“Not sure this place has enough alcohol for that one. Besides, I drove tonight.”
Something painful crossed his face, and I kicked myself. He had lost his wife to a drunk driver. My grandma was right. I was not good at this on my own. I glanced over my shoulder to see if she was coming to bail me out.
“Guess that saves you tonight, then,” he said lightly. “But I’ll get it out of you.”
“Unlikely.” But I was smiling. I tilted my head. “What do you do for fun when you’re not showing around sad almost-divorcees?”
“Are you sad?”
“Not really,” I said, realizing for the first time that it was true. “Okay, so when you’re not showing around merry almost-divorcees?”
“Merry might be a stretch.”
I shook my head. “Fine, totally boring, middle-of-the-road almost-divorcees. You’re a real buzzkill, you know that?”
“Just honest. You’re not boring either though.”
“You know how I was just trying to ask about you? Let’s go back to that.”
He shrugged. “I’m the boring one, I guess. I work. I go running. I read a lot.”
“No one that artistic is boring.” He looked at me like he was trying to figure out what I meant. “I couldn’t have gotten a picture like you did today. Or even the iPhone ones you took of me. I wish I could see the world the way you do.”
“It’s easier through a lens sometimes.”
Maybe I was feeling the drink—it was almost gone, and other than my grandmother’s concoctions the night before, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had more than a small glass of wine. But that statement sounded so incredibly profound. And wasn’t that how I was living before everything fell apart? Posting everything through a filter on Instagram to make my life look perfect when it wasn’t?
“That’s . . . deep.”
“I didn’t mean it to be, but I guess it is.” The waitress passed by, and he gestured for two more drinks.
“I shouldn’t.”
“I can walk you home. You can pick up your car in the morning.”
“It’s my grandmother’s car.”
“Explains the dents.”
I laughed. “You don’t know the half of it.”
He leaned in conspiratorially. “Should we check the glove compartment for prophylactics?”
I cracked up and he did too. “Oh man—if she had them, I’d die.”
We were still laughing when the waitress brought the drinks. I sipped mine, then returned to what he had said earlier. “Wait, did you walk here? Isn’t that far?”
“A little over a mile and a half along the beach. Not a bad walk.”
“After that hike today?”
“If we hadn’t Ubered back, maybe I would have driven.”
I looked toward the beach, the idea of walking back across it with him in the cool evening air dancing through my mind intoxicatingly. The moonlight reflected on the waves, except where a sandbar had appeared, leading toward the island offshore.
“Can you walk out there?” I asked, gesturing to the protruding land mass, trying to take my mind off what lay at the end of that imagined journey across the beach.
Joe turned and studied the sandbar briefly. “You can. You have to watch the tides carefully though. If you time it right, you can get about three hours out there. If you don’t . . . Well, you’re out there for twelve.”
“Does that happen?”
“Your mother never told you that story?” I shook my head. “She and my mother got stuck there once. Your grandmother and Tony rescued them.”
I wanted to know more. But I also didn’t. If Tony helped rescue my mom . . . Well, he and my grandmother were clearly still on extremely friendly terms when my grandfather was home working. And after the amount of detail my grandmother had used in describing their relationship, right down to the prophylactics—I didn’t see how you could go from that madly in love with someone to strictly platonic friends.
“What’s out there?”
He grinned, then checked his watch. “Do you want to see? If we left at about ten thirty tomorrow morning, we’d have time to explore.”
“Is it worth it?”
I wanted to go before he answered. The slow smile he gave me made me want to down the rest of my drink and tell him to take me home—and not to the cottage where my grandmother waited. “Yeah. It’s worth it.”
“Okay, then.” I smiled back flirtatiously. It was surreal. Who was I? Not the Jenna who had spent six months in her childhood bedroom, too afraid to resume her life. I thought about the picture of me in Greece that he had liked on Instagram—I felt like that girl again. Carefree and desirable and . . . well . . . not the kind of person you’d leave for someone else, that was for sure.