“Sure.” I go and open the front door, clutching the spatula the same way she did when she answered the door to me. I come very close to using it as a weapon when I see the man standing on the other side of the door. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Callan Cross holds up a bottle of wine, his lips forming a tight smile. He looks fucking incredible. He’s wearing a deep maroon colored button down shirt with a black paisley pattern printed on it. The cuffs, which he has rolled up to his elbows, are a slightly darker shade, close to purple. Black skinny jeans and a pair of Chucks give him an effortless New York hipster vibe. He’s put some sort of product in his hair, taming his curls. Basically, he looks edible.
“I know,” he says, wincing. “They were out of Malbec at the liquor store. I had to get a blend.”
“Why are you here, Callan?”
“Because Friday invited me earlier. And because I knew you’d be here.”
“I didn’t even know I was going to be here.”
“Of course you did,” he says, pushing past me. “Where else would you be on a Tuesday night?”
That’s right, of course. Tuesday nights were always dinner night at Beauchamp household. Back in high school, I was here every Tuesday night for years. Tuesdays were always tricky for Callan: he had basketball and then football, depending on the season, but he would come here and pick me up after every game, sweaty and disheveled, making me feel things I didn’t know how to handle at the time. I’m surprised Callan remembered my Tuesday night ritual from so long ago, when it had entirely slipped my mind.
“Callan.” I’m stern, almost to the point of rudeness. “I don’t want to see you right now.”
Callan Cross, my beautiful Cal, the guy I’ve dreamed about for so long, shrugs his shoulders. “Too bad. I haven’t had proper gumbo in years. If you want to leave, you’re more than welcome, though.” He grins in the most infuriating way, sidling past me and sauntering down the hallway, hollering as he goes. “Friday! Friday, where are you, you sexy woman. I can contain myself no longer.” I watch his back vanish through the doorway to the kitchen, and it feels so normal to follow after him. So normal that he’s here, and he’s acting like all of this was just meant to be.
I want to walk straight out of Friday’s house, down her porch steps, get back into my car and drive away, but I can’t. My car keys are in my purse, which is sitting on Friday’s dining table. If I had the very first clue about hot-wiring a car, and I wasn’t worried about paying for damages to the rental company, I would totally jimmy the damn Porsche open and just leave my stuff here. Sadly, grand theft auto wasn’t an adolescent pastime of mine.
I just stand there, listening to the dip and swell of Callan’s voice as he talks with Friday in the kitchen. He says something, his voice a low, familiar rumble, and Friday screeches with laughter; he always did know how to get a reaction out of the old girl. Suddenly, this whole situation is just too much. I can’t do it. God knows how Callan can. Just being in the same town as him, breathing the same air, seeing the same sunrise and the same sunset, reliving the same memories as him, is far too difficult. I want to be back in California, back in my safe little bubble. I don’t want to have to face this—the ghost of my father, and the bitter sweet memories of a man who I loved so much once upon a time that I would have died for him.
Now, I just feel like I’m dying in general, and I don’t know what to do.
“Coralie?”
I spin around, and a woman climbing out of the passenger seat of a red sedan is staring at me like she’s the one who’s seen a ghost. I’d know her pump-water straight, dark hair anywhere. The high register of her voice isn’t one I’d ever be likely to forget, either. Tina Fulsom.
Tina was a cheerleader back in high school. Not the kind who terrorized the lower echelons of the high school caste system, or lorded her popularity over the other, less popular kids. No, Port Royal High never even had cheerleaders like that. Tina was a curvy kid, had huge boobs even before the rest of us had training bras, and she always seemed to be on some sort of crusade: a crusade to save the rainforest/starving kids in Africa/homeless people of New York/the public library/Port Royal’s declining yacht club. In her hand, she would always be carrying a clipboard complete with a pen on a piece of string, and she had the most annoying way of roping you into pacing the school grounds, encouraging people to sign what seemed like an endless, incredibly pointless petition.
Tina’s problem was that she was too empathetic. She felt everyone else’s pain to such a degree that her parents made her stop watching the news in her senior year after her mother found her pulled over at the side of the road, bawling her eyes out following a particularly heart wrenching piece about the stray dog situation in Charleston.