“All good.” She nods, being understandably short with me. Anytime she tries to extend an olive branch, I snap the damn thing in half.
“About yesterday.” I start, stopping to clear my throat.
“If you’re going to start being nice to me now that you know the truth about why I came back, don’t. I don’t need another person feeling sorry for me.”
“Good. Because I don’t feel sorry for you.” I huff. “I am, however, sorry.” I try to keep the edge from my voice. “I know how much dance meant to you.”
More than I meant to you, I think but don’t say.
But no matter how bitter I feel about her leaving, I can’t imagine what losing dance has done to her. I don’t know who London is if she’s not twirling around on a stage. I doubt she has any idea who she is now either. And I certainly have not made the transition home on her any easier...
She scribbles something into the ledger in front of her, not bothering to look over at me.
“Thanks,” she finally says after a few long seconds.
“Can we start over?” I blurt, not even sure where the damn words came from.
This has her head lifting and her eyes finding mine. She’s surprised, that much is obvious, but she’s also suspicious, which again, is fair.
“Start over?” Her expression turns to confusion.
“We were friends once, were we not? Maybe we could try that again?”
“You want to be my friend?” Her brow furrows.
“I don’t want to be your enemy.”
“You never were,” she says almost too quietly for me to catch it.
“Look, you’re here. And I’m here. And what happened in the past happened and there’s no changing it. But that doesn’t mean we have to make each other’s lives miserable. Surely, we can find a way to be cordial to one another.”
She thinks on that for a long moment.
“I’d like that.” I can literally see her shoulders sag in relief, almost as if she’s spent the last few weeks holding her breath.
Guilt slams into me like a freight train.
“Good.” I close my laptop and stand. “Now, if you’ve got a second, I need you to come with me.”
“Where are we going?” She doesn’t move from her seat.
“To see your dad. He’s doing some work on a couple of the boats and I need to nail down the exact estimates. Since you’redoing the books right now, I think it would be beneficial for you to tag along.”
“Okay.” She hesitates before standing, then grabs two ledgers off her desk and clutches them to her chest. “Lead the way.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
London
“How do you come up with the names when you buy a new boat?” I ask, walking across the deck of the largest fishing vessel in the lineup—Northern Star.
So far today, we’ve walked through The Mary Time, which took a lot of damage in a pretty bad storm that moved through just a few days before I returned to town. My dad thinks it’s not worth fixing, but I can tell Penn really wants to save it. And a smaller vessel named Independence, which I know to be Travis’s boat. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t there during our walk-through. Since our little show the other day, he’s made himself scarce.
I’ve been hoping to run into him so that I can thank him. I wouldn’t have believed it, but that little kissing stunt of his really shifted things between me and Penn. Not that things are magically okay, but the last two days haven’t completely sucked.
Instead of dirty looks and silent treatments, Penn has actually been treating me like an employee. He’s friendly, professional, and most importantly, not an a-hole. I’ll take being treated like a subordinate over being treated like poop on the bottom of his shoe that he just can’t seem to scrape off any day.
“Depends on the boat,” Penn answers after a long beat, his back to me as he checks the gauges inside the cabin.
