“You don’t think I can hang?”
Aubrey lifted an eyebrow, nothing but challenge in her as she slid out of the booth and stared back at him, one hip cocked out in defiance. “I am the Hog Wild shuffleboard champion three years running.”
“Oh we’ve got a badass here, huh?” He followed her out of the booth. “Thinking of joining the granny gang when you’re older?”
“Joining?” She snorted. “I’m going to run it.”
And three games of shuffleboard later, he was pretty sure she’d run the gang like she ran his ass on the painted deck. He hadn’t just lost, he’d been destroyed. Now, deep into the fifth game he wasn’t playing to win anymore, he was using his ineptitude as an excuse to be close to Aubrey.
Was it pathetic of him to have sweet talked her into teaching him how to play so that she’d stand behind him and wrap her arms around him to teach him proper form? Most definitely. He was okay with that.
“How did you learn to do this?” He took a step back so he could get the amazing full view of her in those shorts as she lined up her shot.
Creeper? Him? When it came to Aubrey it seemed so.
“There’s not exactly a whole lot to do in Salvation.” She did this shimmy thing with her hips and slid her puck forward with just enough speed to bang into his and knock it off the board. “It was either go play shuffleboard at Hog Wild, our local honky tonk, or traipse out into the woods to help Ruby Sue with her moonshine operation. I went with the one that wouldn’t end with me in jail.”
“Is that where Ruby Sue is?” he asked as he walked over to the wall near a support divider.
It was a spot he’d already noticed was shielded from the view of people walking the other way on the deck and the ping pong table around the corner. He put his shuffleboard stick into the holder attached to the wall and sat down on the single lounge chair, daring her without saying a word to come over.
“Are you kidding?” Aubrey laughed and strutted her way to him. “She’s got to be in her seventies at least and is the only one who knows the secret ingredient in her pecan pie recipe so no one else could make it if she got locked up. I pity the sheriff if he ever tried to lock up Ruby Sue.” She put her stick next to his and sat down on the chair between his legs, leaning back against his chest. “The town of Salvation would turn on him before the single light on Main Street turned from green to red.”
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close as they both looked out onto the horizon. “What’s your life like when you’re not kicking ass at shuffleboard?”
“Not the way I expected it to be that’s for sure,” she said with a chuckle.
Aubrey might be trying to keep it light but there was no missing the tension stringing her tight. For the first time since they’d met it felt like he was getting to see more of the person she was rather than just the image she presented to the world. If he was someone else he may not have realized, but there was no one more equipped to understand perception versus reality than a guy who’d spent the past decade in Hollywood. Life had taught him that there were always layers.
“I went back to help my gran out at her bakery thinking that I could sell some donuts and write on the side,” she continued. “That was my plan anyway. But then Gran had a stroke. She recovered fully—thank God—but she can’t take care of things like before and I’m all she has left so I’m not going to leave her.”
He could picture that. Watching her interact with her friends—even when she was stealing one of their pants—showed just how much they all cared about each other.
“What do you want to write?” he asked, genuinely curious about what else she was hiding behind all that impulsive extrovert exterior.
“Narrative non-fiction about people like Andrée Borrel who was the first female paratrooper who was recruited to parachute into occupied France to train the resistance, or Gertrude Benham who circumnavigated the globe seven times before she died in 1938.” The words came out in a rush of excitement, as if they’d been building inside her for a lifetime, leaving a heavy silence after they were
all said as if she needed a minute to box all those hopes and dreams back up. “Instead, I’m up at o’dark hundred making donuts and running the bakery. It’s hard to travel for research if you have to fill the Long Johns or refill the coffees of the old men in town who spend their mornings gossiping over crullers before handling the accounts, putting in the supply orders, and everything else involved in running a business.”
“So you’re doing what you need to do but not what you want. I can understand that.”
“No offense,” she said, sitting up and twisting around at the waist to give him a look of disbelief. “But are you serious? You know what that’s like, Mr. Movie Star?”
Not surprised by her reaction, he shrugged. “I want more than to be The Admiral.” He paused, waiting for the lightning strike from the fates or the super fan with the IG to pop around the corner, phone at the ready to snap video of his confession. He’d never said that out loud to anyone except his brother. He hadn’t planned on saying it out loud to Aubrey. It just sort of happened. It seemed confessions to virtual strangers who a person never saw again wasn’t just a thing that happened in the movies. “That’s not to say I don’t appreciate everything that’s happened. I do. I know a lot of people don’t get the chances that I have. Still, I feel hemmed in sometimes or like I betrayed the person who I was going to be.”
“That I feel.” Aubrey relaxed back against him, letting out a long sigh. “I love my gran but I miss that person I was in college. She was fun and had all sorts of plans and dreams.”
“Is that what this week is about for you, getting some of that back?”
“At least for a little while, yeah I guess it is.” She sat up, her ornery sparkle glinting again in her eyes. “Speaking of which, how about we play one last time and loser buys ice cream?”
The quick conversation change nearly gave him whiplash but he understood. There was giving someone a peek at the soft underbelly and then there was throwing everything wide and letting someone really take a long eye full. He wasn’t into that either.
“I feel like I’ve been hustled,” he teased. “Don’t think it went unnoticed that you really were telling the truth about being a champion shuffleboard player. I thought it was hyperbole. Are you keeping any other secrets that I should know about?”
Her cheeks turned pink and she hurried off the chair, all but skipping a few steps away in her rush. “Forget the game, let’s just go grab ice cream. My treat.”
Seriously, he was going to need to get a neck brace if she kept switching things around so quickly. Not that there was any question of him not going with it. Ice cream and Aubrey were a pretty damn good combination.