Page 18 of Surfer Girl

She smirked. “Nothing, I just… Awkward, right?”

He nodded. “Better honest and awkward than to have beef at work, right?”

She snorted, surprised he felt the same way about workplace conflicts as she did. “You can say that again.”

He arched a stern eyebrow, getting back on more familiar, Brett-like territory. She almost felt relieved. At least his standard operating procedure was predictable. “Hopefully I won’t have to, Jessie.”

She had taken a soft step away, as eager to undo the bad vibes as he was. “Well, like the kids say, don’t start none, won’t be none.”

Brett chuckled, unexpectedly and heartily. Jessie used the slight diversion to inch deeper into the restaurant, hoping he wouldn’t follow. As she started brewing the tea and prepping the expo station for another busy summer day, she was glad he stayed where he was. He’d said all he had to say, and now they could move on. All the same, Jessie was as relieved as she was surprised. Not only had they cleared the air, but she’d earned a promotion in the process.

Not bad for a day’s work, she considered, watching the tea brew as her mind drifted back to Sophie, taffy-colored limbs stretched hither and yon and blissed-out in the twisted bedsheets back home.

She smirked as her mind continued to drift to the soundtrack of steel drums lilting quietly overhead:Not bad for a day’s work, and the day’s only just begun…

Jessie couldn’t remember the last time she’d been as eager for a shift to end as she was this one. And she only hoped Sophie was feeling much the same way. To make sure, she reached for her phone and shot Sophie a quick text, just to test the waters and technically pinch herself to make sure these feelings were real after all.

Chapter Nine

SOPHIE

“Colton?”

Sophie stood at the counter, waiting for her double scoop of coffee and coconut filled waffle cone to be made by the achingly slow cashier behind the frosty glass counter. Colton glanced up from a table for two where he sat, alone, by the window, dragging a bright-red straw through the dregs at the bottom of his old-timey milkshake glass.

“Sophie? The hell?” He seemed neither glad to see her nor repulsed. For quiet, thoughtful Colton, such was the norm. “I thought you had surfing lessons.”

“That was yesterday, dork,” she chuckled across the empty ice cream parlor. It was just after two, Sophie having memorized the hastily scrawled note Jessie had left on the nightstand for her:

Sorry, lover, gotta work this AM. Meet me at Scoopz at 3 after I get off my shift? That is, if you’re not busy?

She had ended the note without enough question marks to signify her lack of confidence in their admittedly new relationship, as if Sophie could ever deny such an offer: the chance to sleep in, wake up to indulgent ice creamandJessie’s face her reward?

The cashier handed her the cone and, after thanking him, Sophie drifted toward Colton’s table. Halfway there, she noted the matching milkshake glass and crumpled napkins and untucked chair directly across from him. She stood beside the table, not wanting to interrupt. “Are you…on a date?”

Colton’s face flushed beet red, his eyes landing everywhere but on hers. “No, why?”

She gently nudged the empty chair across from him with the toe of her clean, white skate shoe. “Uh, the obvious evidence to the contrary, that’s what.”

Colton’s blush settled in, casting a merry glow on his breezily handsome face. It was hard to believe with all the time that had passed since their ill-fated prom night together, he was still the same effortlessly beautiful man-child she’d tried to go straight with. Maybe it was his vaguely feminine features, that feathery dirty-blond hair and those long, sensitive fingers and soft, smooth body that had tricked her into thinking a boy might quench all those burning desires she had for her own sex. Instead, she’d just ended up hurting him, and seeing him twice in a row during her first few days back in Siesta Beach was feeling like less of a trigger and more of an apology tour. “Well, I’m glad you’re getting back out there in the dating pool after I broke your heart,” she teased.

He chuckled heartily. They’d already hashed out their feelings for each other in that cheap hotel room after the dance four years prior, when no matter how hard he’d tried, sexy, willing, eager, sweet Colton had failed to convert her as he so desperately wanted to. The champagne had helped them pour out their feelings, such as they were, but not as much as Colton’s generous and forgiving heart. The last thing she’d wanted to do was hurt him and, after all these years, leading him on had been Sophie’s biggest regret from high school.

Her only regret, in fact.

“It took a while,” he teased, giving up on his milkshake and pushing it away toward his unseen partner’s glass. “But, well… I figured it was time.”

“Bullshit,” she snorted, taste buds alive with the hint of coconut and coffee on her hungry tongue. She realized she hadn’t eaten anything since, well…Jessie. She blushed heartily at the thought. “You were already macking hard on Ashley Seltzer at the graduation dance, you old horn dog.”

His blush, only recently starting to fade, reignited itself with the sudden memory. “I mean,” he chortled. “I had to get back at you somehow.”

“Mission accomplished,” she murmured noncommittally above the sweet, creamy deliciousness of her coffee cone. Sophie didn’t have the heart to tell him she was more jealous of Ashley’s appetizing rear as it threatened to poke out of her shimmering silver micro dress every time she and Colton hit the crowded dance floor. She was savoring the rich, delicious ice cream, to say nothing of the memory of Ashley’s tight derriere, when Colton motioned out the window at a trio of picnic tables, rustic and shaded beneath rippling red umbrellas. “Great weather today,” he murmured, apropos of nothing. “That cone would probably taste great in the summer breeze.”

Her jaw opened at the same time as the men’s room door on the far side of the ice cream parlor, and almost as wide. “Are you trying to get rid of me, Colton?”

“No,” he chuckled self-consciously, both of them knowing it was exactly what he was doing. “I just thought you’d be more comfortable out there, that’s all.”

“Out where?” A male voice chimed in, as if perhaps he’d been standing there all along, lingering halfway between Sophie and the cluttered table for two.

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