“You mean the whole town banded together to save a beloved establishment?” I prod. “Exactly like the trope?”
“Sure,” he says evenly, “or they showed up with pitchforks and demanded their weekly cacio e pepe.”
“Is it good?” I ask.
“Actually, it’s very good.” He hesitates for a moment. “Are you hungry?”
My stomach grumbles, and his mouth twitches. “Would you like to have dinner with me, Nora?” He heads off my response with, “As colleagues. Ones who can’t fulfill each other’s checklists.”
“I wasn’t aware you had a checklist,” I say.
“Of course I have a checklist.” His eyes glint in the dark. “What am I, an animal?”
14
WELL, IF IT isn’t young Charles Lastra!” An old woman with a pile of silvery-gray hair on top of her head and a dress whose neckline tops her chin comes toward us. “And you’ve brought a date! How lovely!”
Her hazel eyes twinkle as she gives Charlie and me both squeezes on the arm.
He looks downright adoring, by Charlie’s standards. Even Amaya didn’t get this smile. “How are you, Mrs. Struthers?”
She holds out her hands, gesturing to the bustling dining room. “Can’t complain. Just the two of you?”
When he nods, she takes us to a white-clothed table tucked against a window lined with candles dripping wax down wicker-wrapped wine bottles.
“You two enjoy.” She taps the table with a wink, then returns to the host stand.
The smell of fresh bread is thick and intoxicating, and within thirty seconds, a bottle of red wine appears on the table.
“Oh, we didn’t order that,” I tell the server, but he tips his head in Mrs. Struthers’s direction and hurries away.
Charlie looks up from the glass of wine he’s pouring for me. “She’s the owner. Also my favorite former substitute teacher. Gave me an Octavia Butler book that changed my life.”
My heart gives a strange flutter at the thought. I jut my chin toward the wine. “You have to drink all of that. I’ve already had two drinks, and I’m a lightweight.”
“Oh, I remember,” he teases, sliding my glass toward me, “but this is wine. It’s the grape juice of alcohol.”
I lean across the table, grabbing the bottle and tipping it over his glass until it’s full to the brim. As deadpan as ever, he hunches and slurps from the glass without lifting it.
I burst into laughter against my will, and he’s so visibly pleased it gives me a full-body twinge of pride. He wants to make me laugh.
“So how bad should I feel,” I ask, “about ditching Blake?”
Charlie leans back in his chair, his legs stretching out, grazing mine. “Well,” he says, “when we were in high school, he used to take my books out of my gym locker and put them in the toilet tank, so maybe a three out of ten?”
“Oh no.” I try to stifle a giggle, but I’m slaphappy, high on adrenaline from my escape.
“How many dates are left?” he asks. “On your Life-Ruining Vacation List.”
“Depends.” I take a sip. “How many more high school bullies did you have?”
His laugh is low and hoarse. It makes me think of the satisfying snap sound of a tennis racket delivering a perfect return.
His voice, his laugh, has a texture; it scrapes. I take another sip of wine to dull the thought, then switch back to water.
“Does that mean you want to date my bullies, or to humiliate them?” He grabs some bread from the basket on the table, tears off a piece, and slips it between his lips.
I look away as the heat creeps up my neck. “That’s all down to whether they ask how big my feet are within the first five minutes of meeting.”
Charlie chokes over the bread. “Was it, like, a fetish thing?”
“I think it was more of a Wow, did you have to fall in a pit of radioactive waste to get that tall? kind of thing.”
“Blake never did have the most secure sense of self,” Charlie muses.
We’re interrupted by a teenage waiter with an unfortunate bowl cut taking our order—two goat cheese salads and cacio e pepes.
As soon as he’s out of earshot, I say, “Libby picked Blake. She’s running an app for me.”
“Right.” His brows rise apprehensively. “MOM.”
“Two dates on the list. Blake is the first.”
Charlie’s eyes do a bored allusion-to-an-eye-roll. “Save yourself the trouble and use this as number two.”