was four years older, so when I was in high school, she was still riding bikes and having sleepovers with friends.”
I was still doing that in high school—the sleepover part, anyway—but I didn’t say anything about it. “Sounds like the perfect childhood.”
The silence that followed told me his childhood wasn’t quite perfect. I looked over at him. If he didn’t say anything soon, I’d probably have to break that silence, maybe change the subject. He’d talk about it in his own time. But would I have a chance to ever learn more about him?
What if tonight was the only night I ever saw him? I was already playing hooky from my dinner, and people would probably notice I was missing. But it wasn’t mandatory. As long as I was back at the tent at ten tomorrow morning, I had a one in three chance of winning this baking championship.
“I stole something when I was a kid,” he said.
I nearly choked on the bite of french fry I’d just taken. I definitely hadn’t expected him to blurt out the truth. I reached for my drink and sipped as I stared out the windshield and waited for him to continue.
“It was nothing big. A friend dared me to do it. But I was caught and taken to the police station here in town. The whole goal was just to scare the shit out of me. It worked, but what I didn’t figure was word would spread all over Seduction Summit. I never lived it down.”
“You never lived down stealing something as a kid?”
“Yeah, not much happens in a small town, I guess.” He laughed. “I was the only criminal in the neighborhood.”
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen. None of the moms wanted their kids to hang out with me. But it was a small school and people didn’t really have a choice.”
“I’m sure girls liked it.” I smiled. “Everyone loves a bad boy. Not that you were bad. You know what I mean.”
Crap. Was I screwing this up? I wanted to make him feel better, not worse.
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess you could say that. But anyway, when I graduated, I went into the military. I thought that might redeem me in everyone’s eyes. But it didn’t work. I returned home and got the same cold stares when I walked into Rosie’s Diner. The only place I fit in is up in the mountains with the guys on the logging crew. Not that we’re big buddies or anything, but they don’t judge me, and the tourists definitely don’t know anything about me.”
The darkness was back in full force. It was in his voice, in his posture, and in the way he polished off his burger and crumpled the wrapper before grabbing three fries and chomping bites out of all three in big chunks.
“Junior year, everyone in one of my classes hated me.”
I blurted that without thinking. He didn’t want to hear my problems. It just felt like I should share that all of us had something in our past.
“Why’s that?” he asked, looking over at me.
I felt the heat of his stare on me. It tripped me up a little, but I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and summoned the courage to blurt it out.
“I sent an email to a group of friends about someone we used to be friends with. I accidentally included her on the email. I have no idea how it happened to this day. For a while, I was the target of a whole lot of hate. Eventually, it went away.”
“Yeah, mine never went away,” he said. “But it sucks all the way around.”
“It probably won’t make you feel any better, but from that point on, I felt like crap every time I saw that person. I can tell by the way she looked at me that she never forgot. I doubt I’ll go back to any of the reunions, and I’m weird about commenting on classmates’ social media posts, because what if she replies? What if…?”
My voice drifted off there. Yeah, I probably had issues if this was getting to me this much six years later. It was nothing compared to what Beau dealt with.
“We should both probably worry less what people think of us,” he said.
I smiled and nodded. “You’re right. I’m not at that dinner right now because I feel guilty about winning a competition. How messed up is that?”
“I could take you back now,” he said. “I’m kind of enjoying this, but I definitely don’t want to keep you from your dinner.”
I shook my head. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.”
It started as needing to get away, but I hadn’t even thought about those people until now. Until we started talking about how we shouldn’t worry about what people thought of us.
I took the last bite of my burger and closed the container, setting it in the bag at my feet. Beau reached over and grabbed it, and in the process, his hand briefly touched my knee.
He jumped back like he’d been burned. “Sorry. I guess you can hand that to me, and I’ll put it in the back.”
With trembling fingers, I reached down and grabbed the handles, lifting it and handing it over to him.
Please touch my hand. Please touch my hand. Please touch my hand.
That went through my mind, over and over. I longed for his touch. But instead of grabbing it at the handles, he grasped the top of the bag to the left of them. I shoved my disappointment to the back of my mind.
“So, what do you do for fun?” I asked, settling back in my seat and staring out over the water.
“Not much these days. I guess I’m all work and no play. I stay up in the mountains to avoid running into townspeople.”
“There aren’t townspeople at the lodge?”
He shook his head. “Most of them come this way if they want something to eat. Or they go to the diner. I didn’t even go up to the ski lodge until I was much older. My parents always said it was too touristy.”
“Only in the winter.”
“Yeah, but they pretty much shut down the rest of the year. At least they used to. I hear they’re working to bring in tourism year-round.”
I frowned. “At a ski slope?”
“I guess there’s stuff they could do.” He shrugged. “Spring is just around the corner, so we’ll see.”
“You don’t play sports or work out?” I asked.
“I guess if I had to name something I do for fun, it’s this.”
Sit in a car, eating burgers? I sure hoped it wasn’t hanging out in parking lots with women. Wasn’t this something similar to the parking teenagers did? They’d drive somewhere, park, and make out. Nobody I’d known did that growing up, but I’d seen it in movies from past decades, and I assumed it still happened somewhere.
“Spend time outside,” he said. “Even in the cold.”
“Ever done a polar plunge?”
I couldn’t believe I’d asked him that question. He definitely didn’t look like somebody who’d do it as part of a challenge. He was so tough, I could see him jumping in just to swim, not even bothered by the subzero water temperatures.
“No,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s a challenge where you jump into cold water, like this.” I gestured to indicate the area in front of us. “We did it senior year because one of my friends wanted to show off on social media.”
Beau had a blank look on his face. No doubt he couldn’t grasp a world where people did stuff just for likes and shares. Come to think of it, that went along with the “caring what people think” conversation we’d had earlier.
I couldn’t really blame my friend. I’d been guilty of it too. Not doing things to go viral, but sharing only the best parts of my life and monitoring how many likes and comments I got.
“It has a lot of other benefits,” I rushed to add. “They say it refreshes your system.”
Now he turned his frown on me. “How’s that?”
“Reduces inflammation, boosts mood…I don’t know, a bunch of other stuff.”
“Maybe I’ll jump in the lake next time I feel foul,” he said.
“We could do it now and see if it works,” I said.
Now I’d definitely lost my mind. I hadn’t even had a drop of alcohol, but suddenly I felt the need to be adventurous.
“In our clothes?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I guess we could strip down to our underwear.”
“Or we could just take it all off. Then when we’re finished, we put on dry clothes.”
My mouth fell open. I still wasn’t looking at him. I was staring out at the water, which probably made it look like I thought the view ahead was the most fascinating thing on Earth. But really, I was a bundle of nerves. Looking at him would have me backing out of this conversation. It was easier to pretend he wasn’t the hottest man I’d ever seen.
He was right, technically. But we’d still be putting our clothes on wet bodies. Maybe he had ideas for drying off. Things we could do while we naturally dried off. I wasn’t going to argue with that.
“Let’s go.” I reached for the handle and jerked the door open, pulling it toward me.
Nothing happened. The door was locked.
“Sorry,” he said.
A plunk sound alerted me that the door was now unlocked. Before I could talk myself out of taking the plunge—in more than one way—I pulled the handle, hopped out, and shut the door, removing my coat and dropping it to the ground before I’d even reached the front fender of his truck.
This was on. For the first time in my life, I felt fully alive, and I couldn’t wait to jump in that freezing cold water.