First Love Again. Kristina Knight
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crookedly against the building with one side a full two inches lower than the other. She felt like she was sitting on a warped teeter-totter.
“Luther just walked out. Says he’s tired of our boring little island and wants to go home.”
Something banged over the phone line. Probably Maureen’s kitchen chair pounding into the counter. “He can’t do that.” She sounded panicked so Jaime kept her voice calm.
“From our walk-through yesterday morning I don’t think any new work has been done since his crew left on Wednesday.” Jaime shoved her hand into her hair. What was she going to do? All the local firms were already booked for the summer. Getting the Cleveland crew had been a miracle so late in the season. “And before you ask again, I don’t know where we would find another crew. I think we’re stuck with Luther and the no-shows.”
“Maybe it’s a sign.”
“Of my complete ineptitude? Thanks.”
Maureen made a shushing sound over the phone. “A sign that this year we skip the reunion. Our class is so scattered no one will mind—”
“We’re not skipping it. The reunion is a tradition.”
“A stupid tradition. Clara dumped the planning in your lap at the last minute and after everything that happened before graduation... I think everyone would be happy with a fish fry on the beach.”
“We are not turning the annual reunion into a fish fry, Mo.” Her stomach tightened just thinking about dropping this particular ball. Yes, Clara had dumped the reunion on her with no notice. Yes, the past couple of months of their senior year had been horrific for Jaime.
She gripped the phone more tightly in her hand.
“Come on, what town needs an island-wide reunion every summer? Our class was never big on these kinds of things, anyway.”
Jaime cleared her throat, pushing the panicked butterflies out of her stomach. She would not be the victim. Not again. Not when she had worked so hard to put her life back together. “We aren’t skipping. It’s our turn to host and that’s final.”
The reunion would not be canceled; not because Jaime hired a shoddy construction firm. She would not give the islanders another reason to act as if she was...wounded.
“I’ll meet you at the diner in fifteen and we’ll go over the early RSVPs and start thinking about the actual planning,” she said and hung up before Maureen could really get going on the cancellation conversation. If Luther and his crew were going to milk this job until the last minute, she would be prepared to use each of those final seconds to make sure the reunion went off without a hitch.
Her ribs twinged again.
It was ten years ago, for Pete’s sake. She was over it. Six more weeks and she could completely put it out of her mind and in the meantime she had the school to renovate, the reunion party to plan and her job at the winery. Plenty of work to keep her mind occupied and fully in the present, where she preferred to be. There was no reason to keep living in the past. Wasn’t that what her therapist told her? She was still cured.
Two years before she’d been a borderline agoraphobic afraid to leave the island. Sometimes afraid to leave her cute little cottage on the west side of town. The first two sessions with Dr. Laurer were held via video chat. For the following four months Dr. Laurer brought the ferry to Gulliver twice a week to meet with her at the cottage or at the diner. The day she took the ferry to his office for a session he’d declared her cured. She’d celebrated with her parents at a nice restaurant on the waterfront.
The fact that she hadn’t been off the island since that day was beside the point. She was over the past. Over the attack. No need to keep bringing it up.
Maybe if she’d gone to the mainland with Maureen for a girl’s day, or even to go to the movies with her mom once or twice she would not have thought twice about driving to Cleveland to meet with Luther before hiring him. There were always reasons to skip an impromptu shopping or movie trip, though. After a while people stopped asking her to do things off the island and until the excitement about the upcoming reunion started she didn’t think twice about all the ways she had become complacent about her life.
That stopped now.
Canceling the reunion, letting the school project founder, would bring the past up in a big way. Would stress out her parents, who deserved so much more than constantly worrying their daughter would freak out and never leave her house again. The whispered conversations would start. The pitying looks. She loved the island and she loved the people on it, but they had to stop treating her like she was broken.
She wasn’t.
She was healed. Maybe if she kept telling herself that it would actually be true.
Fifteen minutes later Jaime sat in her favorite corner booth at the Gulliver Diner watching out the big plate-glass window and stealing glances at a booth in the back to a stranger with broad shoulders and a tight T. His black hair that was short enough to look tidy but long enough to look just a little bit dangerous. He looked...interesting. At least from the back.
But Jaime didn’t leave her bench seat to covertly check him out on her way to the bathroom. It was enough to watch the economical movements he used to cut into his eggs Benedict.
She shifted in her seat and the cracked purple vinyl sighed with the movement. The Formica-topped tables were chipped, and the black-and-white-tiled floor was scuffed and scarred beyond repair, but the Gulliver Diner was a mainstay on the island. Funny, though, Anna, the diner’s only waitress for as long as she could remember, usually paid a lot more attention to tourists, and she’d barely flirted with the hot guy in the corner. Maybe the view from the front negated the pulse-pounding view from behind, she thought.
Finally, Maureen pulled up in her little blue golf cart and hurried inside. She wore skinny jeans and Converse sneakers with a striped sailor top in navy and white. Her hair in a ponytail, quilted backpack slung across her torso, she looked pulled together. Jaime shrank back against the seat as her outfit would never be mistaken for fashionable.
Anna brought over a tall, frosted glass and a pitcher of iced tea. She topped off Jaime’s glass, filled Maureen’s and set the pitcher on the table for them. “You girls want a sandwich?” She waved her hand toward the kitchen. “Hank’s making triple-decker clubs for lunch today. I just served the last of the Benedicts to him,” she said, pointing to the corner booth. Jaime’s gaze came to rest on the back of the stranger with broad shoulders and dark, dark hair. She couldn’t see his face but her tummy did a little flip-flop.
Which was silly. She didn’t do the flip-flop thing any longer. Especially not in grubby work clothes. She should have taken the time to change before meeting Maureen for lunch.
They each ordered sandwiches and Anna disappeared behind the counter.
“Listen to this one.” Jaime tucked the strand of blond hair behind her ear, determined to ignore the discomfort weighing on her narrow shoulders. Before she could begin reading from the questionnaire in her hand Maureen interrupted.
“I think we need to seriously consider not having an island-wide reunion this summer.” She held up her hand and Jaime bit back the protest that immediately sprang to her lips. “The school reno is a huge project, and it’s more important than the reunion. The reno will bring tourists back here year after year. Having all our old classmates come in and seeing the old-timers who moved off-island years ago is great. What the island needs, though, is a steady stream of tourists. Newcomers. Old residents.”
“And they’ll come, but the reno doesn’t trump the reunion.”
“Maybe it should.” Maureen reached across the table to pat Jaime’s hand. As she and so many others had so many times over the past decade. She was sick to death of their patronizing. “The reno was a last-minute fix to the location problem when the winery said no to hosting the main reunion events. That is on our class. The pranks we pulled still make people see us as a bunch of bored kids—”
“All