Starfire (Erotic Romance) (Peaches Monroe) (23 page)

“I’m Arturo,” the handsome young man said, reaching out to shake my hand.

“Chelsea,” I replied, blushing over my lie.

Arturo turned to the older man. “Dad, I leave you alone for five minutes, and you’ve got the prettiest girl in all of San Francisco to come sit at our table.”

I fanned my face, trying to be modest, but eating up the compliments.

Arturo didn’t have a thick accent like his father, but he certainly was Italian. The compliments didn’t stop, and neither did his eyes, scouring my face, my eyes, my jaw, my hair, my collarbone, my breasts, and my hands as I self-consciously reached for my mug.

The two were investigating a business opportunity for their family business back in Italy. As they told me a little about their home, and life in the Italian countryside, I wondered if my friend and former lover Keith Raven was meeting strangers at that very moment and discussing the same. For a moment, talking to these visitors, I felt a connection with Keith, and a warmth.

Keith had described our time together in such positive terms. When I left for the airport, he said he could feel me sparkling in his heart, like a diamond.

As Arturo and his father playfully competed for my attention, I felt what Keith had described. A brightness.

Time passed quickly, and soon a familiar-looking man was hovering near the table.

“This is my friend Vern!” I announced, and introduced him to the Italian men.

Vern nodded to the door. “We’ll be chasing the light,” he said politely.

I went to shake the Italian guys’ hands goodbye, but they both stood as I stood, and insisted on kissing me on the cheeks.

As I exited the cafe with Vern, the cool air and quiet outside made me realize how noisy the cafe had been. A singer with a guitar had started playing on a small stage about thirty minutes earlier, and everyone had carried on at a louder volume.

The convivial meeting in the cafe was exactly the kind of experience you want to have when you’re traveling, yet not the kind of thing you can ever plan or seek. Isn’t it so beautiful that the best moments in life are this way?

Not that I didn’t have a good time with Dalton… mixed with some bad times, and let’s not forget the weird.

“Thanks for coming to get me,” I said to Vern. “We were shopping for flowers, and then—”

“No explanation needed. I understand how Mr. Deangelo can be.”

“This disaster might be on me.” I let out a big sigh that morphed into a self-aware laugh. “The funny thing is, when we got here, I was making dire predictions about a disaster, and then it happened.”

“We reap what we sow.” He held open the back door of the large truck.

Dalton was not inside the vehicle.

“Are we picking him up at the hotel?” I asked as I got settled into my seat.

“No.” Vern closed the door and left me hanging as he walked around to the passenger side.

I asked, “Is he meeting us at the airport?”

Vern adjusted the rear view mirror to make eye contact with me. His eyes looked sad, viewed apart from the rest of his face.

“He’s catching a commercial flight back to LA.”

“But we didn’t say goodbye.”

“He asked me to give you this.” Vern handed back an envelope. “I packed your luggage for you and everything’s in the back. We’ll be going straight to the airport from here, and I’ll have you back home in time for a late dinner, unless you’d like to pick something up quickly here?”

I mumbled that the original plan sounded good, and we started driving.

I tore open the envelope and pulled out a commercial greeting card with a frog on the front. The frog wore a tie, so clearly it was a boy frog.

The caption under the boy frog said:
I’ve got something to say!

Inside was a giant
RIBBIT
in puffy letters.

Underneath that was a smaller line in red text:
In other words, I’m sorry. Can you forgive me?

The card was hand-signed
Dalton, a.k.a. D-Man
.

Dalton’s signature was the only thing that hadn’t been pre-printed on the card.

“This is terrible,” I said.

Vern heard me mumble and asked if I need anything or had any questions.

“I’m fine,” I said.

I stared down at the card with the frog, in all of its terribleness. It was exactly like something my father would give my mother—that’s how bad it was.

But the dumb card was better than nothing.

As we drove, I started to get doubts.

