“Yes, I know, Linda. I’m sorry. Chloe called in sick this morning.” I unlocked the door and held it for her to follow me inside.
As I moved around the store turning on the lights and readying things for a new day’s business, Linda made a beeline for her favorite chair. There was a grouping of cozy couches and chairs by the front window where people were welcome to sit and knit for a spell, when the space wasn’t in use by one of the knitting or crochet groups that held their regular meetups at the store.
Linda came in almost every morning to sit and visit for a few hours over her knitting. She was retired and lived alone, and I had the sense she didn’t talk to many people outside the time she spent in the store.
“What do you think, crème brûlée or southern pecan this morning?” I asked as I moved to the coffee maker. I always kept a carafe of coffee on hand, as well as a selection of teas and powdered hot chocolate, so customers could enjoy a warm beverage while they knit or shopped for yarn. It encouraged them to stay longer, and the longer they stayed, the more likely they were to buy something. It also made the store feel more homey, which was part of my business mission statement:Create a comfortable home for fiber arts lovers to gather and shop.
“Feels like a crème brûlée day to me,” Linda answered as she unfolded the Joji Locatelli Odyssey shawl she’d been working on for the last several weeks. It was knitting up so beautifully I’d been considering starting one of my own with some of the new Malabrigo Dos Tierras I’d gotten in last week.
The bell on the shop door rang, and I glanced over my shoulder as I counted out scoops of flavored coffee grounds. It was a man who’d just entered, which was unusual but not unheard of. He stood with his back to me, gazing at the window display Angie had created for the store. It was an eye-catching installation, with sagging clotheslines full of colorful hand-knit hats, scarves, and socks suspended over a pair of giant knitting needles supporting a swatch of rainbow-striped garter stitch. It had enticed quite a few curious onlookers into the store.
“Let me know if you need any help,” I called to the newcomer. He didn’t respond, so I finished setting the coffee to brew before I went to properly greet my first customer of the day.
He’d drifted over to the section of shelves stuffed with a spectrum of Cascade 220 colors. As I approached, I noted that he was roughly my age—or a bit younger perhaps—with an attractive salt-and-pepper beard and silver-threaded hair.
“Is there anything in particular I can help you find?” I offered, affecting my cheerful customer service smile.
He turned to look at me, our eyes met, and my stomach dropped onto the floor next to my sensible dressy flats.
It wasn’t. Itcouldn’tbe.
But it was.
I’d know those piercing brown eyes anywhere, even thirty years later when they were surrounded by deep crinkles and a silvery beard. They belonged to Mike Pilota, my former high school crush. Varsity football player, student council president, and homecoming king Mike Pilota. The best-looking guy in my graduating class.
In other words, someone who’d been totally out of my league, and whom I’d nonetheless pined over for four long and miserable years.
He’d changed over the last three decades, but not that much. Miraculously, he still had all his hair and his athletic physique. In fact, he was extraordinarily muscular for a man in his late forties. One might even go so far as to call him jacked.
His face sported quite a few more wrinkles these days—in that way that looked so unfairly handsome on older men—and he was more hirsute than I was used to seeing him. In high school, he’d been clean-shaven and had worn his hair in one of those unfortunate brush cuts that had been so popular in the eighties. Now, in addition to the beard, which lent him a pleasantly lumberjacky appearance, his hair was thick and wavy on top, brushed back from his forehead and trimmed shorter on the sides.
But those eyes. They were exactly the same: deep-set, dark, and intense. The giddy feeling they inspired in my loins plunged me right back into high school.
Mike and I hadn’t moved in the same circles back then. I doubt he ever would have known I existed if it hadn’t been for Pizza My Heart, the pizza parlor where we both worked in the evenings and on the weekends. From the time I turned sixteen to the day he left for college, Mike and I spent ten to twenty hours a week slinging pizza, garlic bread, and soda pop together.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I had applied for the job at Pizza My Heart because Mike worked there. What can I say? I was a teenager ruled by my hormones.
The job had allowed me to spend time with Mike, even talk to him a little. I wouldn’t exactly say we were friends, but we were friendly. We were acquaintances, which was more than we’d been the two years prior.
Therein lay the problem: I was not what you’d call a smooth operator in my teenage years. Oh, I’d tried to play it cool, but cool wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse back then. These days I liked to think I’d adopted a classic style that complemented my natural features and personality. But in 1988? I looked like the inside of a Contempo Casuals had vomited all over me—and my fashion sense was by far my best feature.
In addition to braces, acne-prone skin, and a haircut better suited to a Golden Girl than a teenager, I was not socially adept. My best conversational overtures consisted of awkward attempts to repeat jokes I’d heard onWho’s the Boss?the night before. I was, in summary, a massive dork.
Nevertheless, I remained ever hopeful that one day Mike would look past the metal mouth and bad skin to realize his undying attraction to me. I was so optimistic, in fact, that in the summer after graduation—our last summer together at Pizza My Heart before Mike went off to college in Ohio—I screwed up my courage to ask him out on a date.
It did not go well.
His expression in response to my proposal that we catch a showing ofTurner & Hoochwas not unlike that of Janet Leigh when Norman Bates pulled back the shower curtain. The sight of Mike’s face frozen in shocked surprise still haunted me occasionally in my anxiety dreams.
“Oh. Um. Uhhhh…”Mike had dragged that last syllable out for what felt like an eternity, his mouth hanging open like a hooked walleye as he struggled to verbalize a response.“I can’t. I’ve got…stuff. To do. Stuff to do. So I can’t. But, um, thanks?”Then he’d turned on his heel and speed-walked out of my presence as fast as his muscular legs would take him.
Like I said, it did not go well.
That was what I got for shooting my shot. But I didn’t bear Mike any ill will. If anything, I was grateful for the lesson. It had taught me not to aim for the stars. I was more of a middle-distance girl, and that was fine. Somewhere between the ground at my feet and the visible horizon was where I belonged. It was useful information, and it had saved me a lot of unnecessary embarrassment over the intervening years.
And now Mike was standing in front of me, thirty years after crushing my hopes, looking just as dreamy as he’d been at eighteen. Dreamier, even. It was easy to be attractive at the age of eighteen, but attractive men in their late forties were rare unicorns indeed.
My eyes drank him in. All six-plus feet of him. A solid hunk of a man at any age.
