She mustered another small smile. “Huckleberry pancakes. Babe picks the berries herself—at patches she won’t tell anyone else about. If you’ve never had real huckleberries, you should get those. Babe makes the huckleberry syrup, too.”
“I’ll have that, then. I want you to remember my sweetness.” God, he’d meant that sincerely, but even he could hear that he sounded like an ass covered in slime.
Her smile disappeared, replaced by raised eyebrows and suspiciously narrowed eyes. “Was that supposed to be a pickup line?”
He shrugged, chagrined. “I’m just trying to make your day better, not worse.”
Her eyebrows remained up. “So pickup line or not?”
Smooth, he wasn’t. She probably heard cracks like that all the time from random men who walked into Babe’s Diner and wanted to see a smile on her face.
“Somewhere in between,” he offered, trying to verbally back away without fully retreating.
She continued to look unimpressed. “You know, pickup lines are almost never successful with women, and especially not when delivered halfheartedly.”
He laughed at the truth of the matter. The town sign had said the population was 692. On his way to the diner he’d seen a vet’s office, a bar, a hardware store, and a steakhouse, but no McDonald’s. So it wasn’t that she was sick of all the strangers coming in and hitting on her, he realized. It was that he’d tried, struck out, and then was being a coward about it.
“You’re right,” he said, shaking his head at himself. “Well, here’s the honest truth. I suck at being smooth. If I’d wanted to impress you, I should have talked nerdy to you. I’m good at that.”
To his surprise—and apparently to hers, too—she laughed. Her entire face brightened. For a brief moment, the dark circles were gone from under her eyes and the little Christmas bells hanging from her ears jingled. Pleasure filled his chest. He was as proud as if he’d just dragged an enormous dead animal to the cave of the woman he was trying to impress. At least he knew enough not to bang on his chest.
“That was better,” she said with a smile and a shake of her holly-tipped pen. “Huckleberry pancakes it is. Comes with bacon or sausage.”
“Bacon, please.”
She nodded, a hint of a smile still present on her lips. “It’ll go with your sweetness.”
This time, when she walked away, he didn’t feel guilty for enjoying the view before picking up his mug of coffee. He took a sip, prepared to grimace at the stale, pre-ground coffee, and was stunned by the rich, smooth liquid that jolted him awake. He pulled Megan out of his pocket and skimmed through his e-mail. A couple of messages from his dating app profile, which he deleted without looking at. Some e-mails thanking him for entering some contest—his mother’s doing. And there, buried in the midst of the junk, was the e-mail he had been expecting from Curtis.
He sat back in his seat and read the message. Curtis thanked him for the offer of work, then told him that they would be sure to contact him if they had lingering issues with Terry that Curtis couldn’t solve. But right now, we’re good, he’d written.
He hit the “reply” button. We’re a team, he typed, then deleted it. They had been a team. Curtis would be sure to point out again that they had both been asked to stay with Terry in her new home and Marc had turned the offer down.
Better to stay with the simple, We should talk again. Curtis had always thought they were good. Throughout the entire building process, it had been Marc who had pushed for tighter code, better security, more encryption, fewer holes. Curtis’s strength was writing code; Marc’s was fixing it.
Good editors were never given the credit they were due. Or that had been how Marc had felt when they were in negotiations and all the attention had been given to Curtis.
“Here ya go.”
The waitress’s voice startled him out of the lies he was about to start telling himself. He had been offered a job, just as Curtis had, and he’d rejected it because he hadn’t felt like his ego was being stroked enough. That impulsive rejection was his fault. It’s why he was on the outside, an elegant solution running circles in his mind, and Curtis was on the inside, ignoring him.
“Hey, this smells good.” The bacon was thick and crispy, not too much fat. The purple syrup smelled sweet and tart, like it would make him pucker and his dentist cringe in the best possible way. The pancakes themselves smelled like butter.
“Babe knows what she’s doing,” his waitress answered as she took a step back, putting distance between them, their shared laughter nothing but a memory.
“Can I ask you a question?”
She raised a pale eyebrow at him, and he held his hands up. “I’m not trying to hit on you, I promise.”
Doubt shadowed her face. Maybe it was due to how tired she was, but reactions flittered across her face like a movie he would never get bored watching.