Did I actually
deserve
an apology, regardless of how terrible the apology was? The cause of our recent fight didn’t seem obvious, in retrospect. First, I’d insulted his moth-eaten shirt. But he’d sprung some new information on me about stalking me. And I’d called him a liar, which was possibly true, but unsubstantiated. Then he’d tossed dog water on me before I could toss it on him. He did have a point that I should have said something sooner about the scooter, but I honestly had been trying to be easygoing.

And now I had a
RIBBIT
card.

I didn’t know whether to tear the card in half and toss it out the window, or put both card and torn envelope carefully in my purse with my wet jean skirt, to take home and start a scrapbook with.

CHAPTER 22

I brought the RIBBIT card with me to work on Monday morning.

A few times during the day, I’d pull out the card just to look at it. Holding the card in my hands made me feel like a kid at the end of a fantasy movie—the kind of movie where everyone says the events were just a dream, yet the girl unfurls her hand to find a shimmering, magical feather.

The RIBBIT card was my magical feather, and Dalton was real. The engagement was both fake and real at the same time. Thinking about that made my whole body ache.

At twelve-fifteen, things were going fine at the store when I got hit with a Lunch Break Returner.

I wiggled my toes inside my shoes to keep from screaming.

Lunch Break Returners are all about Getting All The Fucking Things Done, especially on Mondays.

If you open a retail business yourself some day, take my advice and find a way to not be there between twelve and one o’clock on Mondays. Put a scarecrow behind the counter, leave the door unlocked while you go for coffee, and put a help-yourself bucket of cash next to the cash register—like the honor-system candy buckets some people put out at Halloween.

Let them serve themselves.

The woman said, dramatically, “I was shocked and horrified by some of the
words
in this book.”

“Yes, I understand.” (She’d already stated the reason for the return, unprompted, several times.)

Like most Lunch Break Returners, she wore business casual dress and pumps that were a size too small, judging by the way she shifted back and forth on her feet. She probably wore the pumps into the office and kicked them off under her desk for most of the day. As I pondered all of this, I frowned inwardly that my keen insights into the habits of Beaverdale bookstore customers had very little value in the non-bookstore job market.

I asked, “Would you like the refund on your credit card, or store credit?”

She huffed, “Store credit, of course. It’s not YOUR fault these publishers allow
words
like this in books these days.”

I could tell she really wanted me to ask her about the specific words, but I wasn’t playing the game that day.

Slipping my hand into my purse, under the counter, I felt the raised lines of the word RIBBIT inside my card. It wasn’t a dream! I really was engaged to a famous actor, with a fabulous non-retail life ahead of me. Unless
this
was the dream, and Dalton was the dream within the dream.

“Will this store credit even be valid at the new location?” the woman asked, her voice sharp with suspicion.

“Nope. And we’re starting the move tomorrow, so you’ll have to use it before six o’clock today.”

Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped. (You should never joke around in retail, especially not where the customer’s money is concerned.)

“Kidding!” I added quickly. “Of course the credit is good at our fabulous new location, and I hope you’ll come and shop often. We’re putting in a section of audiobooks.”

She said huffily, “Good. Your new location is more convenient for me, because my hairdresser is on that block. I don’t know why this store is all the way over here. There’s never any parking.”

I glanced out the window reflexively, then held my lips tightly together as I looked at the unobstructed view of a street with over half the parking spots wide open.

Honestly, one of the biggest obstacles I’ve had to overcome to be a decent retail employee is to resist the overwhelming urge to state the fucking obvious to people. For example, they’ll walk in as I’m sweating and dusty from organizing shelves and unloading boxes, and they’ll comment on how nice it must be to
sit and read books all day
.

Your job as a retail employee is not to tell the truth during small talk.

Your job is to be friendly and put the money in the register, while only speaking the truth about your fine products, which you stand behind one hundred percent. If you happen to sell crap you don’t believe in… good luck with that.

I gave the woman one of our new postcards with the new location’s address. She left with a smile on her face, which made me feel good. I hadn’t been completely ruined by fame! I still had the retail touch.

The rest of the day passed quickly.

Adrian came in at quarter to six and brought the sandwich board inside with him.

“Let’s close up shop,” he said.

