The Fortune Cafe (23 page)

“Sweetie, I saw this coming from the first day I was up there. I think that neighbor of yours might be crazy about you.”

The possibility made her heart pound hard enough to drown out the crash of the waves in front of her. “I don’t know, Mom. He’s always ready to help me out if he thinks I need it, but I don’t want him to see me as some project. And even if you’re right, I don’t think the day and crime scene of my canceled wedding is the time or place to convince him that I’m not rebounding.”

“I’m sure you’ve got a plan,” her mom said.

“Time.” It would take a lot of time actually, but she’d convince Carter that Blake was a misguided idea she’d had that was as much in the past as her untouched box of high school mementos in her parents’ garage. Only Blake wasn’t something she was interested in holding on to. “I’ll play it cool, be his friend for a while, slowly add in some flirting until he can’t miss the signals, and then I’ll graduate out of the friend zone.”

“Why not just say something to him— ask him where his head is at?”

“Because I really want this to work out, and right now I’m standing about three miles down the road from where I was going to get married at noon. He’s not going to trust anything I say while we’re here.” She’d love to go back to the hotel, grab him, and kiss him as a wordless announcement of where she wanted them to go. But for now, no matter how many new discoveries she made about Carter’s hotness and his fascinating mind, no matter how often he made her laugh until her stomach hurt, she’d be his friend until he understood that she was already over Blake.

“I think you should just talk, but I guess it never hurts to take things slow. But make sure you don’t move so slowly that he can’t even detect the forward motion, okay? I like that boy for you.”

“Don’t worry, Mom. I like him for me too. I’m going to play this right.”

They hung up, and a half hour later, she was back at the Mariposa. It was a letdown to find the room empty, but she knew Carter had to be around somewhere. She stepped into the bathroom to shower. Steam and the smell of soap lingered from the shower Carter had already taken. It was an odd sort of intimacy that took her straight back to eighth grade when Aaron Wellberg had gotten up from a lunch table to go shoot hoops with his friends, and she’d slipped into his spot while it was warm just so she could feel the traces of his body heat on the bench.

She walked out of the room thirty minutes later in cute shorts and a tank top, a touch of lip gloss, and her favorite hoop earrings, but she hadn’t done more than blow-dry her hair because Carter had said once that he liked how it looked when she let it go natural instead of straightened. The almost-curl in it seemed somehow more right here by the beach anyway.

“So... bikes?” Carter asked, looking up from his laptop to smile at her. His hair looked like he’d tried and failed to tame it, strands of it already trying to reclaim their cowlick status.

“We’re going about twenty miles. Think you can handle it?”

He rolled his eyes, “Yeah, Lance Armstrong. Maybe you better hit up your secret sauce so you can keep up.”

She grinned. “It’s not a race. It’s one of those days where I want to enjoy every minute because it was so close to being such an epically wrong turn. I want to savor every second of being back on track.”

His eyebrow rose. “That sounds... um, much better than I thought you would.”

“I’m taking my life back, no big deal.”

He grinned back at her. “Yeah, no big deal.”

“I want to swing by the jeweler and pick up my necklace first. Seems like a good way to kick all this off.”

Worry crossed his face. “Is it a big deal if we don’t go by until this afternoon?” He nudged a backpack that Lucy hadn’t noticed. “I went and picked up some lunch for us. It’s not going to keep forever, but I thought it would be fine if we got on the bikes right away.”

Lucy shrugged. “Yeah, we can do it after the bike ride. She told me once that afternoons are less crazy for her anyway. What’d you get for lunch?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“Isn’t everything with you?”

“Yes. Bring me to the bikes, woman.”

On the way out of the hotel, she narrated the sites of canceled wedding activities in the serious tones of a news anchor describing an accident scene. “And there is where Lucy Dalton almost held her rehearsal dinner. It was a narrowly averted disaster since Dave Dalton would most likely have punched Calvin Sefton. Hard.”

Carter smiled at her fake news voice, but it didn’t turn the creases around his eyes into smile lines. Well, he’d see as the day went on how relieved she was to be here presiding over the ashes of her plans and
not
celebrating a misguided wedding.

