Love Beyond Words (City Lights: San Francisco Book 1) (8 page)

Natalie met her friend’s eye, struggled not to look away. “Funny. I feel as if I could say the exact same thing about you.”

Liberty colored under her pale make-up.

“Now, ladies,” Marshall intervened. “Kiss and make up before the claws really come out and someone gets scratched. Namely, me.”

“Come on.” Liberty tugged Marshall’s arm. “Let’s go.”

Marshall made an imploring face at Natalie but she just shook her head. He let himself be dragged out of the café, miming “I’ll call you.”

Natalie watched them go, her hands shaking and tears stinging her eyes. She attended to her customers and waited for Julian to come. He never did.

#

Julian’s absence stretched into days. Natalie wanted to be angry but she reminded herself she had nothing to be angry about. He owed her nothing. He could come and go as he pleased, no explanation needed or required. Despite their intimate conversations, he was, for all intents and purposes, just a customer.

Natalie wondered if Liberty (with whom she made up the moment Liberty recovered from her Halloween hangover) had been right after all. Perhaps Julian was already in a relationship. Or that he was toying with her. Neither notion felt true; he never spoke of another man or woman in his life, and he seemed to enjoy her company. But even
friends
exchanged numbers, socialized outside of work.
Maybe we’re not even that.

She cursed her own weakness.
Jane Austen’s heroines were more progressive than you are,
she thought.
Take the initiative!

It was a slow night and Natalie was reading behind the register when Julian returned. He was dressed impeccably, as always: a wool coat over a black cashmere sweater and stylish jeans. She quailed at the idea of putting him on the spot, but there was a dearth of equilibrium between them that needed to be remedied.

But instead of sitting him down and having a serious conversation about what—if anything—was between them, the night progressed as it always had. He wrote furiously for two hours and then they shared a pastry while chatting about everything under the sun except for
them
.

For the first time, Natalie began to fear that
them
was nothing.

On the fifteenth of November, Natalie came into the café a few minutes early for her shift. Niko was at a table, laughing and talking loudly with a customer. She waited, shuffling her feet and tapping her fingernails on her teeth until he was finished.

“Natalia! Such a good girl!” Niko took her cheeks in his thin, tough hands and giving her a playful shake. “I was hoping to sneak out a bit early to get Petra a bucket of flowers? She tells me I’m no romantic. Pfft. I go, yah?”

“Yah…uh, yes. As soon as you say yes to my request.” The smile on her face was so plastic she could practically feel it try to slide off.

“Uh oh.” Niko’s exuberance dimmed. He crossed his arms over his apron. “You have that look on your face. That one you wear when you don’t want me to worry. And you know what it does? It makes me worry.”

“You don’t have to.”

Niko rubbed his chin. “Mmm. Well? What is this request? That you work sun-up to sundown? Until you drop from tiredness? Eh? Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” Natalie said. “I have four days off from school around Thanksgiving, and I have practically the entire month of December off.”

“Natalia…”

“I’ll take as many double-shifts as you’ll give me. Let Sylvie and Margo take whatever time off they want. And you can take Petra somewhere on a romantic vacation and prove her wrong.”

Niko sighed. “The holidays is hard for you, I know this. But Natalia…”

“Just say yes, Niko. Please.”

“Maybe I don’t want to say yes, eh? Maybe I want you to have Christmas with us. And Thanksgiving too. Come on! Greek-style! We’ll have homemade spanokopita, some paidakia—grilled so nice—and tzatziki instead of stuffing. All your friends be jealous...”

Natalie braced herself against his generosity, arms crossed over her chest, eyes cold and unblinking. She felt herself leaning towards him, longing to be engulfed in his fatherly embrace. Impossible. She’d start crying and wouldn’t stop and then Niko would be late for his date with his marvelous wife.

Niko wilted. “Okay, you win. I’ll have Petra write up the schedule and post it next week.”

“Thank you, Niko…” Natalie began but the kind man gently took her chin in his hand and tilted her face to his.

“I do this for you, Natalia,” he said, “for the last time. Next year, you eat with friends or you eat with us. And Christmas too.” His smile was sad. “This pain in your heart stays so long, my girl, because you are holding on to it so tightly.”

He released her chin with a pat on the cheek and left her standing alone behind the register. She jumped when a customer approached, bumbled their order, and spilled their coffee when she set it down.

#

After four years, Natalie thought she had the holidays pretty well in hand. Or as well as could be expected. Thanksgiving wasn’t that difficult. Only one day and generally celebrated behind closed doors. Natalie worked from eight in the morning until eight at night (Niko refused to allow regular hours if she insisted on working on a day he normally would have closed up shop). There were few customers. Julian didn’t show up—a fact that was equal parts relief and disappointment. She wondered where he was, with whom he was dining. His family? A lover? No one?

Natalie closed the cafe, went upstairs, and fired up a microwave dinner. Both Liberty and Marshall called and left careful messages on her machine that she erased the moment they finished playing. She watched
Manhattan Murder Mystery
on her tiny TV and when it was over, picked up Rafael Mendón’s poetry collection,
Starshine.
She cried a bit—but not too much—and went to bed. All in all, she considered it a pretty successful Thanksgiving.

Christmas and Hanukkah were worse, however. They were inescapable. Television commercials were an assault on her grief, with their endless portrayals of the family unit, either madcap or sentimental. Natalie shut off her TV and left it off for the entire month of December. School came to an unmerciful break and she worked her six double shifts per week—three more than Niko was comfortable with—letting the hours pile up, putting one day after the next. Julian still came to the café three or four times a week in the evenings, though Natalie never let on that she had been there all day and would be there the next. Never let on that she was struggling hard to make it out of this tunnel, to the innocuous dazzle of New Year’s.