“But it’s not six yet.” I trotted quickly to the area behind the counter, putting the furniture between us. I’d been meaning to talk to him about my engagement to another man, but hadn’t found the right time, or gotten drunk enough.

He replied, “Have it your way. I’ll hang out here and we can count down the final minutes, like they do on New Year’s Eve.”

“Don’t say that. You’re going to make me all nostalgic and weepy.”

He rested his elbows on the counter and leaned across to kiss me hello. I reached under the counter and quickly tucked my frog card away and zipped up my purse, then pretended to get distracted by the special orders shelf needing adjustment.

“Did you forget about our date tonight?” he asked.

“Of course not,” I lied.

He kept staring at me, his blue eyes darting from my eyes to my lips, as though he might be able to read my weekend activities on my face.

I crossed my arms and tried to put on a poker face.

“How’s Cujo?” I asked. “Still wearing the Cone of Shame?”

Adrian laughed, his smile relaxing his face and making me relax, too.

“Except for meal time,” he said. “We left the cone on for his first dinner at home, and he scooped all the soft dog food into the cone by accident. Then he could
smell
the food, but couldn’t reach it with his mouth, so he was like this, trying to get it with his tongue lolling out.” Adrian tilted his head and lolled his own tongue out while whimpering.

I had to laugh. “Poor little man. I need to see him soon so I can thank him for being my hero.”

“Hey! He’s your hero? What about me?”

“The guy who led me right into the bear’s territory in the first place?”

“And then dragged you right back out again. Like a hero.”

“Thank you for that. I guess I owe you. Dinner at DeNirro’s? Unless we made plans for something else?”

“I could go for some Italian. Can we close up the store yet?”

I looked down at my brand-new watch. “Seven more minutes.”

Adrian reached across the counter for my hand, then drew it near him as he studied the fancy watch. “This is new.”

I cleared my throat. “A gift, from this weekend.”

He let my hand go and turned his head to the side. “I don’t want to hear about him, or the expensive gifts he buys you.”

I leaned on the counter between us, reached up with one hand, and stroked the side of his face with my fingertips. “Adrian.”

It hurt me to hurt him.

“Seven minutes.” He pulled away from my hand, looking down as he withdrew his phone from his pocket. “I’ll step outside and call DeNirro’s to see if we need a reservation. What do you think? Monday night? Shouldn’t be too busy, unless they ran a coupon in the Beaver Daily.”

“I’ll start counting the float.”

“I’ll flip the sign.” He walked to the door, where he stopped and looked back at me. “You know, this is the end.”

“The end?” My heart leapt up, my pulse banging in my throat.

“Say goodbye and make it a good one.”

Adrian knew I was breaking up with him? I stood there in stunned silence. I had to tell him everything that was happening, yet I didn’t want our new relationship to be over. He wasn’t just some guy. He was
Adrian
, and we’d known each other for years.
We had history.
When I was with him, I felt like we had a future.

He patted the wall next to the door. “Goodbye old bookstore! I hope you like wine!” To me, he winked and said, “Say goodbye to the store. Something like that.”

“Five minutes!”

He paused, seemingly frowning at my watch, then retreated out the door to phone DeNirro’s about reservations.

I ran the reports on the credit card machine and double-checked that there were no customers in the store. I’d been pretty sure nobody was there at the time Adrian had arrived, but sometimes a person will be reading quietly on the other side of the shelf and make me scream when they reappear. Not this time, though.

I walked around turning off the lights and saying goodbye to the store. The whole thing seemed silly and premature, since we were coming back the next day to oversee the movers, but I did it anyway, running my hand along the bead curtain leading back to the bathroom, and letting the clinking chimes ring through the space.

“I’ll miss you,” I said to the space in general.

“I won’t miss you, evil jerkface,” I said to the cupcake vent as I passed underneath on my way out.

Adrian was leaning up against the building’s exterior with one foot resting on the wall. With his blond hair and high cheekbones, plus wearing his tight jeans, sneakers, and black T-shirt, he looked like a troubled youth in an indie Euro movie—like he was waiting in some Swedish city’s alley for a drug dealer.