Living Lies (18 page)

“Where to now?” Trish asked, as they headed out the door to the cool night breeze.

“Shoot, I forgot my jacket. I’ll be right back,” Melanie said, running back into the restaurant.

The excuse sounded fake even to her, but she hadn’t left it intentionally, had she?

A little tipsy from the tequila, Melanie stopped short, almost passing by her jacket still slung over the high-backed chair. The move startled a waiter carrying a single glass of red wine on his tray.

Melanie gasped, the waiter gasped. The glass was airborne and heading directly for the handsome man she’d been fantasizing about all evening. Without thinking Melanie lurched forward, quickly catching the stem. The wine splash down the front of his shirt, and horridly, at the end it was she who held the empty culprit.

He’d tried to get out of the way, standing only few feet in front of her with the right side of his shirt, from shoulder to the rolled-up cuff, stained.

“Oh, my God, I am
so
sorry,” She bit down tightly on the flesh inside her mouth and slowly raised her guilty eyes.

She looked up into the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. A short gasp escaped her lips and she held her breath.

“I usually have to go out with a woman before she’s throwing her drink at me,” he said, a small smile forming.

His voice was deep,
absolutely luxurious
, and his ease immediately comforted her.

“It was an accident,” she felt compelled to explain as she stepped closer and reached for his arm.

Her heart jolted as her fingers closed around the tight muscle beneath his shirt.

“I know,” he laughed a low bass note.

Melanie was absorbed by every feature: dark hair framing tan skin, brilliant emerald eyes, salmon lips against white teeth.

“Club soda, I need club soda, now!” yelled the woman in blue, startling Melanie out of her revelry.

“Yes ma’am.” The waiter scurried off.

“There is wine on my dress,” she glared at Melanie, punctuating every syllable.

“I’m so sorry.” Melanie tried to locate any stain on the fancy dress.

“Someone is going to pay for this,” screeched the beautiful woman.

“Daria, calm down,” said the man.

“Hello, I’m Mr. Gomez, the manager. I’m sorry…”

“Look at this,” she interrupted, hotly pointing out a discoloration on the fabric.

“Daria, it’s all right.”

His tone was not as patient as it had been. Daria seemed to have noticed it, too, because she quieted down and gritted her teeth as Mr. Gomez rubbed a spot on her dress and apologized.

“I’m sorry,” Melanie said, quietly to the man in merlot, writing her number on the back of a coaster.

“It shouldn’t be a big deal,” he said calmly, his smile crinkling the edges of his eyes.

He was handsome and behind the wood scent of the wine he smelled vaguely of rosemary.

“Well, this is my number I’ll be more than happy to replace … whatever.” She looked toward Daria then handed him the coaster.

“Wait, what’s your name Ms. 202?”

“Melanie,” she smiled and kept walking.

Once outside again, she pulled out the glass she’d hidden beneath her jacket. And without missing a step tapped it against the painted cinderblock wall, letting the shards fall into the groundcover. Melanie shook her head. She hadn’t consciously taken the glass – it was instinct. Leaving fingerprints was always a bad idea.

Irrational
, Melanie knew.

She said nothing of the incident to her friends.

Early the next morning with her radio strapped to her arm, her phone hooked to her shorts and her hair in a ponytail, Melanie followed the coast south.

It was June and summer was in full swing. Bright umbrellas speckled the beach at 7:30 on a weekday morning. Melanie walked barefoot along the shore. The cool water washed over her feet, erasing her footsteps. She had nowhere to be and all day to get there, and was not about to spend another day scrapbooking with her mom and Cheryl.

The jealousy of her sister-in-law’s relationship with her mother came unsuspected. Rita and Cheryl spent hours together, picking out papers and choosing scissor designs to create a “life” album for Olivia. Cheryl was calling Rita “Mom” and they palled around like teenagers. Melanie had joined in for two days, on the third they had moved over to Cheryl’s house. Melanie was hurt. Too much spare time had always been a problem. She’d attributed her intense, hard-driven focus to her inability to cope with emotion. Whenever feelings went awry Melanie found herself at work, putting 110 percent of her attention into things she could control.

You have way too much time to think and now … now you’re starting to feel?

Feel. The word left a bad taste in her mouth. Heated blame was aimed at Ty for her sudden surge of hormones.

Seven years of celibacy, then some hot kid lays a wet one on you and you get weak in the knees.
But the truth was she had been “feeling” since Hawaii.

Effortlessly her daydream flowed to the man with the green eyes and she wondered how the rest of his evening had played out. Her thoughts swirled like the tide, sweeping in and flooding her senses, only to be washed away by the arrival of the next.

Her phone rang. In an exceptionally bored moment last week she’d changed her ring to the William Tell Overture.

“Hello?’

“I’m calling for Melanie.”

“Yup, speaking,” she said, nearly trampled by three boys that only had eyes for the water.

“Hi, this is Adam. You probably know me better as the guy wearing the red wine.”

“The man in merlot,” her smile reaching through her voice.

His laugh was deep and Melanie’s self-pity vanished.

“Yeah, I guess that’s me.”

“I was just thinking about you,” she blushed. “I wondered about the rest of your evening.”