One night, they sat together under the paper cut-out snowflakes the day baristas had made. They twisted in the soft currents of the café. Julian remarked about how tired she looked.

“It’s been a long day,” she said.

“Yes, this time of year can be exhausting,” he said. “Christmas is coming. Or…Hanukkah?”

“Both,” Natalie said, her stomach clenching. “Hanukkah from my mom, Christmas from my dad.”

“You must be leaving soon? To visit them?”

Here it was. She sat back in her chair, thinking how to navigate away from the question. Instead, she heard herself blurt, “They’re gone.”

She watched his face as he made the same inevitable calculations everyone else did: it was the holidays, no family, she would be alone. She braced herself for chafing platitudes of pity but instead he said, “I was in this area yesterday morning. I saw you here, behind the counter.”

“Niko needs the help and I could use the money.”

Julian said nothing. He ran his finger along the rim of his cup.

“Don’t feel bad for me,” Natalie told him. “It happened a long time ago and I don’t want to talk about it.”

He met her eyes. “I know the feeling.”

“Which feeling?” Natalie demanded. “There are so many, I hardly know where to start.”

“All of them. They’re undoubtedly of different tones and tenors, but I’m amazed at how many events in our life are striking the same chords.”

There was a silence then, and Natalie heard her words rush out. “My parents are dead. Car accident. Four years ago,” she said in single bursts, like a machine gun. Her eyes were full and challenging as they bored into his. He accepted.

“My father when I was ten, as I told you. My mother eight years later. Heart attack and cancer. One fast, like lightning. One slow, like a merciless poison.”

“Mine were both fast, like lightning.” Natalie could hardly whisper the words. “Which one is easier?”

He cocked his head and smiled sadly. “Which one do you think?”

“Neither.”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her cheek.

“Me too.”

They sat in silence under the snowflakes that hung above them, twisting lazily but never falling.

#

Niko had insisted that the café would be closed on Christmas Day but the Barbos family was in Key West for the holiday and Natalie had the key. She didn’t mark her time card, but opened up at eight a.m. and by noon had served only three people—each amazed at their luck on finding something open. No one came in for hours after that and Natalie began to wither. Her book couldn’t hold her; the pastries and coffees were stale with familiarity. It was ridiculous to stay but she couldn’t go back to her empty apartment either. The silence would be too much to take.

“I miss them,” she told the empty room, and soldiered on.

At two o’clock, the door chimed. Her book nearly slipped out of her hands as Julian walked in.

“I had thought the café would be closed,” he said. “But I also guessed it wouldn’t.”

The quiet of the café had been on the verge of unbearable. His voice was music and the beauty of him like a vibrant painting after staring at gray walls. Natalie valiantly fought against the tears of relief that threatened to flood her. “What are you doing here?”

“I was coming by your apartment. I thought maybe you’d like to go somewhere with me. I’m not sure what might be open,” he said, wearing that shy smile that still had the power to disarm her. “I didn’t think anything through.”

It’s happening. It’s finally happening.
Natalie took another deep breath, and the knot of pain in her gut relented to the sheer joy of seeing him. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“So am I.”

There was little to clean or tidy up; Natalie had the café dark and locked five minutes later. She threw on her coat and then she and Julian stepped out onto the street together.

Natalie inhaled deeply, feeling as if she’d just emerged from a stale, airless container, into the world. The chill wind was bracing and lovely. “Well?” Her smile split her face. “I think I would love to get out of this neighborhood. Can you stand to wait in the cold for a bus?”

“We could wait for a bus,” Julian said. “Or we could just take my car.”

A sleek black Mercedes sedan was parked at the curb.

“This is yours?” Natalie asked.

“It’s from a service.”

“Oh, well then I’m not as impressed.”

He laughed. “I don’t want you to be impressed; I want you to be warm.”             

He opened the door for her and Natalie bent to get in, but stopped. “Wait! I forgot something. I’ll just be a minute.”

She fumbled her keys out of her purse, unlocked the gate, then raced up to her place. On the coffee table was a square package, wrapped in white paper. A smaller oblong box sat atop the first, also wrapped in white, and both tied together with a red ribbon.

Natalie reached for the presents but once in her hands, she hesitated. The three black and white composition books were more of a tease. The pen, however, had cost her a pretty penny at an antique shop. When she saw it, she realized she couldn’t leave the store without it; it was too perfect for him.

Now, with a luxury car waiting downstairs for her, the books seemed silly and the card…She flipped it open.
Love, Natalie
in her neat, slanted script. She bit her lip. It was too obvious. It was all wrong. Julian hadn’t even told her what he was writing and here she was giving him books and pens…

“You have nothing else,” she said aloud. Her words echoed hollowly in her empty apartment. She stuffed the package into her bag and raced back downstairs.

Julian was still standing outside, his breath pluming before him in the cold.

“Oh, gosh, you should have waited in the car,” she told him.

“What kind of brute do you take me for?” He grinned and opened the passenger door for her.

The seats were soft leather and she felt fading warmth emanating through the cotton of her dress as she sat down.

“Heated seats? Okay, I’m
mildly
impressed.”

He started the engine. “They’ll warm up more in a moment,” he said. “I’m a little unprepared. I didn’t plan anything...”

“You know what? I’m actually really hungry,” Natalie said. “I skipped lunch. What about you?”