The Co-op

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

L A RYNN

The walk to lunch is too somber for me to only overthink being around Deacon again, so at least there’s that. There’s a memory everywhere I look—the time I thought I could roller-skate down the steep hill that leads to the beach and ended up with road rash down my back. The shawarma cart on the corner that I ate from approximately five days a week each year. Neptune’s Palace, where I spent one entire summer and buckets of money on arcade games just so I could save up enough tickets to buy some shitty skateboard I hardly used, which would have cost much less to purchase directly. The way I felt like I’d accomplished something out of sheer determination that year. Then there’s the way everything smells, how the ocean and the sand act as a palate cleanser between the various fried-food scents wafting from the park. The shrieks from the rides remind me of my grandma encouraging me to go on them, no matter that she knew I was likely to get sick and cut our day short. She always encouraged any bravery in me, even when it was a little foolish.

So much of this place is achingly familiar, and yet none of it is mine. My heart keens at the realization that I don’t have anywhere to call home, then lurches viciously at the idea that Deacon will still belong here, long after me.

“Where do you normally live?” I blurt. “When you’re not staying at our… at the grands’?”

He greets someone as we pass them by, and it feels like a confirmation. Like he’s made a whole life for himself here while I can’t find the starting line in mine. “You know Mom and I bought the campground?” he asks, tilting a glance my way, I think. But he’s donned sunglasses and the top half of his face is shaded beneath a baseball hat.

“Yeah.” The grands were pretty selective about bringing up Deacon after our summer together, but things inevitably flitted through.

“I built a house on the grounds. Well, I built one for my mom, and put in a newer manufactured home for me.”

“Oh.”

“I rented it out for the season, though,” he quickly adds, “so don’t get any ideas about telling me to go stay there.”

“How about you don’t get any ideas about me getting any ideas,” I bite back. “I hadn’t even considered that. I was merely asking you a question.” We slide back into silence.

“Sorry,” he says after a protracted pause.

“It’s fine,” I say. I probably would have asked him to go stay there once the option had occurred to me, anyway. I hate that he’s good at reading people. Predicting them, whereas most days I feel like I hardly understand myself.

He walks us to the Hard Water Pub, a local brewery I’ve never been to, where the hostess greets him with a starry-eyed smile, and he decimates her with a winsome look of his own. I roll my eyes so hard I’m sure I pull something.

“Thanks, Anya,” he says when she seats us at an outdoor table with an unobstructed view of the ocean. “Hey, how’s your aunt? Procedure go okay?” he asks her.

She puts our menus on the table with a flourish, oblivious to mine sliding right off onto the deck. I lean out of my chair to recover it while she launches into the update on her aunt’s hammertoe surgery.

“Give Gloria my best,” Deacon says when they wrap up.

“Of course,” coos Anya. “Enjoy,” she says brightly to me. I smile and hum a confirmation, then begin studying my menu.

“What?” Deacon says from behind his.

“ What, what?”

“You made a face,” he says.

“No I didn’t.”

“You did. Just tell me.”

I frown innocently. “Nothing at all.”

He shakes his head and trills his lips.

“Girlfriend of yours?” I ask. I hear his menu thwap softly onto the table.

“No,” he replies, the syllable picking up at the end like a question.

“A dear, cherished ex, then?” I have no idea what I’m looking at on this menu.

“She’s just an acquaintance, Larry,” he says.

I set my menu down and study him from behind my sunglasses. He cocks his head and returns my stare through his. “Oh? Do you know all your acquaintances’ families’ podiatry health? That’s a weird subgenre of foot fetish, but go off.”

He removes his glasses, spins his hat around backward, and folds two big forearms on the table, leaning onto them with a low chuckle. He focuses the full attention of his dark gaze on me when he says, “Maybe I just have a supremely good memory.”

There’s that unwelcome thrill again, that gravity-defying dip in my core. To me, it’s as if he’s just said I remember how your feet left marks on the interior roof of my ’72 Bronco due to the frequency with which I had them spread and planted there.

Our waiter drifts over to us then, and I’m saved from coming up with a response. Deacon rises from his seat to give him one of those dudebro-handshake-half-hugs, then introduces us. I’m not sure what possesses me to try my brightest smile out on Oscar, or to awkwardly plant my chin in my hand when I do, but Oscar’s grin falters and he turns a furious shade of pink. Deacon orders a beer, so I order a cocktail. We both order wings.

