He laughed at her confused stare. “I think I’m speaking the truth. I’ve always done it before.”
“You have,” she said. “And I’ve appreciated it.”
Phew. Didn’t make too big of a mistake there.
“No. So do the same.” Her head went back and forth. “I’m not going to leave a bad review here. This place is everything it boasted to be.”
She laughed at his attempt to joke. He was being serious but anything to get her to let go like she had around him in the past.
“That’s good to know. Okay, you’re a year older than me. Thirty-three. Why haven’t you figured out what you wanted to do? The fact you’re staying here for a month says you have the means to do it. Unless of course you’re crazy in debt.”
“There,” he said, pointing his finger. “That’s not something you’d normally say.”
Her face shrank back some, her lips parting and showing her teeth. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Yes, you should have. We used to talk and laugh all the time. When I got you to loosen up.”
“That’s true. So what have you been up to? Or are you just independently wealthy and jet setting around the world while you try to discover any hidden talents you’ve got?”
“Damn, you guessed it.”
She coughed on the bite of food she’d put in her mouth and chewed quickly. “Seriously?”
He smirked and bit into his burger without saying another word.
4
THEN AND NOW
Natalie didn’t know what to think.
Her independently wealthy comment had been a joke.
It was a crude thing to say to someone, but Arik had a way of disarming her, making her drop her guard and forget about being proper.
After a minute of them both eating their lunch and her trying to conjure up another topic, he finally spoke.
“You know I went to school for engineering, right?”
“I do,” she said.
“I minored in computer science. I always thought data engineering was for me. A combination of two things I loved. Working with my hands and my mind.”
“By gathering the factors of those things and being able to determine what was working or what wasn’t?”
“Exactly,” he said. “My first job out of college was for a small tech start-up in Seattle.”
“Wow, a long way from here. You were from the East Coast, right?” She knew he was interviewing all over the US but never found out where he’d landed.
“Baltimore,” he said. “And you right from this small island.”
“And back here I came,” she said.
She wouldn’t regret it.
During summer breaks she’d worked at the front desk of The Retreat. Hard work wasn’t beneath her and her family.
She wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth and never professed it.
