Page 2 of My First Time Fling

“It was never my idea in the first place!” I threw my hands in the air. “I only signed up for it because Tanner got it in his head that he wanted to run it, and I thought it would bring us closer. Now that doesn’t matter, so—”

“But you can’t just quit,” Brooklyn protested. “You can’t give up!”

“It’s not giving up if I never even started,” I rationalized. “Come on, we both know that the only marathon I’m likely to complete is one spent on the couch, watching all ofLaw and Orderseasons seventeen through twenty-three.”

“Look, I get that Tanner is the worst, but you can’t let him—ouch, what was that for?” Brooklyn cut off and looked at me, aggrieved, when I kicked him. I just stared, panicked, over his shoulder. Eventually he followed my gaze, and I heard his intake of breath when he saw what I was looking at—Tanner and Quentin walking into Cardigan Cafe.

Shit.

As much as I tried to joke about it, as much as I tried to tell myself I was over it, seeing Tanner in the flesh brought home the fact that I very much wasn’t. This was actually the first time I’d come face-to-face with him since the breakup. I’d seen him around town a few times, but each time I’d turned a corner, altered my route, or just plain ducked behind a bush until he’d passed by.

No chance of ducking this time. Tanner gave me his patented ‘I’m too good for you and everyone in here’ smile as he walked up to the counter. I couldn’t believe I used to think it was sexy. I took a deep breath. I was going to have to talk to him. Dammit.

“Jesse,” he said, “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“Right. Because I’ve only been working here every other morning for the past nine months.”

“Still, I couldn’t be sure I’d see you. What a pleasure. How are you?”

How was I?He had some nerve, asking that. Waltzing into my coffee shop like he owned the place and acting surprised to see me. He’d probably planned this, just to rub my nose in his post-break-up happiness. The only consolation I could find was that Quentin, standing slightly behind Tanner and staring at the floor, looked as uncomfortable as I felt.

“I’m fine, thanks.” I bit the words off and forced myself not to say what I really wanted to. “Can I take your order?”

“Oh, of course,” Tanner said, glancing up at the menu. “I’m just not sure what I’ll have yet. Quentin, do you know what you’re getting, hun?”

Quentin mumbled something that might have beencoffeeand I punchedsmall coffeeinto the point-of-service system.

“Jesse, oven emergency!” Brooklyn’s voice called out behind me, and I turned to see him stepping out from the kitchen with hot-mitts on his hands.

When had he disappeared back there? And what possible oven emergency could we be having? We’d finished the morning baking, and Brooklyn wasn’t due to put a new batch of muffins in for another hour.

Brooklyn whipped the oven mitts off his hands and shoved them against my chest. “Can you go take care of that?” he asked as he brushed past me. “I can take over up front.”

I looked at him, stunned into inaction, as he walked up to the register and greeted Tanner and Quentin all over again. Then I shook myself, turned, and walked back into the kitchen.

I stopped short. Brooklyn had taped a piece of paper to the wall of the kitchen, scrawling, ‘Stay here till I come get you,’ on it in blue marker.

Well, at least nothing was burning. But I felt a little humiliated that Brooklyn had decided that I couldn’t handle myself in front of Tanner and Quentin. Though, on second thought, maybe I was better off back here.

My breath was still short, and I couldn’t tell if I wanted to cry or punch something. Maybe both. I felt stupid for caring this much. Stupid for getting worked up over a guy who wasn’t worth my time, a guy who’d dumped me over a month ago. And yet.

I’d just hoped, for so long and so hard, that things with Tanner were going to work out. That his commitment issues and moodiness would go away if I could just stick it out long enough. That I’d finally get the happy ending I’d been craving.

I should have known better. But after years of feeling like an ugly duckling, I’d been defenseless when Tanner walked into my bar back in Miami and started flirting with me. And he could be so charming, so damn sexy when he wanted to be. The thought that a guy who looked like him—a guy who was on TV, who’d been in magazines, who had a Wikipedia page about him, for God’s sake—would be interested in me had seemed like a fairy tale.

So I’d hoped against hope that when I followed Tanner up here, when he invited me to live with him, it meant that things were finally falling into place. I’d felt guilty, leaving my mom with only my sister to take care of her, but they’d both told me that it was time to follow my dreams for once.

And that’s what I’d been doing. I’d even enrolled in online classes to finish the business degree I’d started back home. And I’d fallen in love. Not with Tanner. That was already a given. But with a ramshackle old bed and breakfast on Summersea Island, a two-hour car and boat ride away.

Savannah might not seem that different from Miami—both were hot, humid, and semi-tropical—but where Miami fronted the ocean, and felt open, breezy, and fresh, Savannah had always felt overgrown and marshy to me. Summersea, though—that was a different story. It was about as different from Miami as you could get, but it was also, critically, different from Savannah.

Summersea was a tiny island off the Georgia coast with three equally tiny towns, each filled with tiny antique stores and tiny ice cream shops and more Victorian architecture than you could shake a stick at. The majority of the island was undeveloped, though, with masses of coastal forest and rolling hills that swept down to sandy dunes and the wild ocean beyond.

The Sea Glass Inn was located in Tolliver, the tiniest and most remote of Summersea’s municipalities, and I adored it. The owner was a guy named Cam Starling, who’d inherited the place from his parents and had no interest in keeping it up. He wanted to sell it by the end of the year, and I’d been working at Cardigan Cafe and a bar called the Flamingo to save up enough to make an offer.

But that was the other part of my bad mood today. Cam had called last night. He’d always been nice—nicer than I deserved, really, taking me seriously and treating me like a real buyer. But he’d called last night to let me know he’d gotten an incredible offer from another party, and he was going to have a hard time saying no to it. He’d asked if there were any way I could offer a little more. All I could tell him was congratulations, and no.

“Alright, you can come out now,” Brooklyn called from the front of the cafe, and I poked my head out from behind the kitchen door before emerging fully from my hiding place. “They’re gone.”

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