Page 19 of Last Second Chance

I stood back, unable to keep my eyes off Poppy. This time it wasn’t because she was gorgeous—although she was. What had me thoroughly entertained was how spectacularly bad she was at this game. For someone that used to play it all the time, she was a hot mess.

But I loved watching her, because she was having so much fun shaking her uncoordinated ass on that game that I couldn’t stop laughing. She had a big smile on her face, and when the game was over, she celebrated her low score with a whoop of happiness.

I hadn’t laughed like this in a long time, and when she stepped off the game platform, I pulled her close, tucking her under my arm at my side. I loved that she was short. She fit against me perfectly like this. She also didn’t pull away.

“How’d I do?” she asked, looking up at me innocently.

“Fantastic. I couldn’t stop watching.”

She slapped my chest. “Liar. I know I suck.”

I smiled down at her. “But you don’t care.”

“No, I don’t.”

That was just another thing that I liked about her. It was no wonder that Poppy could make me happy like no one else. It had always been that way. She was a ray of sunshine in my life.

“And that’s why I couldn’t stop watching,” I said.

We found a two-player game after that. It was a zombie shooter game, and I expected to dominate since I was experienced at using a real rifle while hunting upstate with my dad as a kid. But I didn’t factor in the messed-up targeting on the plastic gun-shaped thing in my hand.

Poppy kicked my ass, but I didn’t care as she jumped up and down in excitement. My eyes shamelessly drifted to her breasts. If she noticed, she didn’t say anything. A long strip of tickets printed out and Poppy took them over to two of the kids playing a driving game together.

We left the arcade soon after that, continuing down the boardwalk. There were a couple of gift shops and a bar down near the end. When we passed a woman sitting on a bench with an e-cigarette in her hand just outside the bar, Poppy slowed down almost to a stop to address her.

“I love your necklace,” she said to the other woman.

The woman, who I now realized was wearing a small black apron around her waist, glanced down at the pendant around her neck and smiled. She had curly dark hair and heavy makeup.

“Yeah? Well, thank you. It was a gift from my sister.”

“Oh, does she live on the island?” Poppy asked easily.

The women were off after that, getting to know each other while I stood by and listened. This was what it was like to be with Poppy. She was the most genuinely nice person I’d ever met, which was why it was so hard to handle the cold way she treated me before last night. It was so against her nature that I felt like I’d broken her somehow.

When we were out in public together, she tended to run into people she knew all the time. Or if she didn’t know them, she made an effort to. Poppy was the type of woman that made friends so easily it seemed like second nature. That was what she was doing with the bartender, whose name turned out to be Freya.

“Yeah, I love running the bar,” she was saying in response to a question Poppy asked. She had taken a seat on the bench beside Freya while I leaned against the boardwalk’s railing. “It took a long time for the owner to allow me to do it, but I finally earned his trust after working here for so many years.”

“You must be great at it then,” Poppy commented.

I glanced in the bar’s windows to find the place half-full. Considering that it was early-afternoon, I’d guess that this was their lunch rush. There was one waitress working the tables, looking a little frazzled.

“I do what I can,” Freya said, standing as she tucked the e-cigarette back into her purse. “But it’s not always easy. For instance, one of my dishwashers called in sick for today’s lunch shift. I have to get in there and do his job alongside my own.”

“That sounds impossible.” Poppy frowned.

“Close enough. Good thing I’m up for a challenge. I better get back in there. I still have ten minutes on my break, but I hate to leave Jill running things in the front all alone.”

Poppy’s eyes met mine, and I suddenly knew what to do. She was too good of a person to pass this up.

“Could you use some help?” I asked for both of us, and Poppy beamed at me.

“Are you offering?” Freya asked, sounding shocked.

“Yeah,” Poppy added. “We can help in the kitchen. It’ll be fun.”

“Fun?” Freya chuckled. “Well, I can’t promise that. But how does a free lunch sound as payment?”

---