Georgie, All Along (39)

I reply with a quick heart-eyes emoji, adding that I’m doing well and will update her soon. Then I toss the phone onto the bed and move toward the discarded pants on the floor, pulling out the card from The Shoreline Evan gave me. I walk to the dresser, where I left the fic this morning, and page through it, searching for the first mention I can find of the inn. Once I see it, I slide the card in and close the notebook again, resting my palm on top of its cool, flat, worn surface. I close my eyes, trying not to think about the contrast to the way Levi’s skin had felt beneath my hand. When that doesn’t work, I force myself to think about the stiff way—the blank way—he responded to my kiss, and the notebook seems to get more solid and comforting beneath my hand.

I think you should keep going with it, I hear in my head, and I try to pretend it’s my own voice, and not Levi’s, leading me on.

*

DURING HER VERY busiest times—seasons that were jam-packed with long days on set, with press interviews and business meetings shoved into inadequate fifteen-minute slots, with late-night writing sessions fueled by espresso and sheer determination—Nadia used to have this saying. I’d be following her around, ushering her to her next very necessary thing or trying desperately to shuffle something she’d been running late for, and she’d be doing this autopilot listening thing she used to do, where she’d be typing on her phone or turning over an idea in her mind, totally confident in my ability to handle the details I was running through about the rest of her day. I’d say something like, Okay, now you’re going to talk to Variety for ten minutes about the exclusive streaming deal, and then you have a meeting with Tony about location scouting, and then at 2:15 we’ll need to leave for your dermatologist appointment, and Nadia would look at me, seemingly unbothered, and reply, Out of the frying pan, into the fire, right?

I may not have had to talk to anyone about a streaming deal or location scouting or forehead wrinkles, but by the time Friday afternoon rolls around, I’m pretty well reacquainted with both the frying pan and the fire.

The frying pan, it has to be said, is the lingering embarrassment over what happened with Levi last night: the restless night of partial sleep, most of which I spent tossing and turning while jumbotron-size memories of my planting my face against his played on a loop, followed by the fact that I’d woken up to him still in the house, moving around quietly and murmuring soft words to Hank. In the few days Levi and I have been staying together, he’s never still been home when I woke up, and I had the terrible frying-pan sense that he was waiting on me, probably to finish off the pitying Don’t worry about it I’d known he was working up to last night. I’d stayed in bed, cooking in the oil of my own cowardice, until I heard the rumble of his old truck start up and drive away.

The fire, though?

Well, the fire is my new job.

My very sudden new job.

“The guy at fourteen wants another order of calamari,” Remy says quickly as they pass by me, rolling their eyes. Seeing as how I have only worked at The Shoreline’s restaurant for about two and a half hours, I do not know its floor layout well enough to be able to tag table fourteen by sight; however, I can discern from Remy’s eye roll alone that I am getting an order of calamari for the guy in the Hawaiian shirt who has slammed three gin and tonics over the last hour while steadily increasing the volume of his voice as he talks to his golf companions about interest rates. They all look sunburned and heat exhausted, and I keep dropping off fresh water at their table, fearing imminent man-fainting.

“Right,” I say, whirling back toward the kitchen and calling out the order to a woman running the line whose name I have, embarrassingly, already forgotten in the chaos.

When I arrived at The Shoreline earlier this afternoon—determined to get back to the business of the fic, or at least the business of it that had dropped into my lap at the antiques store—I expected a pitch. A tour of what I could tell was a newly renovated and expanded space, probably accompanied by some light pleading for my temporary help. I’d figured I’d get an hour’s worth of distraction from the frying pan followed by a chance to figure out whether I wanted to take on waitress work at my teenage dream spot as part of my project.

Instead, what I’d gotten was a panicked Olivia Fanning, pulled away from her day spa duties in order to accommodate a very unexpected gathering of mortgage brokers from across central Virginia, all of whom wanted to eat lunch at the restaurant after a round of golf during an extremely short-staffed shift.

“Evan’s stuck dealing with an irrigation problem on the ninth hole,” Olivia had said when I’d made my way to the dining room, a tremor in her voice, her brow sheened with sweat. “And my mom is who knows where, and my dad is doing a sailing tour, and I’m—”

“Put me in, coach,” I’d said, smiling brightly. And honestly?

Honestly, Olivia Fanning’s face full of relief had made me feel as purposeful as I’d felt in weeks, notebook goals or not.

Of course, my bright smile had belied everything I’d forgotten about waitressing in the years since my last gig, and I’ve spent the last couple of hours scrambling—trying to figure out the flow of an unfamiliar kitchen, stumbling my way through reading off the lunch specials, shaking out my hands and arms every time I turn away from setting down the unfamiliar weight of multiple dishes and drinks.

I grab a few plates now from an order coming out of the kitchen, recognizing the accompanying ticket as one of mine. Loaded up, I make my way back into the packed dining room, and my body—clad in an ill-fitting spare uniform of branded polo shirt with dark pants—transforms in the way it used to when I did this job full-time: my brow smooths, my lips shape into a placid smile, my shoulders straighten, my stride balances at that perfect point between quickness and calmness.