Sweet Forty-Two (17 page)

Most days, really.

“How long have you been baking?” Regan yawned as he brought the bowl over to where I was. He leaned against the counter and loudly slurped his coffee.

I began the process of adding the dry ingredients to the bowl, scooping in yogurt between additions.

“Forever, it feels like. My grandmother was always in our kitchen, especially on Sundays, and she’d make sweet breads, brownies, cookies, muffins, sandwich bread. All by hand. After church I’d spend all day planted on a stool next to our island.”

“Church?” Regan tilted his head to the side. Interrogation was exhausting.

I nodded. “Yeah, you know, church. Sunday. Jesus. Crown of thorns and all that?” I drew an imaginary circle around my head with my index finger.

“I get it...”

“Anyway, baking has always been a meditative and especially rewarding escape.” Once the ingredients were all combined, I went to the deep freezer to pull out a bag of blueberries I’d picked and frozen over the summer. “Like music for you, I guess.”

Regan sighed. “Yeah. I don’t know what I would have done most of my life without it.”

“Did it start as an escape for you?”

His lips twisted. “What four-year-old needs to escape something?”

You have no idea.

“You know what I mean,” I huffed, hoping he hadn’t read too much into my question.

He didn’t seem to. “At first I was really proud. Excited. I got a lot of attention because the violin came so easily to me. I worked hard because I wanted to be better. To get more attention.”

Using an escape to get attention was foreign to me on every level possible. But, he’d just said he hadn’t started out on the violin to escape.

“After a while,” he continued, “it became a self-fulfilling escape, if that makes sense. All of the praise I’d received and all of the pride I had in myself grew to pressure in no time.”

I pulled out a fresh muffin tin, handed Regan a small ice cream scoop, and took one for myself. I scooped some of the batter up, clicked the handle to pour it in the tin, and looked at him. “Like this. So, pressure?”

He mimicked my movements, studying my hands carefully before confidently filling wells on his own.

“Yes,” he sighed, “I can’t blame my parents. The pressure I put on myself they reciprocated, and vice versa. I think they saw how hard I was working and they wanted to support that, but it was hard to do that without pushing me a little harder than I was already pushing myself. It’s hard to know where the pressure started. I think it’s inherent, honestly.”

“In you?”

“In anything anyone craves. You want it to be perfect. No matter what it is. It just has to be ... the best. If it’s not, what the hell’s the point? There. Done.” Regan stood back with a victorious grin on his face.

I took the tin and slid it into the oven. “Well, in half an hour, we’ll find out if there’s a point to all of this.”

Turning around, I found Regan with an entire muffin in his mouth. One I’d taken out earlier.

“Oh,” he talked with a full mouth, “there’s definitely a point. These are delicious! Can I have another one?”

“Sure.” I grabbed my travel mug, filled it with coffee, and turned back around. “Grab a few and follow me back outside.”

Once we were outside, I locked the door and led Regan back across the street.

“I’m not jumping.” He sat on the rock wall and swung his legs over the edge.

“Ha. Ha. It’s not like I leapt to my death, or something. Dial it down a little.”

We sat in silence for a few minutes, eating the muffins and sipping — or in his case, slurping — the coffee.

“These are gluten-free, too?” he asked after eating his third muffin.

“I told you, the whole bakery is.” I snatched a muffin before he ate them all.

“Why? Do you have celiac or something?”

“You know about that? I’m impressed.”

“I pay attention to news and shit.” He nudged his shoulder into mine as he laughed.

The more time I spent with him, the more my assumptions of him were stripped away. Is that how it worked? Would it work the same with me? I couldn’t decide right then if I wanted him to have his assumptions of me dismantled. Whatever they were.

“I don’t have celiac, but I know people who do. And, frankly, you just don’t
need
wheat for a number of reasons I don’t want to get into at eight o’clock on a weekend morning.”

Regan shrugged and continued slurping his coffee. Seriously, what was with that?

“Do you always drink your coffee like that?” I asked, clicking my tongue in irritation.

“Like what? With my mouth? Swallowing?”

I brought my cup to my lips and mimicked the slurping sound.

“That was a bit dramatic,” he scoffed.

“You’re right ... it was.” I raised my eyebrow at him and he lightly smacked my shoulder with the back of his hand.

“All right, all right. Sorry. I have no idea why I do that.”

“Has
no one
said anything about it to you before? It’s really quite offensive.” I laughed, setting my mug on the wall.

Regan went silent for a minute. When I looked over at him, he was staring at his hands.
You
’
ve got to be kidding me.

I cleared my throat. “Rae?”

He nodded. “It’s okay.”

“Doesn’t look like it.”

“Well, she died...” He winced through that whole sentence, nearly closing his eyes by the end of it.

I sighed, my window of distraction officially slamming shut. “Tell me.”

“We were out on a trail ride,” he started.

“No,” I cut in, “I don’t need to know about that. Tell me about
her
.”

I knew how hard it could be to talk about how people used to be, but for me, it provided a sense of comfort that the memories existed at all. I’d take the bad if I got to have all of the good that came before it.

I think.

“I don’t know if I can...”

In the span of my drift off into my thought process, I’d missed that Regan had taken down his hair and tucked it behind his ears, snapping the elastic around his wrist repeatedly.

“Just ... just tell me your favorite thing about her.” I leaned my shoulder into his and left it there. His muscles were tense. Hesitant.

He laughed sort of silently. “She came out of nowhere. Tiny, bossy, and full of certainties.”

“Certainties?” I tucked my knees into my chest.

“Yeah, she was filled with this stone-solid conviction. When she was passionate about something, she wouldn’t let go. It wasn’t in-your-face ... it was ... this quiet resolve. She was ferocious. She’d been through more than you and I both before I’d even met her.”

