Page 4 of The Summer House
“And you, sir?”
“Just a beer, thanks.” He nodded toward some sort of import. Then to Callie, he said, “You mentioned a cottage—The Beachcomber? Are you opening soon?”
“My friend Olivia and I are opening it back up at the end of the summer,” she said, relieved at the question. This was a nice, easy topic. She loved talking about The Beachcomber.
Callie hated this part of meeting someone. She much preferred the point when both people felt comfortable enough to sit at a table and eat without needing to fill the silence. She’d always been bad at offering up tidbits of information about her life, preferring to keep all that private.
The bartender slid their drinks toward them. Luke retrieved a couple of loose dollars from his pocket and stuffed them into the tip jar.
“Thanks, man,” the bartender said. “Ready to order?”
Callie wasn’t ready. She hadn’t even looked at the menu yet except for her poor attempt to find a drink. “What do you normally get?” she asked Luke.
“A bacon cheeseburger.”
“I’ll have the same.”
He eyed her inquisitively. “They’re really big,” he warned, a smile twitching at his lips.
His gaze swallowed her in a way that made her feel like she was the only person on the planet. She cleared her throat and looked down at the menu. “That’s fine. I can take the rest home if I don’t eat it.”
He turned back to the bartender and ordered their burgers. When the bartender left to put in the order, Luke swiveled on his bar stool to face her. “If the world ended tomorrow, and I had one last meal, it would be this burger.”
“You would choose a burger as your last meal?” she asked, surprised. “I can think of so many things that I’d have over a burger.”
“You’ve never hadthisburger.” He tipped his beer up to his lips, and she tried not to watch for fear she’d be goggling at his attractiveness. She liked how easily the conversation was going, how he didn’t put her on the spot.
“You’re very confident,” she said, meaning more by her comment than just his certainty about his choice of last meal.
He took a long look at her before shifting his eyes down to his beer and having another sip from his bottle. “What would you have for your last meal, then?”
“I don’t know if I’d be worried about my meal. I’d be too busy trying to do everything I wanted before the end.” She sipped her rum and Coke, savoring the coconut flavor. A string of paper lanterns hanging from the thatched roof above the bar rattled as they danced in the wind. With the warm breeze and the hiss of the sea behind them, she felt herself relaxing.
His eyebrows rose in interest. “What do you want to do before you die, then?”
“Learn how to knit.”
He laughed. “You could choose the hardest, most unreachable thing in the whole world—bungee jumping, mountain climbing, world travel—and you picked knitting? That’s something you could do right now. I’ll buy you a How-To-Knit book on the way home. Come on, you can do better than that,” he teased.
With a grin, she thought some more.
“Meet a world leader?”
Callie shook her head.
“Swim with dolphins?”
“Stop,” she giggled. “I’m actually trying to think of something but you keep distracting me.”
“So no clowning classes?”
“No! Nothing like that,” she laughed.
“Well what would you really want to happen before you die? Really.”
“I’d like to be closer with my mother,” she said, immediately feeling fire shoot through her veins at admitting that out loud. She’d never done that before. Luke’s easy talking had pulled her in and she didn’t know how to do this: get personal with a stranger. The things she wanted to do before she died were very intimate desires, the kinds of things buried so deep down in her heart that she wasn’t sure she wanted to share them with anyone. The fuzzy memory of her father leaving—a memory that had almost faded completely with time—filtered into her mind, reminding her of the turning point with her mom. It caused Callie to tense up.
His face softened, and she realized then that she’d bristled. She noticed that her knees had moved slightly away from him, her arms folded across her body. She straightened them out, channeling that moment of calm before his question and let her shoulders drop. She leaned back toward him again, grabbing her drink to have something to do with her hands, stirring it with the little black straw in the glass.