They picked up beach cruisers, and Carter made Lucy laugh by insisting on a girly bike because it had a basket in front where he could put his backpack. For the next ten miles he played tour guide with fake information. “The house on our left was once owned by the millionaire who invented the bendy straw. His name was actually Ben D. Straw, so it’s not like he could invent anything else. That large boulder on the right is called the Goliath Booger because, well, look at it.”

“Gross. Goliath Booger? Are you twelve?”

“Sometimes I feel like I am when I’m around you,” he said, grinning.

A couple of times he made her laugh so hard she swerved like she was trying to bike after a night of tequila. Around mile eleven, he settled down to study the undeveloped coastline stretching down either side of the highway. She took advantage of the chance to steal glances at him, at the way he watched the passing scenery with nothing but a smile, like enjoying the view was the only thing in the world he had to do.

She loved that smile. Whatever she’d seen Carter do, he did only that thing, whether he was deep inside a coding problem for his app or people watching at the park. He was so
present
in a way she’d never mastered. When he listened to her, he only wanted to know what she had to say. He wasn’t parsing it so he could figure out what to say next.

He glanced over and she looked away, embarrassed to be caught. She wanted to hop off her bike right that second and drag him across the sand to play in the waves and then collapse and roll around in them with him
From Here to Eternity
style, hungry kisses and everything. Especially the hungry kisses.

She kept her eyes on the road ahead. How was she supposed to fake just-friends indefinitely?

A few more quiet miles slipped by. Every now and then Carter would ask her a question or point out a pelican or something. But to her it felt as if her whole mission on this bike ride was to keep him from catching her staring at him like Aaron Wellberg had often caught her doing in middle school— love-struck and hopeful.

She increased her speed, pushing the heavy beach cruiser bike to go faster. She was a grown woman, and she could keep it together, for pity’s sake. She just needed breathing room to reset.

“We racing?” Carter called, close behind her. Too close. She needed more space and a few minutes to get it together.

“No race,” she called over her shoulder. “Just getting some... stuff out. Feels good.” And she poured on more speed.

He kept pace, and even if she hadn’t been able to hear the hum of his tires, she would have sensed him there anyway. Her nerves had acquired intensely sensitive Carter antennae.

It didn’t take long before Carter was even with her, but she kept pushing. Her calves burned from the strain of powering the heavy bike until she morphed from a hurts-so-good to a just-plain-hurts situation. She pulled into a scenic outlook and climbed off to stretch.

Carter stayed on his bike. “Let’s call it a tie,” he said. The wind had destroyed any remaining order to his hair, and the sight of it paired with the satisfied grin on his face was so adorable that it stopped Lucy’s breath for a few seconds too long. She remembered to quit staring and inhaled on a gasp.

“You okay?” Carter asked, his smile fading.

“Yeah, I’m good. Winded from that sprint.” She turned toward the water. This was ridiculous.
Pull yourself together, girlfriend, because you aren’t going to convince anyone you’re emotionally stable like this.
“I think I need a few minutes alone. Is that okay?” she asked, daring a glance back at him.

His laugh lines had all been dragged downward with worry again. “Of course. Yeah, go ahead. Take as long as you need. I brought my camera, so I’ll just stay up here and shoot.”

She trudged through the sand until she was a few yards short of the tide line. It was warm enough for people to be out flying kites or running, but still too cool for many of the locals to be in the water. Her research on an ideal date for a beach wedding had been dead on. This would have been a perfect day, but not one molecule of her regretted that she was sitting here in shorts and a tank instead of a wedding dress.

She dug into her front pocket for the slip of paper she’d taken from her purse before leaving the hotel.
True love is for the brave, not the lucky.
Flecks of dried soy sauce speckled it, a reminder of the disastrous lunch where she’d gotten the cookie. It had bothered her so much then— the fact that she’d gotten her first generic fortune right after breaking her necklace.

Maybe it was possible to make this is as true as any fortune that had ever predicted her promotion or winning lottery numbers. “Just talk to him,” her mom had said. And Lucy had told her she was afraid of ruining a good thing. That wasn’t brave.