I doubted that, but let him continue with his story.

“I’ve been in love before, but with her...”

“You’ve been in love before?” I pulled my head back and scrunched my forehead.

He smiled. “Oh, of course. Love is great. Swept off your feet, and all of that? I love it. The first time I was in love was with Kylee Graham in seventh grade. She always wore flowery dresses, and I was certain I’d marry her.”

I bit my lip as I smiled. A thirteen-year-old Regan Kane, in love and making plans to marry. His cousin would consider such thoughts treasonous to the brotherhood of men.

“Anyway,” he sighed wistful thoughts of Kylee into the sea air, “Rae was the first time I felt
grown up
love.”

“What’s the difference?”

He looked up and then closed his eyes. “It rewired my insides.”

A hole the shape of my mother’s smile seared through me and choked the air away from my throat. I let out an exhale as though I’d been punched in the gut. Because I had, by his words alone. I was left struggling for the comfortable air of my cynicism.

“I know. Intense, right?” He smiled and took a silent sip of his coffee.

“Keep slurping it,” I blurted out.

I needed him to be real, still. Flawed in the volume of his drinking. Loud enough to override the palpable rawness of his allegiance to the doctrine of love.

“When I was in high school I pictured a future with a few girls. With Rae, I felt it here.” He patted his stomach, leaving his fingers to bunch around the fabric of his shirt.

“How long were you together, again?” I couldn’t remember if he’d told me, but I was losing traction on reality.

“Barely two months.”

“Wow.”

“Mmmhmm.” He ran a hand through his hair.

“Did she feel the same way?” I knew I was trudging into mucky personal territory, but come on, we were talking about his dead ex-girlfriend as it was.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I never told her.”

“
What?
” My shock offended two nearby seagulls, who flew away in a tizzy.

“What?” Regan cleared his throat, looking concerned at my sudden trip into intensity.

“All of that talk about being in love before you even knew what to do with yourself and you never
told
her?”

The pained look in his eyes signaled I’d done it. I’d pushed too far.

“Well ... I didn’t exactly get the chance to, Georgia. I felt it so deeply that I was afraid if I told her that soon then I’d push her away. Then—”

“I know.”

Regan reached his hand across my lap, grasping my knee. “Let me talk about it.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

“Then ... she died. She. Didn’t. Make it. Jesus.” He sniffed and inconspicuously wiped under his eye. “Words have never hit me like that before. I’d been shot, I was sure of it. Every time I took a breath it felt like the air was leaving my chest through a hole before it ever got to my lungs.”

It was time for me to regain some emotional control over this conversation. We’d passed my comfort level at the intersection of love and certainty.

“Was there an exit wound?”

He turned to me with a perfectly quizzical look on his face. “Huh?”

“An exit would. From feeling like you were shot. Did the bullet leave your body, or do we need to go fishing for it?”

“I...” Regan shook his head slowly, looking between me and the ocean with his bottomless eyes.

“Sew yourself up if it’s gone, Regan. That’s the only way you’ll move on. If you want to move on. Come on ... the muffins are done.” I stood, brushing crumbled gravel from my jeans, and walked back toward the bakery.

“And that was it? That’s all you said to him? And all he said to you?” Lissa shook a martini like her life depended on it as we navigated an annoyingly busy Friday night.

I shrugged. “Yep. That was it. Then he went back to his apartment and I haven’t really seen him since.”

“Did he take the card?”

“No.”

“Do you still have it?” She slid the martini to her customer in an uncharacteristically impersonal manner, more interested in the mild excitement she judged in my life.

“Of course I have it. What the hell would I do? Throw it away?”

It had been an awkward week in La Jolla. Regan hadn’t spoken a word to me since he left the bakery on Sunday. Well, actually, after our chat on the wall before the second batch of muffins was done, he never came back into the bakery. He got up, looked me up and down with a disturbingly unreadable expression on his face, and went back into his apartment.

Saying he hadn’t talked to me was slightly dramatic, given I hadn’t actually
seen
him. But I heard him. He’d taken to practicing his violin in the wee hours of the morning. On nights I came straight home after work, I could hear him. It sounded like the notes were crying. Given our conversation on the swing set, it was hard to tell if he was escaping from something or putting pressure on himself.

I determined I wouldn’t push him about the card from Rae. He knew I had it, and that was that. I’ve found that if you push people, they have an uncanny tendency to push back.

Lissa slid by me, lightly smacking my butt. “You’ve got skills, sister.”

“Skills?”

She chuckled. “You spent all that time with him
inside
the bakery and you managed to avoid all discussion about it, its theme, or your mother whatsoever.”

I roughly set a rack of glasses at the edge of the bar. “It’s not just him. I don’t talk about my mom. To anyone.”

“Why?” She put her hands on her hips, as though we hadn’t had this conversation every few weeks for the duration of our friendship.

“You know why. No one gets close enough.”

“You don’t let them.”

I growled under my breath. “
Liss
. You
know
why.”

Visibly frustrated, Lissa grabbed my arm and pulled me into the small entryway to the kitchen. “You can’t use circular reasoning, G. You keep people away because of your mom, and you don’t tell people about her because no one is close. Then, this amazingly nice and clean-cut guy comes in here, is clearly interested in you, and you
still
insist on pushing him away.”

“Who? Regan? You saw how he nearly drank his face off over his dead girlfriend the other night. I’d hardly call that a place of
moving on
.” Crossing my arms, I leaned back against the greasy wall.

“Whatever. I haven’t heard him mention her once. If he’s opening up to you, he trusts you. And that look he gets around you? The one where his pupils double in size?”