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“Hmm. Okay, so, other than an insecure giant, what else are you looking for?”
He pours himself another beer, taking his sweet time. I imagine his steady hands stitching cuts and gently examining patients. It’s a jarring image given what I know about this man, and yet I can picture it so clearly.
“I don’t know that it concerns you,” I say. “If you’re mint chocolate chip ice cream and my favorite flavor is Rocky Road, there’s nothing you could say or do that would make you Rocky Road.”
His dimpled chin juts forward. “Never been compared to ice cream before.”
“Just illustrating my point,” I tell him. Words are kind of my thing.
While everyone expected me to go into a STEM-related career after high school, I accidentally took a left turn along the way and fell in love with public relations. Back in New York, I was able to marry the two, working for a PR firm that specialized in promoting various STEM-start-ups. In fact, I was in the process of negotiating a big promotion when the whole thing with Mason happened. I couldn’t get out of the city fast enough. I didn’t want to be reminded of my philandering fiancé and the life I thought we were creating together. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I went home to figure it out—something I’ve still yet to do.
Alec’s looking at me like he used to, like I’m that bratty little sister again.
“Okay, fair enough,” he says. “But maybe I want to know. What have you been up to lately? How’s your family?”
Ignoring the whole, What-I’ve-Been-Up-To thing, I sip my beer.
“My family hasn’t been up to much. Aidan and Cooper work for the same lumber yard up in Lewiston. My dad sold the hardware shop and retired when Home Depot came in. My parents still live in the house across from yours. Er, your old one.”
“Oh, yeah? Lots of good times there …” His emerald gaze grows distant for a moment, as if he’s reminiscing, though I find it difficult to believe Alec has a nostalgic bone in his body.
Our cranberry red Maine saltbox was perfectly nice for a middle-class family of five, and would’ve been absolutely phenomenal if not for one thing: the sprawling waterfront Mansfield manse, which was built when I was a little kid and entirely blocked our view of the ocean. It was all my parents could talk about until the Mansfields gave them free reign to use the walking path to their private section of beach.
Despite how beautiful and big Alec’s house was, though, he was always over at our place.
Always.
My parents used to joke that he was their third son, and Alec lapped it up like a kitten to warm milk, which I always thought was crazy because his mother was so glamorous and his father was so successful and we were so ordinary in comparison. While the Mr. and Mrs. Mansfield spent their Friday nights at the country club, my parents could usually be found at the bowling alley. Their vacations tended to be exotic and expensive and long. Ours tended to involve cramming into Mom’s Dodge Caravan and driving for hours upon hours, eating fast food, and stopping at various roadside attractions and free national monuments.
Shortly after Alec graduated from high school, however, the Mansfields sold their mansion to a reclusive older woman who put up fences and fast-growing evergreens that made sure we never became good neighbors. By the end of the new tenant’s first week there, she’d padlocked the gate to the beach path and plastered PRIVATE PROPERTY signs all over the place.
Alec fixes me with a stare, as if he’s unwrapping everything I haven’t said.
“What about you?” he asks.
“Me?”
“Yeah. What have you been up to?” The tone of his voice and the life in his eyes makes me think he’s truly interested, that he isn’t simply making small talk.
I answer with caution and give him the abridged version. “I moved out when I graduated from USM. My roommate, Madison, and I live on Main. In that old brick complex with the steel windows.”
He doesn’t need to know about Mason or my failed engagement.
It’s far from being any of his business.
Alec raises an eyebrow. I think he’s probably as shocked as I am embarrassed that I haven’t made much of myself since graduating at the top of my class ten years ago. I’ve run into a handful of high school teachers over the years who made no bones about hiding their disappointment. If they knew the full story, maybe they’d understand, but it’s not the kind of thing you talk about in passing.
I brace myself, waiting for him to ask why I threw my life away.
Only instead, he says, “Oh yeah. The one by Ted’s Pizza?”
“Is there any other?”
He laughs. “That’s where I live. What number are you?”
