Her eyes widen comically. “Oh, Jesus. Did someone send it to you?” She looks panicked, and I’m overcome by the urge to reassure her.
“No. When I found out you’d leased Pier Seven, I looked you up. It was in a comment on one of your social posts.”
“Oh, dear god.”
“It disappeared later,” I say. Though in telling her so, I’m revealing that I looked her up more than once. “I have to admit ... I didn’t know what to think.”
“Ugh.” She walks over to the edge of the pier and drops her bag. She sits down, legs dangling over the side.
I hesitate only briefly.
Then I go sit down next to her. We watch the water lap and froth against the rocks in the shadows below the pier. I wait for her to explain, or to tell me to fuck off, or to do anything.
I don’t care if I have to wait here all night, I need to know. I need to knowher. Just a little fucking something so I can stop fucking wondering and driving myself crazy.
Sheisa mystery.
Beautiful and kind of sweetly awkward, sassy and sharp and a fucking mystery.
I have no idea what really makes her tick, and at this point, I would kill to know one fucking thing.
One thing she tells me herself, and not when she’s drunk.
“Look, I did not make that meme,” she says softly. “I told you my boyfriend broke up with me days before I arrived in Orchard Cove. The whole story is, his family was investing in my business. I was going to buy a small brick and mortar store in Vancouver to open a permanent Cutie Fruitie location. And they were providing the down payment, connections, experience. I really couldn’t have done it without them.”
She kicks her feet slowly in the air, and I wait for her to spill the rest of her secrets to me and the sea. As many as she’ll give us.
“We were on a video call, to celebrate, because they’d found me the perfect location,” she goes on. “Kyle, me, his parents, and several other relatives involved with their family-run investment business were on the call. And I made the incredibly stupid mistake of not realizing that there was a large, anatomically detailed dildo on my bedside table in the background. Everyone noticed it before I did. Kyle was at his place and like, yelled at me over the video call. His family hung up. But not before I guess his sneaky, pimply little cousin recorded the whole mess so he could immortalize me in a purple dick meme. Which he then blasted out to Kyle’s entire contact list for shits and giggles.”
Silence stretches, marred only by the rhythm of the water hissing over the rocks below.
“Fuck me” is all I can say.
“Yeah. Technology in the hands of the children. Terrifying.”
“So . . . that comment about how ‘big’ it was . . . ?”
“I was talking about the location Kyle’s dad found for me, for the smoothie shop. It was way beyond my expectations and I was fucking thrilled.”
I swallow the urge to laugh and clear my throat instead. “I mean, I could see that. You seemed very excited about the size of it.”
Our gazes connect and she bites her lip. Is she trying not to laugh?
“I suppose it wouldn’t salvage some small part of your opinion of me,” she ventures, “if I were to explain that the dildo was just a gag birthday gift from my best friend, and not, like, my faithful bedtime ritual or anything. Kyle sure didn’t believe it.”
“Hey, no judgment here. My opinion of you is already as low as it gets, based entirely on our business rivalry.”
A hint of amusement flickers over her pretty lips. “Well, thank you. I appreciate the professional courtesy.”
We sit in silence for a moment, warmth in the air between us. A tension effervescent with humor thatalmostbubbles to the surface and breaks. I’m still not totally sure if she’s struggling not to laugh, but I sure as fuck am.
“So ...” I test the waters. “Never used it, huh?”
“Oh, I did,” she says sharply. “Once. After Kyle dumped me and refused to even hear that it was brand new and had never been sullied, because he was so offended I’d subjected his parents’ eyeballs to a sex toy that had intimate knowledge of my vagina ... there was a definite hate-fuck situation.”
I study the side of her face as she gazes into the water, and heat spreads through my body. “You ... hate-fucked the dildo to get back at your ex-boyfriend?”
“Oh, yeah.” She glances at me, eyes sparkling, but covers her mouth with her hand. “It made alotof sense at the time.”