What if she were brave enough to ask Carter if she was more than a project to him? She thought she was more. At the very least she was someone fun for him to hang out with.

Was that all? If she had the courage to ask, would “love” really favor her?

It would be a lot easier to try if she knew her bravery was backed by luck, and her hand fell away from the spot where her necklace should be. She wished she had insisted on them stopping by Spyglass.

A trio of seagulls to her right scattered and flew away. She looked up and found Carter trudging toward her, his backpack slung over one shoulder and his hands in his pockets. He dropped down beside her. “Sorry. You’re just making me too sad. I brought you something.”

“Lunch?” she asked, eying the backpack.

“Eventually. Something else first.” He rose to his knees to dig in his pocket.

“Why am I making you sad?” she asked. “I’m not sad.”

“Then you do a good imitation of it,” he said on a grunt as he freed a small box. “Here. I think you’ve been wanting this.”

She took the white box with a picture of a Spyglass stamped on it and her eyes flew to his.

“Open it.”

Her fingers fumbled over each other in her hurry to check inside. There on a bed of cotton was her necklace, but it didn’t look the same. She frowned in concentration and pulled it out, letting it hang from her finger to study it more closely. The jade and its setting looked like they had the day her grandfather gave it to her, but something else hung with the pendant.

“You can take that off,” Carter said, the words flying out of his mouth faster than their bikes had sped over the highway trail.

“You know what this is?”

“Yeah. It’s an aspen leaf. I made a call a couple of weeks ago and asked Stella to add it, but you can remove it, and your necklace will be exactly what it was before.”

Lucy studied the intricate leaf done in the same gold filigree as the jade’s setting. “I don’t understand.”

Carter drew his knees up to his chest and clasped his arms around them. It was casual, but in a very deliberate way. He cleared his throat and looked somewhere past her head. “I’ve always paid attention to you. I’ve seen you wear that necklace a hundred times. I did a little research and the aspen leaf symbolizes determination. Sometimes I think you think that your luck thing makes you who you are the way that your eye color and your laugh do. But it doesn’t.” He met her eyes and took a deep breath. “I thought you should remember that the best parts of you have nothing to do with that necklace.”

She let the chain pool in her hand and touched the aspen leaf again. “I can’t believe you did this,” she said, awed by what he saw in her.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, it’s okay. I shouldn’t have done it. At least I didn’t have her fuse it on, right?” He rose to his knees again and dug through his backpack.

She tried again. “I meant that—”

He groaned at something inside his bag. “Man, I thought I had such a great idea to help you today. I was going to reverse engineer that whole day when you were down here with Flake and make this place a better memory for you, but I think I really, really suck,” he said, pulling out a dripping plastic bag with The Fortune Café logo on it. “Looks like now that you have your necklace back, our luck is reversing already. I can’t believe this exploded. I was super careful when I packed it.”

“Wait, you were trying to recreate the day my necklace broke?” she repeated, trying to understand his logic.

“No, reverse engineer it. I mean, that’s where it all fell apart, right?”

She nodded slowly. She
had
thought that. She didn’t now, but she’d put it that way to him when she’d told him about it one particularly rough night in the days after the breakup.

He shrugged, and set the bag down to rub at his sticky fingers with a napkin. “I know you’re into signs and stuff. I thought I’d turn this day into a sign that things are getting better. New and improved necklace, lunch from the same place as last time, but I rigged the cookie with a different fortune.” By now he was mumbling, whether out of embarrassment or in distraction as he tried to sop up the mess inside his backpack, Lucy wasn’t sure.

“You rigged my fortune cookie?” she repeated.

“Yeah. That’s hard, by the way,” he said. “It took me like twenty tries to do it at my place. I’m just glad I was smart enough to try it at home instead of here. Because I was definitely not smart when I thought egg drop soup would be good on a bike ride.”

She grabbed the bag and looked for the wax pouch inside where Chinese restaurants always put the fortune cookies and the soy sauce packets. Carter looked up when the bag rustled and his eyes widened. “You don’t need that,” he said, taking the pouch from her fingers. “It was a stupid idea. I’m going to get this mess out of here, and let you meditate or grieve some more or whatever I interrupted.”