“You know it?” Saylor asks.
“Oh yeah. Me and Whit spent a couple obligatory summers here. There’s probably still grease in my veins from their burgers and fries because we ate there so much. They have the weirdest, best burgers. We’d always order the same thing then swap halfway through.”
“Great,” Saylor says, flicking on the blinker for nobody. We’re alone here, the only car trying to make a getaway. “What a perfect way to honor Whitney today. What’s the usual order?”
“Oh, I’m sure the menu’s changed.”
“Tell me anyway. Call it one more Whitney story.” At the bypass, he checks left-right-left-right with exaggerated caution, like someone who’s borrowed something valuable and is terrified of damaging it.
“Whit would get the spicy Hawaiian burger with barbecue sauce and pickled jalapeños, and I’d get…a different one.” I catch myself, remembering how weird this sounds to other people.
“A different one? Care to elaborate?”
“Not particularly.”
“Celeste. You asked me to plan your funeral. We’re way past bashful. Come on, out with it.”
“You’ll judge me.”
“Are you a lettuce-leaf bun kind of girl?”
“Woman,” I remind him. “And no.”
“Then, spill. I promise no judgment. Probably.”
Air leaves my lungs in a slow surrender. “It’s…a burger with a brioche bun, slathered with a bacon-and-berry compote, and a drizzle of a creamy peanut-infused reduction.”
Saylor is quiet for a long time. Just the sound of the blinker as he passes a red Hyundai going ten under the speed limit. When he’s safely reset into the right lane, he steals a glance in my direction. “Did you just try to make a peanut-butter-jelly burger sound fancy?”
Heat rises in my cheeks. “I said what I said.”
He bursts out in laughter. “Maybe I didn’t lie to the valet. With half a spicy Hawaiian burger, and your weird Frankenstein mash-up, we might both end up spewing from one end or the other.”
“We?” I ask, lifting a brow.
“Oh, yeah. I’m in this. Pickle for pickle. Oh wait, gross. You don’t put pickles on the peanut butter burger, do you?”
“What? That’s crazy.” My awkward laughter is an obvious confession. I tried pickles on it once. I didn’t hate it as much as I should have.
When our laughter fades, Saylor reaches across the center console and grabs my hand just for a moment before releasing it. “I’m sorry I asked you out earlier. I got swept up in the moment and it wasn’t the right timing.”
“It’s fine, Saylor. There’s been a lot of heightened emotions today. It’s natural to want to feel close to someone. I am not upset. We can just forget about it.”
“Yeah, maybe, but still. And I’m sorry for the future too.”
My head whips around. “What do you mean?”
“I mean a preemptive apology.”
“For what?”
He looks ahead at the road with feigned nonchalance. I swear I see the corner of his lips twitch into a smile. “For when I ask you out again.”
Riptide looks exactly the same.
That’s the first thing that hits me—not nostalgia, not sadness, but the sheer stubbornness of a place that has refused to change. The same sun-bleached wooden sign with the wave logo. The same screen door that doesn’t close all the way. The same neon beer signs glowing in the window, one of which has been flickering since two thousand six, and evidently will flicker until the sun explodes.
The memories come at me next, wrapped up in the enduring smell of grease and salt and something sweet—the buns, maybe. They bake them in-house, or they used to. The aroma itself throws me into a time machine, and suddenly I’m twenty-one years old, sitting across from Whitney in the corner booth, splitting a basket of fries and arguing about whether Orlando Bloom or Viggo Mortensen was the superiorLord of the Ringslove interest. Whitney was team Viggo. Rugged, broody, tortured. Of course he was the finer hero. We eventually agreed I was wrong, and she never let me forget it.
