She hoped she was far enough away that he didn’t notice how his deep, resonant voice caused goose bumps to erupt over the back of her neck.
“Yeah?” she asked over her shoulder.
“I’m lookin’ forward to tonight. I hope you are too.” His smile was soft and lazy.
Now the chills weren’t only across her neck. They’d migrated to her arms, legs, and belly. The latter of which flopped around like a fish on dry land.
“I always enjoy a night filled with good music and good drinks,” she told him airily. Or at least shehopedshe sounded airy.
His response was a wink and a two-finger salute before he turned and ambled toward the beach house.
She noted the bulge of his calf muscles and the economical way he moved along the sand all while thinking,Oh, god. Why do I feel like I’m about to step off the edge of the Marianas Trench with a fifty-pound rock tied to each foot?
Chapter 3
8:38 PM…
“I’m having an existential crisis.”
Chrissy looked at Winston seated on the barstool next to her and smirked. “Well, that’s self-indulgent of you.”
His mouth thinned into a straight line. “I’mserious,Chrissy. I’m thirty-one years old and I have no romantic prospects on the horizon.”
She let her gaze take a circuit around Pepe’s Cafe. The rickety-legged tables were filled with sunburned tourists. Most of the folks lounged around the bar were locals. “Don’t tell me your biological clock is ticking too.”
Winston frowned around his cocktail straw as he sipped morosely at his Rum Runner. “I don’t think it’s so much my biological clock as it is my lonely heart. Don’t you want to fall in love?”
“Now you sound like my mother,” she said distastefully.
Winston sighed. “I miss Josephine every day.”
A steel spear of pain stabbed into Chrissy’s heart. For all of her mother’s terrible taste in men and even worse taste in drinks—Who puts ice in their rosé, I ask you?—Josephine had been a good mom. Quick to laugh. Quick to play. Quick to kiss a hurt away.
“I miss her too,” Chrissy admitted freely before adding, “And to answer your question,no. I don’t want to fall in love. Saying you want to fall in love is basically announcing to the universe there’s something missing inside you. A hole only another person can fill. You remember how Mom was constantly hunting for ‘the one’?” Chrissy made air-quotes. “Then when she couldn’t find him, she settled for bastards unworthy of her big, squishy heart?”
“Nuh-uh.” She shook her head. “I swore from a young age I wouldn’t fall in love. That I wouldn’tneedto fall in love. That instead I’d focus my energy on the world around me. Appreciate each sunrise. Be thankful for a cold beer at the end of the day. Enjoy the genuine smile of a stranger. And when it came time to choose a partner, I’d do it with my head, not my heart.That’sthe mother effin’ key to true happiness. Notfalling inlove.”
Winston narrowed his eyes. “You really believe that?”
She squared her chin. “Did I stutter?”
“Oh, no. Your monologue was clear, and peppered with just the right amount of pseudo-obscenities to make you sound certain.”
“But?” she prompted, sure she’d heard that unspoken word tacked onto the end of his sentence.
“But how do you square that with your burning desire to have kids? Isn’tthata hole you’re trying to fill?”
“Are you being intentionally obtuse? The urge to have children is biological. It’s what we were born to do. To procreate. To proliferate. Romantic love? Pfft.” She waved a hand. “That’s a human construct.”
“If you say so,” he demurred. She could tell he was humoring her.
“Idosay so.”
“Or…” He lifted a finger. “And hear me out. What if the urge to have children and the urge to fall in love are the same thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re both part of our desire to know the full gamut of life’s experiences.”
