Georgie, All Along (33)

My smile gets bigger, and that stomach flutter? It comes back, and it gets more . . . fluttery. With him looking at me this way, half hope and half embarrassment, I forget all about the disappointments of the day, and I definitely forget about the way that business card offered a potential escape from them. Frankly, I forget all about Evan Fanning entirely. I forget about everything except the man standing right in front of me, and the invitation he offers up next.

“What I’m saying is, would you have dinner with me?”





Chapter 8


Levi


For the next half hour, I split my mental energy between prepping ingredients and doubting myself. The look on Georgie’s face when I asked her to have dinner was a mix of surprise and hesitation, and I almost backed off, told her I could simply leave her some leftovers. Why would she want to try a meal with me again, after last time?

But after today’s realizations, I’m trying to stay determined. All morning, I worked out at the Quentin property with Micah, one of my seasonal guys who does good work on floating docks, and that’s the only real option for the Quentins, who’ve got a pretty fragile setup on their property for a structure—a fluctuating water level and soft bottom conditions. Micah’s a good guy, a good worker, but he likes two things I don’t on the job: music and chat. The music bit has to do with the work itself, which I think goes better when you can hear everything you’re doing—when you’re paying attention to the water, to the wood, to the wind, to whatever else is going to affect how your final product functions. The chat, obviously, is a weakness of mine, but Micah loves it, can’t stop it. One thing is, if he has a playlist going, he won’t talk as much. Instead, he’ll sing.

But the Quentin property is a dead zone for cell and wireless service, so Micah couldn’t get his playlist cued up, and that meant it was chat straight through. At first, it was pretty innocuous. Micah and his wife, Natalie, live over on Varina Creek with their three kids, and they have a family project going this summer, something involving an expanded coop for these guinea fowl they’ve been raising for the last year or so. In the first hour I learned more about guinea fowl than I ever wanted to know, including what sound they make when they’re agitated, since Micah performed it for me. I was getting lulled in, figuring he’d keep on about the coop or the birds or the fact that one of his daughters tried to have a tea party out there with them, which got Natalie mad enough she made Micah sleep on the couch for two nights.

But then out of the blue he said, “You still staying over there at the Mulcahy place?” and he said it as if he knew.

I’d accidentally knocked over the box of fasteners I’d been sorting through and looked over at him, but he was working away, seeming not to care about my answer.

“Yeah,” I said, suspicious.

“Heard Georgie’s back in town, is why I’m asking.”

“How’d you hear that?”

“Natalie ran in to Deanna Michaels at the Food Lion. Said she saw Georgie at Nickel’s, and you, too.”

I’d rolled my eyes and thought, This fucking town.

“Georgie and I graduated in the same class,” Micah continued. “Nice girl. Kinda flaky.”

I’d looked over at him again, annoyed. What’s a guy who lets his kid have a tea party with wild birds doing calling anyone flaky? I’d been working up a defense of her—which probably would’ve been a simple grunt of disapproval—when Micah had said, “So you staying in the house with her?”

I focused on the fasteners that were scattered all over the grass and said, “For now.”

I’d hoped that’d be the end of it, but with Micah, it’s not the end of anything until you’re not in the same room with him anymore, or until he’s got something playing he can sing to. For the next ten minutes he told me every story he could remember about Georgie Mulcahy, including the time she and her dad spent a Sunday afternoon power-washing Micah’s grandmother’s deck, free of charge, to help out after Micah’s grandpa passed on. “Those Mulcahys,” he’d said. “Friendly, aren’t they?”

It’d been that word, for some reason, that’d stuck with me, and my face had heated in shame as I’d sorted those fasteners back into their spots. The other night, I’d gotten awful fragile about that friendliness, hadn’t I? In the first place, Georgie hadn’t been anything but nice to me, and I’d rebuffed her on account of something she’s got no reason to know I’m uncomfortable about, other than rumors she’s probably heard. In the second, I shouldn’t care if she did want to call up my younger brother and say hello; that’s no skin off my back. That’s something a normal, friendly person who’s back in their hometown might do, and I don’t have any reason to be sensitive about it.

Or at least any reason that’s fair to her.

For the rest of the workday, I’d steered Micah back toward talk of fowl so I could think on my predicament. I knew I needed to apologize for the way I acted and for the way I’d been avoiding her. I knew that Paul and Shyla wouldn’t have liked the way I’d treated Georgie, but more important, I knew I didn’t like it, either. If I meant what I said to Georgie, that I wanted to keep things simple, then that meant I needed to do what was obviously simple to her, too.