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And not only because we’d sunk both of our savings into it.
But because it had stabilized our lives.
Before it, we were always so flighty, both of us moving around from place to place, never quite feeling settled, never truly giving our roots enough time to dig deep.
I was pretty sure the year and a half we’d been in this little area of New Jersey was the longest either of us had stayed put.
Well, my mom had once.
Being born into a middle-class suburb, her parents had lived and died in the house she’d been raised in. They never traveled. They never even wanted to.
It was why my mom had left the week of her eighteenth birthday. To stretch her wings. To explore. To find a different kind of happiness for herself that didn’t involve a mortgage and 401k, things that never suited her spirit.
But, as I rounded out my twenty-fifth year, I started craving things like the same house to wake up in every morning, the same sights and faces. And, yes, the same job. But only if it was a job I could pour my heart and soul into.
As I said, I wasn’t creative like my mom.
I didn’t paint and sculpt and write amazing short stories like she did.
But I was good with people.
I guess I could give credit on that to my mother as well, the woman who took me everywhere with her, who taught me by example how to speak to every single person I came across with kindness and interest.
So I was overjoyed at the idea of getting to talk to a bunch of people every day. Maybe, over time, having regulars that I would know and have deep conversations with.
I also got to take care of the plants, do the cleaning, pick the music. All tasks I enjoyed.
While my mom did the food art. Something she put her whole heart into.
Which was why we needed business to pick up.
Because I was pretty sure it would crush my mom if we had to close up, if she couldn’t make a living creating all these wonderful dishes of hers.
It would crush me too.
Because I was starting to really like it here.
I was hopeful.
Business had been getting better week by week. All we needed was the right buzz, and we would not have to worry again.
Around six-thirty, I opened the door to the restaurant and set to making the Pretty Water and brewing fresh coffee. Between that and the fresh pastries making their way into the dessert case, the place smelled magnificent by the time the first diners came in for the day.
Being a weekday, we didn’t typically have a lot of dine-in visitors. We had several people picking up coffee and a treat to eat on their way to work, though. And we could always count on some ladies coming in for a little girlfriend date. We also had a book club that typically met each Wednesday, eating and chatting and filling the place with laughter.
I had been fiddling with a leg that had broken off one of the storage cabinets under the counter when I heard our little bird door chime—something my mom had picked up from a craft show in South Carolina when we’d first started talking about getting serious about opening a restaurant.
I’d been a little surprised to hear a man answering me from above.
I didn’t like to stereotype based on something as silly as gender, but we did tend to see more women in our establishment than men.
I absolutely hadn’t been prepared for the most gorgeous man I had ever seen to be standing there in front of me.
He was tall and fit under his black tee and basketball shorts, and I was maybe a little too interested in the shape of his arms, of the breadth of his chest, of the slope of his hips.
Ugh, fine.
Did I wonder about his cock too? Yes, yes I did.
