Best Served Cold

With that done, I changed from the skirt into a pair of shorts in the bathroom. In hindsight, I probably should have done that two hours ago when the store closed, but I hadn’t thought about it at all.

“Ready?” Chase asked.

I nodded. “Where are we going?”

He pursed his lips in thought. “We can either go to my place or we can go to the beach. It’s not too hot out there now.”

I considered the options for a second before saying, “Beach. Let’s go.”

***

He was right. It wasn’t too hot. It was hot enough that you knew it was Florida in the summer, but not so hot that you wanted to claw your eyeballs out of your head.

Which happened unfortunately often.

We dropped down onto our spot. The one where we’d had our first date and the one where he’d told me he was still in love with me. It was weird—I hadn’t been to this spot unless I was with him. The emotional attachment you could form to a place baffled me.

Chase leaned back on his hands, but I used my purse as a pillow and laid down flat. He chuckled, shifting back up the sand so he could look down at me to talk.

“That tired, huh?”

I nodded. “But if I go to sleep now, I’ll wake up stupidly early tomorrow, and the circle will repeat itself.”

“Yep. I think you’re going to have an insane few weeks.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel like I should buy stock in Red Bull for all the cans I’m going to buy.” I sighed. “At least Marnie will be there to help tomorrow, even if she just rings up orders and cleans tables.”

“I can help you for a bit, you know.”

“How? It’s not like I can pay you, and you need to get started on your store.” It was all I’d heard all day yesterday was how excited he and Grandpa were to turn the store into something amazing and different to anything they’d seen in the area.

“Yeah, sure,” Chase said, looking out at the water. “But it’s not that simple. I think he’s trying to see if he can buy the space from my landlord before anything happens. There’s stuff I think he wants to do that he needs permission for.”

“I’m shocked,” I muttered. “Do you think your landlord will sell?”

“I’m not sure. I think he’s open to it. He did half-ass offer it to me, but I wasn’t in any position to buy it.” He paused. “And I didn’t want to buy it.”

“Yeah, yeah, you were only supposed to be there a couple months.” I reached over and nudged him. “You and your stupid ideas.”

He laughed, lying down with me but rolling onto his side. “Can I ask you something?”

“Only if you’re not proposing.”

“Not yet.”

“Reassuring. Carry on.”

His eyes twinkled, then darkened. “Are you still mad that I took your ideas?”

“No.”

Chase raised his eyebrows. “You’re not?”

“Nope.” I rolled onto my side too and picked at a bit of grass that was coming through the sand. “Look—I can be mad at you for that, but it doesn’t achieve anything. You’re not Dr. Who. You can’t go back in time and change what you did. Although that would be a handy skill to have.”

“I wholeheartedly agree. We’d both change things, I think.”

“We would.” I let my lips tug into a small smile. “I think it was a good thing in the end. Grandma told me that I needed to make the store my own. The original ideas were something I thought I wanted, but the more I look at the store now, the more I see that it’s me. My personality shines through in it a lot more.”

“I don’t know. There’s not a whole lot of sharp teeth. It’s pretty deceiving.”

I smacked his arm, laughing. “You shut it. I’m still shocked at how it turned out.”

“I’m shocked you did it and didn’t hurt yourself again,” he teased with a big smile. “It was looking like it’d happen at one point.”

I poked my tongue out at him. “It wasn’t all me, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll still be apologizing for the toe thing in ten years.” He shook his head. “Women. Never let anything lie.”

“Except sleeping babies.”

“Always a good choice.”

I laughed and looked out at the water. “Do you think we’ll still be together in ten years?”

“Only if we don’t kill each other,” he replied, laughing too. “I do. I mean, if we can make it work after the last two years, don’t you think we can do it longer?”

“It’s only been like four days since I actively made a choice to stop hating your peachy little butt,” I reminded him. “So that’s quite cocky.”

“I know.” He reached over and pushed me onto my back, leaning over me. “But I know we will be.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because,” he whispered, pushing a stray bit of hair from my face. “Rae, you’re my penguin.”