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Now the world wanted a bespoke butcher experience. And Mateo, like his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him, was there to provide it. “Do you?” he asked. “Alice said you haven’t been back in five years.”
He glanced over to see her lift her chin, her eyes on the road ahead of them.
“I remember,” she said. In the tone that said, I remember everything. And the problem was, so did he. And the tension in the truck was almost too much. And it wasn’t just the sexual tension or all the questions they were afraid to ask or the answers they were afraid to hear. He wanted to roll down the window just to breathe.
“Why?” she asked, popping the tension. “Why didn’t you ever pick up the phone? Just to let me know you were okay.”
They were doing this. Really doing it.
“I was mad.”
“At me?”
“No. God no. At Max. Alice. Myself, mostly.”
“Why?”
Oh god. He really didn’t want to talk about this. Bringing it up made it real. Made it now. And he liked all this stuff in the past.
“Because I’d waited a year, Josie, to tell you how I felt, and I let the whole night get away from me. I was sober. And older. It should have happened another way.”
She opened her mouth and he knew she was going to apologize again. And he didn’t need her being more sorry for something that he didn’t blame her for.
“And I was embarrassed,” he said before she could say anything. “And proud. And being a martyr.” He managed to smile at her very serious face, her auburn hair poking out from under that hat in the most endearing way. “I knew you would get over me.”
“You knew that, did you?”
“You were young, Jose. And beautiful and about to start school in New York. You had everything ahead of you. When I think about it now, it was ridiculous to think there was even a chance the two of us could work.”
He stopped, waiting, maybe, for her to argue. He wasn’t sure. But she turned her face away, looking out the window. And her silence said plenty. It had been ridiculous to think that what they’d felt for each other would have survived. He’d been a sixteen-year-old kid inside a twenty-two-year-old body. He’d known nothing of the world or himself. And she’d been about to set the world on fire.
“And then it was just easier to move on. To forget.”
“Did you?” she asked.
“Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes I wouldn’t think about the Riverview for days.”
And other days it was all I could think about.
“And you must have,” he said.
“Must have what?”
“Moved on. Alice said you haven’t been back in five years.”
“Work,” she said, looking down at her hands, the red mittens they’d found in the closet to match the hat, because all her winter stuff was at Max and Delia’s. “It’s…all-consuming.”
“See? Clearly it was for the best. I mean, look at you, Josie. Look at what you’ve done. You’re so accomplished.”
He was trying to push them out of the past and into the present. The present he could talk about.
Come on, he thought. Let it go. Let who we were and what we were to each other go. Let that night go.
The tension between them pulled taut again, like she was wrapping her feelings around her fists, ready for a fight. But there was nothing to fight about. They were both okay. It had all been for the best. Surely, she had to see that.
And then she took a deep breath, and just like that the tension slipped away.
“I don’t know, you’re kind of a big deal, Cameron,” she finally said with a big smile and he sighed with relief. The muscles of his body loosened.
“Yes, in primitive cooking circles, I am a very big deal.” He smiled, the king of self-deprecation.
“All those chefs you’ve gotten to lure out of their kitchens to your campfire…”
“Well, once Jamie Oliver did it, it wasn’t hard to convince lots of them to try it.”
“Stop downplaying what you’ve done. You always did that,” she said. “Made your accomplishments seem like accidents when I know how hard you had to work for everything.”
He blinked.
“Funny,” he whispered. “You sound exactly the same as you did when we were kids.”
“Bossy?” she asked with a laugh. “Because I’ve kind of made a career out of it.”
“Yes. But I also never had a cheerleader quite like you.”
Yeah. He wasn’t so good at staying out of the past. Not with her. In every other part of his life, his childhood and his time at the inn were in a shoebox he could shove into some far closet corner. But with her, well…the past was very much part of his present.
He pulled the truck into town. A one-road stretch leading down to the Hudson, lined with shops and restaurants and bars. The street was dressed up in its very best Christmas clothes. Lights and greenery wrapped around the black cast-iron light posts. Wreaths were on every doorway. The shops selling last-minute stocking-stuffers and the restaurants offering lunches to those last-minute stocking-stuffer shoppers were doing a brisk business.
