Mouth to Mouth (Beach Kingdom 1)
“Yeah,” Rory said thickly, relief filtering in, warming him with something that resembled hope. “I can do that.”
Several heavy beats passed before Jamie put a hand over his heart and spoke. “Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment—”
“Christ,” Rory muttered, coming to his feet and turning before Jamie could see his smile. “Shut up, Jamie.”
His middle brother stood, too. “Don’t interrupt me when I’m quoting Vonnegut.”
Jiya chose that moment to arrive at the bottom of the stoop, an apron dangling from her hand. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing,” all three brothers said at the same time.
It didn’t feel like nothing, though. It felt like the beginning of something.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Olive sat in the window of a coffee shop sipping an iced coffee and skipping around between her favorite scenes of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, her go-to comfort read. Every person who passed by the glass storefront were jovial, relaxed. On their way to the beach. She wanted to follow in their wake and warm herself in the sunshine again, but she remained glued to the chair, shivering in the air conditioning. She reached the part in the book where the reader meets Zaphod Beeblebrox, a two-headed, three-armed former president of the Galaxy—and ship thief—dismayed when she didn’t experience her usual sense of solace.
She hadn’t been back to the beach in two weeks. Two weeks since she’d been pulled from the ocean, had a sexual awakening and been cast aside. All in a matter of hours. It was impressive, really, how many peaks and valleys she’d managed to cram into one afternoon. Maybe she should call Guinness and apply for world record status.
Olive grimaced into a sip of watered-down coffee. It wasn’t like her to be so negative, but she’d taken a lot longer to recover from Rory Prince than expected. As in, she hadn’t recovered. Hardly at all. Every time she left her apartment, she swore he would be waiting outside, that serious, this-is-a-bad-idea expression cemented on his gorgeous face. Walking through Long Beach, she always had the fresh sense she’d just missed seeing him. Which was crazy. She was crazy.
Her focus should be squarely on acing her summer class and beginning a sterling college career. And it had. She’d been more meticulous than usual when writing papers and studying for quizzes, mostly in the name of distraction. She only allowed herself to pine for Rory after she finished her homework, and she almost always stuck to that incentive/reward system.
Just kidding.
This cavernous feeling in her stomach refused to be filled, no matter how many food truck dinners she fed it. It would, though. It had to, because Rory obviously wasn’t coming back. Nor was he going to call the number she’d scrawled on the straw wrapper. Was it still in his locker?
For the millionth time in the last two weeks, she wondered if she’d walked away from Rory too soon. He’d just told her something serious. A majorly serious thing. That he’d been in prison for putting a man in a coma. A smart girl such as herself was well within the parameters of common sense to run away and never look back. Except for two things.
One, he’d practically tripped over himself to make sure Olive knew he was bad news. Would someone with a conscience do that? Or would they act selfishly, take what they wanted and let the other person suffer in due course?
And the second reason she should have checked herself before turning away?
The way he made her feel wasn’t going to come around again. At only eighteen years old, people might laugh at her for being so positive of that notion. Well, so be it. She absorbed a little more knowledge with every book she read. Olive had walked in a million sets of shoes, throughout dozens of unique genres, living through the heartache of others and combing through the world’s philosophies while hidden away on the second floor of her parents’ house. She’d only lived for eighteen years, but her soul held the weight of lifetimes. If she never saw Rory again, she would wonder what they could have been until she grew old. She just knew it. That’s why she’d shouted at him to come back the day they’d met. It’s why she couldn’t sleep anymore.
And God, wasn’t that terrifying? All of it. It was so scary, she didn’t think the air conditioner was responsible for making her shiver anymore.
Rory, this person she’d felt drawn to so entirely since laying eyes on him…had blown her off. Two weeks later, there was no denying that. The day they’d broken up—because a break-up is exactly how it had felt, even if they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend—she’d compared Rory to her parents. It had been an emotional response and she’d regretted throwing it in his face.