Page 67 of The Cabin
He sets the pour-over on the stump-table by my rocking chair, and reaches into the paper bag, pulls out a bottle of champagne. My heart does a flip, and then hammers when he produces, next, a carton of orange juice.
Mimosas.
It feels too direct. Like he knows things about me he shouldn’t. I mean, it’s just mimosas. It’s a pretty common morning thing for a lot of people. He can’t know the joyful memories I have of mimosas.
Paris, with Adrian, sleeping in late and waking up to sip mimosas on the balcony with the Eiffel in the distance.
Weekend brunches in college with Adrian, Tess and Clint, Elmore and Tanya, and Kyle and Tanner, and we’d all crowd around a too-small table in our favorite brunch haunt and eat piles of fruit and pancakes and waffles and omelets from a chef station, and we’d get absolutely clobbered on mimosas and laugh ourselves stupid.
That trip to Germany with Adrian when we were promoting Pocketful of Posies. The hotel’s room service had been middling at best, but their mimosas came in giant goblets with fresh-squeezed orange juice and were stupid cheap, and we’d spend half the morning still buzzed from mimosas with breakfast.
“Uh. Pancakes need flipping,” Nathan says, shaking me from my reverie.
Crap. I smell them, and they’re about to burn. I fly over to the stove and flip them as fast as I can, and most of them are fine, but one of them is charred to inedibility.
“Sorry,” I say.
“No worries. I don’t mind them a little crispy.”
I snicker and tilt the burnt pancake so he can see it. “I think this may be a little bit beyond merely crispy, Nathan.”
His eyes widen. “Oh. Well, yeah. That one, maybe.”
I laugh, and plate the three that are edible, toss the ruined one in the trash, and ladle four more onto the griddle. “I’m good at this, I swear. I just got a little…distracted.”
He’s leaning against the doorway. “It’s all good.” He sets the champagne and orange juice down, lifts the coffee. “Mugs?”
I bring him mugs, and champagne flutes. Or, rather, I bring him mugs and start to bring him flutes and rethink it. Instead, I bring him regular wineglasses. “Might as well do it properly.”
He pours coffee, hands me a mug. “I’m in. I haven’t had a mimosa since my…” he trails off. “Well, in a long time.”
“Say what you were going to say. No point in dancing around it, right?”
“Since my honeymoon,” he says. He stares into his coffee. “Nine years ago.”
“Used to have them all the time. I had a big circle of close friends in college. Me and Adrian, my best friend Tess and her then-boyfriend, later husband, and now ex-husband, and two other couples. We’d go to brunch every weekend and get day drunk on mimosas.”
“I thought it was pancakes on the weekends.”
“That was Saturdays. Sundays were for brunching.”
“Oh.” He grins. “You did weekends right in college, it sounds like.”
I sigh. “Yeah, I guess I did. Haven’t had a weekend like that in…well, in a long, long time.”
I flip the pancakes, and this time they’re perfect golden brown, fluffy and dense.
“When did they stop? Those weekends, I mean.”
I sip the coffee while leaning on the counter beside the stove; he’s still leaning against the doorway. I don’t invite him in, and he doesn’t seem to mind. I don’t let myself examine this too closely.
“Adrian and I graduated. We all went to UNC, and after graduation, we moved back down here. Tess and Clint stayed up there a few more years, and the others I just lost track of. I started work, and Adrian was working nights at a bar and writing during the day. We’d have some good weekends, but we needed money so I started covering shifts on the weekend in addition to my normal schedule. And he’d be up early writing on Saturdays and Sundays, since those were his busiest days at the bar at night.” I shrug. “I guess we let life stop us from...I don’t know. From enjoying life. Sounds dumb, now that I put it that way.”
“It’s not dumb. It’s normal.”
“Shouldn’t be, though.” I’m on the third batch of pancakes by this time.
“No, it shouldn’t.” He smirks. “You know, I have no idea what day of the week it is? Literally, no clue.”
I blink. “You know, now that you mention it, me neither,” I say, laughing.
“So why don’t we just agree it’s Saturday.” He uncorks the champagne with a loud pop, pours a short layer of orange juice at the bottom of the wineglass and then a generous amount of champagne over that. He extends one to me, and I take it. “Here’s to enjoying the weekend.”
I clink it against his. “Here’s to the weekend.”
We sip, and I’m transported back to more carefree days. I close my eyes, and I can almost hear Tess cackling at her own lewd jokes, Kyle and Tanner egging her on, Clint embarrassed by her and pretending to laugh along with us—he always was an asshole like that, he never appreciated her for who she is.
