2. TWO #2
Rory looked down at the dog, who immediately flopped in the dirt, all four paws in the air, completely surrendered to the universe. “Hardball type, huh?”
“The absolute worst.”
Rory snagged a fresh bottle of beer from the fridge, gesturing toward the shelves. “Help yourself to whatever. Got some other options in there too if you don’t want a blonde ale.”
Kieran grabbed the local beer, staring at the artistic, minimal label—artisanal and probably brewed by monks—and nodded as if he drank it every Tuesday.
He followed Rory out to the patio, where Rory dropped into a wooden Adirondack chair, kicking his bare feet up onto a low stool.
Kieran took the matching chair opposite him, holding the cold bottle tight to keep his hands from doing anything stupid.
“So,” Rory said, taking a slow sip. “You got family down here? Friends?”
“Nope. Just me and the dogs.”
Rory’s eyebrows lifted. “You moved all the way down here without knowing a soul?”
“Basically, yeah. See ya later, Sacramento.”
“That’s kind of bold.”
“Or incredibly dumb. I haven’t quite decided where the line is yet.”
Rory smiled faintly, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “What made you pick Encinitas?”
Kieran hesitated, his thumb scraping at the edge of the beer label. He could not say out loud that the ocean had been calling to him for reasons he couldn’t explain. That sounded insane.
“I don’t know,” he said instead, keeping his eyes on the fire pit between them. “I was…tired. Of a lot of things. I’ve always wanted to live by the water, and I figured if I didn’t actually make the jump now, I’d end up staying in my hometown until I fused to the pavement.”
Rory nodded slowly, accepting the answer without an ounce of judgment. “Yeah. That makes sense. Pretty pricey place to come find out, though.”
Kieran braced himself, waiting for the inevitable follow-up questions—the standard script of what do you do for work, why the sudden escape, did you leave a relationship behind?
But Rory didn’t press. He leaned back, entirely comfortable with the pause, stretching one arm out to scratch Mabel right behind the ears until her eyes rolled back in pure ecstasy.
“You grow up here?” Kieran asked, eager to turn the spotlight around.
“Pretty much. Left for a few years, but came back.”
“You love it that much?”
Rory was quiet for a moment, looking out past the yard toward the invisible horizon where the ocean sat in the dark. “I just like being near the water,” he said. “It makes sense of things. Even when nothing else does.”
Kieran went still. He hadn’t expected that answer. He’d figured Rory was the kind of guy who talked about clean sets, parking, and where to find the cheapest fish tacos. Not whatever the hell that was.
“You good?” Rory asked, noticing the silence.
“Yeah,” Kieran said, clearing his throat. “Just surprised you said something so poetic.”
Rory snorted, the heavy contours of his shoulders shaking as he smiled. “Sorry. Next time I’ll grunt and scratch myself instead.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
The words were out of Kieran’s mouth before his brain could intercept them.
A heavy, electric beat of silence dropped over the porch. Rory slowly raised one dark eyebrow, his gaze locking onto Kieran’s face with a sudden, sharp intensity. “Oh?”
Kieran’s entire face erupted into a scorching, white-hot heat. He instinctively took a massive gulp of his beer to cover it, swallowed entirely wrong, and immediately hacked into a violent cough mid-sip, making the entire sequence infinitely worse.
“Sorry,” he sputtered, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, mortified down to his mismatched socks.
“That was—God, shit. I am so unbelievably bad at small talk. Like, clinically bad. I can write flawless press releases. I can draft corporate talking points. I can record perfect, articulate voice memos. But the second I’m one-on-one with a human being in the real world, I just start blurting out things like ‘don’t tempt me’ to near-strangers and then I flatline from the shame. ”
To his surprise, Rory didn’t look weirded out. He laughed. It wasn’t a polite, neighborly chuckle either—it was a full, deep laugh, his head tilting back, his chest rising as the tension broke.
“You’re not flatlining,” Rory said, his voice laced with an incredibly dangerous amount of warmth.
“I am. I’ve officially deceased. I’m a ghost haunting your outdoor furniture right now.”
“Relax, Kieran.”
That completely shut him up.
It was the first time Rory had used his name. Kieran. Said quietly, with a soft, grounded weight that made Kieran’s mouth go dry. He stared at his beer label, suddenly painfully aware of how unaccustomed he was to this kind of man.
He was used to the transactional safety of late-night apps—to guys who texted back within thirty seconds at 11 p.m. but took three days to respond at 11 a.m. He knew how to handle a first date where he talked too much to mask his anxiety, and he certainly knew how to handle a second date that never materialized.
But this effortless, unhurried stillness? He had no script for it.
They ended up talking for over an hour as the coastal air cooled around them. They talked about nothing of consequence, mostly—the local music scene, how profoundly overpriced organic smoothies were, the ridiculousness of the latest season of The White Lotus.
Kieran shared a deeply embarrassing story about getting locked out of his Sacramento apartment in nothing but a damp towel, and Rory admitted he’d once had a catastrophic stomach issue inside a thick wetsuit during an amateur surf competition.
By the time the moon was high and the dogs had collapsed into furry heaps on the deck, Rory stood up, stretching his arms over his head.
“Well, I’ve got a brutal five a.m. start on a job tomorrow.”
“Right. Yeah.” Kieran stood up quickly, his knees cracking in the quiet night air, suddenly hyper-aware of how close their bodies were in the small space of the patio. “I should get these two back inside before they permanently become part of your landscaping. Thanks for the drink, Rory.”
“Thanks for not dying of shame on my watch.”
Kieran gave him a crooked, weary smile. “I’ll see you around?”
Rory nodded, his dark eyes catching the amber light from the kitchen window. “You will.”