Page 12 of The Hotel Nantucket
She steps out of the car, so excited she couldlevitate.She feels like a living, breathing inspirational meme. She has stopped fighting the old and started building the new! She’s weathered the storm by adjusting her sails! She is a pineapple: standing tall, wearing a crown, and sweet on the inside!
Lizbet slips her phone into her navy-and-white-striped clutch and looks up to find her ex-boyfriend JJ O’Malley standing in the white-shell-covered parking lot with his hands behind his back.
This isnothappening,she thinks. Lizbet hasn’t actually seen JJ since the awful day in late October when he moved the last of his belongings out of their cottage. He told Lizbet he was spending the off-season in upstate New York with his parents; he’d gotten a part-time gig cooking at the Hasbrouck House. By that time, Lizbet had already accepted the job at the hotel, but she didn’t tell JJ that. But clearly he’s heard the news. The Cobblestone Telegraph is real.
“What are you doing here, JJ?” Lizbet asks. He’s wearing cargo shorts, his Black Dog T-shirt, chef’s clogs, and a green bandanna around his neck. A thought occurs to Lizbet that’s so horrible, she nearly drops her clutch: the chef of the new hotel bar has been kept “a grand surprise” because, in the world’s most hideous twist, Xavier has hired JJ.
Lizbet will quit.
No, she won’t quit. She’ll make JJ quit. But one thing is for damn sure: she and JJ O’Malley arenotworking in the same building.
“Areyourunning the bar here?” she asks.
“What?” JJ says. “No. I wasn’t even approached. Why?”
Sweet lightning,Lizbet thinks.
JJ brings his hands out from behind his back. He’s holding a dozen long-stemmed pink roses wrapped in butcher paper. He gives her what she used to call his puppy-dog look—big eyes and protruding lower lip. In happier days, this would spur Lizbet to squeeze him tight and pepper his face with kisses, but now she thinks,Wow, he looks awful.It was normal for JJ to let his hair and beard grow out over the winter, but has it ever beenthisunruly? His beard straggles across his face like creeper vines on a brick wall.
“First of all, I came to wish you good luck for opening day.”
A text would have sufficed (though Lizbet blocked his number months ago). “You betcha. And I’m not taking those flowers. What else?”
He drops the roses to the ground, reaches into the deep flapped pocket of his cargo shorts, and pulls out a ring box.
“Don’t you dare,” Lizbet says.
JJ sinks to one knee on the crushed shells and Lizbet winces—but no, sorry, she’s finished empathizing with this guy’s pain.
He opens the box.
Don’t look at the ring!she thinks.
But come on, she’s only human. She crunches through the shells in her stilettos and studies the ring; it’s a dazzler. It’s either fake or JJ took out an enormous line of credit on the restaurant—a move she would have absolutely vetoed if they were still together. It’s over two carats, maybe even two and a half, and it’s a marquise cut, which is what she’s always wanted.
“I had a lot of time to think over the winter,” JJ says. “I love you, Libby. Marry me. Be my wife.”
Lizbet is standing close enough to see a hole in the shoulder of JJ’s Black Dog T-shirt, a shirt she knows he’s had since the summer of 2002. It was his first cooking job, over on the Vineyard.
“The answer is no. And you know why.”
He gets to his feet; his knee is encrusted with shells. “You can’t stay mad forever.”
“I’m not mad,” Lizbet says. “And I’m also not going to marry you. You cheated on me.”
“I didn’t touch Christina,” JJ says. “Not once did I touch her.”
“That may be so,” Lizbet says. “But clearly there was enoughelectricityorchemistrybetween the two of you that the mere idea of her gave you a hard-on that you then went to the trouble ofphotographingandsendingto her along withone hundred and eighty-seven textsdescribing what you would like to do with her if you ever got her alone in the wine cellar.” The espresso Lizbet just finished asserts itself; it’s liquid anger coursing through her bloodstream. “You’re acheater,JJ. I will not marry you and all the forgive-me flowers in the world won’t change my mind. You’re a jerk for showing up here.”
“What do I have to do to get you to forgive me? I can’t run the restaurant without you.”
“Hire Christina.”
“I don’t want Christina. I want you.”
“I’m guessing what you really mean is that Christina was blackballed by every restaurant on this island—as she should have been—so she moved to Jackson Hole.” Lizbet can only hope this is true.
“Libby, please, I’m desperate. I’m lost. And look at you, baby, you’re a hundred times hotter than you’ve ever been.”