I find him giving me a bored look when Oscar takes our menus and retreats.

“Did you just try to flirt with him?” he asks, pinching his lips into a smirk.

“What? No.” I make a pfft sound.

His brow furrows with mock seriousness. “You scared the poor kid, Larry.”

“I wasn’t trying to flirt with him!”

“Pretty as your smile is, you can’t pull off a staged one to save your life.”

“Didn’t know I signed up for charm lessons,” I say. I miss having my menu to look at.

“So you think I’m charming?”

At this, I guffaw. “Of course I do.”

He leans back and replaces his wayfarers, bracing his tattooed hand on a thigh. “And why does that sound like an insult, coming from you?”

Our drinks arrive and I take a long and hefty gulp. He continues to wait.

I shrug. “I tend to think that charms are synonymous with spells for a reason,” I say. “They’re just tricks. Ways to get people to act how you want and do what you want.” My parents are two of the most charming people you’ll ever meet, at least initially. They’d throw parties and treat their circles to extravagant dinners and vacations, playing the ultimate friends and charmers while they were at it. Rinse and repeat. Buy and sell. Anything to avoid each other’s company, or mine. In my experience, behind that particular veneer lay a world of empty promises.

He only snorts quietly before reaching for his beer.

“For the record,” I add, careful to keep my tone as dry as possible, “you really only wielded your charms on everyone but me. Most of the time.” He rarely flirted with me before we got together, actually.

He angles his head considerately. “ Most of the time, I couldn’t figure out what you’d be charmed by anyway, Rynn.”

I am so not ready for this line of conversation, so I polish off my drink and wave down Oscar for another.

An hour later, somewhere between Deacon swapping out all the drumsticks and giving me all the flats on our second round of wings, I realize that I am very narrowly drunk. No, buzzed, I think. I just haven’t had a decent buzz in a long time, so it feels like drunk.

“We haven’t talked about any of the house stuff,” I stupidly spurt. Because despite the fact that we’ve talked about nothing of real consequence in regard to our shared business, I have learned the business of about half of the staff in this place. Obscure, harmlessly scandalous details that I find myself getting invested in nonetheless. Apparently, Anya and one of the line cooks dated for a time and started a band together, but then Oscar came to work here and people found out he was musically talented as well, and now there’s a whole angsty love triangle going on behind those kitchen doors. I’m not the least bit surprised to learn that Deacon’s got his finger on the gossip pulse of this place.

However, I also find myself wanting to ask about him . His tattoo and his job… and for some reason this feels like a risky concession. I need to get things back on track.

The hand in question pauses midway before he brings his beer to his lips and takes a gulp. I am momentarily mesmerized by the bob of his strong throat and his tongue as it swipes across his lip for a rogue drop. The curls of his hair wrap around the tops of his ears and escape through the hole in the front of his hat, something boyish juxtaposed against the rest of him. He’s got pretty eyelashes, too, I notice. I don’t remember those.

Definitely drunk.

“I mean, I guess we’ve only got one option, yeah? We have to sell it as is, even though that means we’ll only get about half of what we would if we could at least finish the place,” he states before tearing into another wing. “Don’t suppose Max would be open to fronting you the money?” he asks around a mouthful.

Something sloshes in my stomach at him referring to my father so blithely. “Max and I are not currently speaking, so… no.”

He studies a thumb before sucking some sauce from it, letting it slip out of his mouth with a little pop . “You want to talk about it?”

That does it. I take a swig of my ice water. “I don’t.”

“He seriously revoked your trust all because you quit school?” he says anyway.

I’m not sure why quit school turns the dial back up on my simmering annoyance. Quitting sounds like something cowardly, when it actually felt like the most terrifying leap of my life. It took my grandmother’s death to shove me off that ledge.

“He didn’t revoke it. It’s an irrevocable”—I pause to burp into my fist—“trust. He just put reshtric–, res-tric-tions in place.”

Deacon sets his glass down forcefully, some beer splashing out onto the table just as the sound of a mic check blares over the speakers. I turn and see our dear Anya on a small corner stage under the awning, a guitar perched on her lap and a mic stand at her front. She immediately launches into an acoustic rendition of “… Baby One More Time.”

“I love this song!” I brightly declare, but God, “I never realized how horny it is!”