Melanie walked to dry sand and sat while she listened to Adam talk about driving Daria home.

“Your home?”

Her home.

Melanie was feeling sick, and she realized his voice had awakened a confused rabble of fluttering butterflies.

“I thought if you didn’t have plans for tomorrow we could do something.”

Her heart skipped.

“I’m free during the day but I’ve got…” She hesitated then tossed him the information. “I have a blind date in the evening.”

“A blind date, huh? So, you’re not married with half a dozen kids. That’s good to know.”

His voice was low and soft.

“What about you and the vocal blonde?”

Melanie closed her eyes letting his deep husky voice soak into her skin.

“Nope, there’s no one,” he said slowly. “What else do you want to know?”

Melanie bit her lip, giddy.

“What else do I want to know?” Melanie repeated thinking of how to answer.
I want to know why your eyes are so green and why my heart goes into overdrive just thinking about you.
“How about a confession? Anything you wouldn’t normally tell someone on the first phone call.”
Sure
, she thought,
it was easy to be brave over the phone.

“Hmm … all right. You have the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen, and when I saw you last night I had to stop myself from kissing you.”

Melanie froze, barely managing to get the words out of her throat. “Well, that’s pretty good.”

Unconsciously, she bit her lip.

The noisy beach was forgotten while they spoke and she concentrated on being charming, getting lost in conversation. That is, until a woman in a one-piece bathing suit bellowed at her two toddler sons and stormed to the water to catch the mischievous duo, who were streaking naked to avoid being lathered with sunscreen.

“Where are you?” Adam asked.

“At the beach among thousands of my closest friends.”

“We’ve been talking for 20 minutes. How ’bout I meet you there and we’ll have lunch?”

“Where do you work that you can take off to lunch with someone you don’t know?”

“I work in a restaurant. How about lunch?”

“You’d never find me.”

“I’ll find you. What beach?”

Thirty minutes later Melanie waited for Adam outside a Denny’s. She begged a woman in the bathroom to borrow some lipstick and ran her fingers through her hair.

“You should keep the hat on,” suggested the woman with the lipstick.

“Ya think?”

She nodded and Melanie pulled her hair back and slipped her ponytail through the back of her baseball cap. The parking lot was a stream of moving vehicles, a constant trading of spots – one car out and another in line to take its place accompanied by horn blowing and hand gestures. Nervously she traveled across the curbs, balancing on and hurdling over the short barriers.

She recognized him cutting through the lot from a distance. If she’d been savvy she’d have waited to let him approach but instead they met awkwardly between two towering SUVs.

Adam looked like he’d stepped right off a fashion shoot, in a pair of loose shorts and a white T-shirt that fit snugly across his shoulders. It was a different look but suited him well.

“Hi,” he greeted, as he took off the silver framed sunglasses, exposing his beautiful eyes. She exhaled and froze as he bent to give her a quick hug.

“I’d have worn a nicer tank top had I known we were going to meet,” Melanie said, looking down at her outfit starting with the old running shoes that looked even grungier than they had this morning.

“You look nice. Sporty.”

“Thank you,” she said, thinking,
for saying the right thing
.

He was taller than she’d recalled. She barely reached the top of his shoulders.

“Are you hungry? There’s a great hot dog stand a couple of blocks away.”

“Is it the restaurant where you work?”

Adam laughed. “No.”

The hot dog lean-to was set up on the sand’s edge, along a row of shabby businesses that included equipment rentals and a swimsuit/T-shirt shop. The entire structure looked unstable, and Melanie wondered how it stood up against the strong Pacific winds.

The beach was packed, uncomfortably crowded. In another hour every square foot would be occupied for miles, too many people with too much bare skin smeared in coconut oil. The hot dog shack had about a dozen tables, each with four chairs and a red and white umbrella. Melanie and Adam stood in line with two-dozen others.

“So, Adam, at the restaurant, what do you do? Waiter? Bus boy?”

“Chef.”

“Chef?” Melanie repeated as they arrived at the order window where two men in white paper hats served specialty dogs. “Aren’t hot dogs against some culinary Hippocratic oath? ‘I will never injure or give poison in the form of various animal scraps to my diners’?”

He laughed. “What’s wrong with an occasional deviation?”

“Hey Adam, how ya been?” said one of the men from behind the counter, his little white cap clinging to a sparse clump of thinning hair.

“Hi Joe. I’d like you to meet my friend Melanie,” he said, his hand flat on the small of her back.

“Nice to meet ya. So ya going for the colossal with the works? What about you?” Joe asked, gesturing to Melanie.

“She’s going to have the same,” Adam said.

“Hey, Ervin, get Adam his drinks at no charge.”

“Thanks, Joe.”

By the time Ervin got their two cups of Coke and Adam paid the bill, Joe had slid over their dogs and was onto the next customer.Two seats opened up at a table for four and they enjoyed the comforts of aluminum chairs.

“Are you ready?” Adam asked, slipping a waxed paper boat off the tray.

Somewhere beneath a mound of chili sprinkled with cheddar cheese was an entire hot dog and bun. As she looked around at the other people to learn how to tackle this beast, a chunk of the chili slid off the dog and onto the wax paper wrapper.