Falling for Mr. Wrong(21)
Harper decided it made sense to open a storefront. This was the beach, after all. Tourist mecca for three-quarters of the year. People always seemed to love to buy jewelry when on vacation at the beach. A perfect marriage of need and fulfillment. And probably the only marriage she’d ever be committed to at this point. But she was okay with that. At least she’d finally found a purpose. She sure wasn’t in the mood to find a man anytime soon—if ever—but she was excited to discover her passion, and her shop, Designs by Harper had taken off so well that she was able to move out of her parents’ place and into her own at last. And she was fine settling for unlucky in love, kick-ass in business. She didn’t need Noah Gunderson to lead a fulfilling life.
Chapter Sixteen
Noah sat relishing his morning coffee on the terrace overlooking the ocean, where a brilliant melon-hued ball of fire was cresting over the horizon. At this time of day, he was always at his best. He’d already been out surfing and was now strategizing his schedule in anticipation of the wedding the inn was hosting this evening.
These events always made him a little nervous, probably more so as they’d been negotiated by his mother long before he’d taken over the place. Bit by bit, her bookings had mostly come and gone, and he was already doing a steady business of booking events into the following year. But he wanted to do right by his mother and keep her legacy alive, so he was conscientious about trying to do things her way. Ultimately he wanted to transition into managing the place in the way he was most comfortable, but for now, he followed her plan of operation line by line, and in a way, her guidance was a reassuring hug from afar.
He hadn’t expected to enjoy being an innkeeper. It seemed so odd for a man of his young age to do so. Seemed like the type of job a retiree might take on. But after running the place for this long, he was grateful he didn’t wait until he was older. This was hard work: there were always repairs that needed to be done in the historic building. It seemed Mother Nature wanted to encroach on his little patch of land, with leaks here and there a regular occurrence. Soon he’d have to figure out how to replace the roof, but in the meantime, he’d been able to bandage together repairs enough to stave off that large expense.
Perhaps his taking over his mother’s money pit was a blessing in disguise. In all the traveling he’d done, perhaps the thing he loved the most was hospitality of strangers who made him feel at home even when he was oceans away from his real home. A mother’s touch, a comfortable bed, a home-cooked breakfast, a warm shower: all of these things may have seemed insignificant, but ultimately when you’re far from home, they mattered so much. And maybe somehow this was his mother’s gift to him, this legacy she passed on so he could extend that same sense of warmth and welcoming that was so important to him, to other travelers who might need a welcoming place to settle into or at least a psychological hug.
It sure beats practicing law, he thought with a laugh.
Sometimes he thought about the law degree he never completed. He wondered if he was a quitter, and that concerned him. Was he? He up and quit Harper with nary a glance backward. Ditto with law school. Though for two very different reasons. And if he honestly examined it, he’d admit he’d glanced back plenty. At Harper. Not at the relationship itself. That bit was what made him so damned scared. Harper? He would have been happy keeping things the way they’d been. She was the person who made him happiest in the world. But happy didn’t mean forever, did it?
The idea that he could get stuck like Matt, his whole future having to be rolled up like a dirty rug, all of those plans, those fun things forfeited because of a slip-up, was like a cold bucket of ice water dropped on his head. Ugh. That had been the thing he selfishly focused on. Because when he was twenty-one, the idea of being tied down like Gulliver by the Lilliputians was downright terrifying. Now? It no longer instilled the fear of God in him. In fact, after having spent time with that little bugger Tyler, he kind of liked the idea. Sure kids were a lot of work, but they were also rewarding. It’s too bad the timing was so backward on this revelatory notion. Now, the idea of having a little Tyler-type Lilliputian with Harper almost put butterflies in his stomach. In a good way.
He’d hoped that his running away—and let’s face it, it was absolutely running away sans the bandana full of belongings tied to the end of a hobo stick and balanced on his shoulder—would lead to some soul-searching. And indeed it did. In India, he meditated beneath the scorching hot sun until his skin could take it no more. In Tibet, he contributed to the building and—necessary—destruction of beautiful sand mandalas. It pained him to deconstruct what took many monks and helpers like him weeks to craft, but that was the point of it all: to emphasize the ephemeral nature of life. He channeled energy at Machu Picchu. He stood at sunrise fixing his gaze on the magnificent statues at Easter Island, marveling at the unexplainable. He communed with aboriginal tribesmen at Uluru in Australia.
Now in truth, some of this wasn’t quite as glamorous as it sounded. In Tibet, he also spent a week puking his guts up with a mysterious ailment, only to be made well with the help of a Tibetan healer. He picked up nasty bedbugs at the hostel he stayed at before he made the week-long hike up the Andes Mountains to Machu Picchu. And he was bitten by hundreds of ants as he slept beneath the stars near Uluru.
But it was all worth it. Noah left a boy but returned a man—one who had seen the world and experienced mental and physical hardship, growing greatly in the process. He’d tested and learned his limits, learned to respect his fear and admire his bravery.