Did I say that out loud? I look at Deacon, horrified when his expression dissolves into a laughing fit, then settles into a lopsided grin. “‘Show me how you want it’?!” he says, just loud enough over the music.

I rear back so violently I nearly keel over, my knee crashing into the underside of the table. “No!” I all but scream.

He starts laughing harder, a deep, throaty rumble that’s gotten grittier with age. Wipes a tear from his eye. “No!” he says. “The lyrics! You didn’t realize a song that says ‘show me how you want it to be’ was horny?!”

I don’t answer, and go back to aggressively drinking my water. My body temperature is alternating too quickly between hot and cold. Oscar joins Anya onstage with a second guitar and they break into a twangy, subdued version of “Levitating.”

I rock from side to side to the beat, my straw firmly planted near my mouth through the song.

At a low point in the music, Deacon asks, “What are the restrictions?”

It takes my vodka-addled brain a few beats to recognize the question’s origins. We regard each other through the rest of the verse and one more full chorus before I answer. “Marriage.” It was the easiest prerequisite my father could add, I wager, while being both incredibly futuristic and therefore limiting, plus, thin on paperwork.

A cold, exquisitely timed, and ominous breeze billows in from the water and lifts my hair off my shoulders. At some point outside my awareness, the sky’s fractured into streaks of vermillion and gold. He shows no signs of shock, his eyes dancing between mine.

“I’ll do it,” he states.

“I wasn’t asking,” I reply.

“I know you’ll make the proposal up to me. My ring size is a thirteen.”

“This isn’t funny, Deacon.” The alcohol has my heart racing.

He cants his head just so, white teeth sinking into his lower lip like he knows he’s got me. “But wouldn’t it be funny to stick it to your dad like that?”

“Stop it.” The sound gets lost underneath the next song, an acoustic cover of “It Must Have Been Love.”

His expression softens, going serious. “I’m not joking, Rynn. I swear it. I don’t want to let that place go for nothing. You know how much they loved it. If we can’t hold on to it then I say we at least make it worth something. It feels like they left it to us for a reason. Not to our parents. Not to my brother. Us.”

Oscar’s hauntingly smooth voice croons something about making believe he’s sheltered by a heart, and I jump up from my seat. “I have to pee,” I declare loudly, and power-step my way to the bathroom on shaky legs.

I take my time running my wrists under cold water when I’m done, splash some on my neck in an attempt to cool off. He’s waiting for me in the hallway when I get back out, propped up against the wall with his hat turned forward again.

“Ready?” he asks.

“We need to pay the bill.”

“I already got it.” He hands me my sunglasses.

“Oh… thanks.”

I’m far too buzzed to stop the onslaught of memories on the walk home, and there’s no conversation between us to keep my fuzzy brain in the present. Only all the colorful lights from the Boardwalk rides twinkling and blurring against the darkening sky, and the ever-steady whoosh of breaking waves. I don’t realize I’m walking ahead of him aimlessly until my foot slips on the uneven ground and his hands reach out to steady me, my shirt riding up and his palms hot on my waist.

I elbow them off like they’re live tentacles. “Don’t.”

He lets out a frustrated growl. “What?! You want me to let you fall?!” he says.

“HA!” The fucking irony. “Since when do you care if I get hurt?”

He blinks like I slapped him, then takes a slow step closer, pinning me in place with a glare. “That’s rich coming from you,” he says.

My head spins, my heartbeat feels uneven. “I want to go home,” I concede.

He takes a sharp inhale like he’s about to land another blow, probably something like “I’ll help you pack” or “And where is that, exactly?,” and I brace for the impact.

He must catch it because he frowns just as quickly, eyes tracing my frame before he deflates and takes a step back. “Alright,” he quietly replies.

We’ve gone half a block farther when Deacon flags down a bicycle taxi, the chariot on the back lined in ropes of LED lights. “Hey, Glen,” he greets the driver. I see the sign across the top of the canopy: Glenda the Good Hitch. He hands her some bills. “Can you take her to my place, please?” All the wing sauce in my stomach burns when I wonder if he often has his dates ferried off to his place . He hands me a ring of keys, separating two from the rest. “Gate,” he says about one. “And main entrance,” he says about the other.

“What about upstairs?” I ask before I remember. “Never mind. No door.”

“No door,” he confirms.

His mouth judders open like he’s going to say more, but then he thinks better of it, closing it and shoving his hands in his pockets before he stalks off in the opposite direction.