Chapter 34
Kellan
“Another round, boys?” asked Murphy, the appropriately crusty old bartender as Ryan and I sat at The Ship’s Wheel, the marina bar, after another long day out at sea.
We were sunburned and salty but relieved to have the next day off and sharing a rare beer together with Carla out of town. “Why not?” I said, looking to Ryan for approval.
He shrugged and pushed his empty beer glass toward Murphy. “Why not?” he sighed in agreement, watching the bartender fill it at the tap before returning it and reaching for mine. “I’ve got nothing waiting on me at home but a microwave dinner and last night’s ballgame.”
I chuckled, echoing the statement quietly inside my own head. “No girlfriend at the moment?” I pressed, realizing that, other than fishing and figuring out which end of the boat was the bow and which was the stern—I was still working on all that—Ryan and I didn’t do much talking.
I hoped our first foray into the Ship’s Wheel might change all that. “Not at the moment,” Ryan sighed, peering back at his amber beer in the pint glass in front of him. “Not since Shelly broke up with me over Christmas.”
“You meant last Christmas?” I asked.
“No, this coming Christmas,” he teased, nudging me with his elbow. “Didn’t I tell you I was a mind reader?”
I sighed and sipped my own beer, figuring Ryan would tell me in his own sweet time. It didn’t take long. “I got her these sweet headphones,” he revealed, holding his hands up to show just how sweet they must have been. “And I invited her onto the boat to give them to her, you know?”
I nodded. “Sounds romantic.”
Ryan brightened. “I thought so. Anyway, Shelly made it clear she’d rather meet at Sorrento’s, this fancy restaurant downtown. I agreed, and wined and dined her all night, to the tune of three hundred bucks, only to have her tell me she was tired of smelling fish guts on my T-shirt in bed every night and that she was breaking up with me.”
I literally winced. “That’s cold, Ryan.”
“Tell me about it,” he huffed, reaching for his beer.
“I hope you kept the headphones,” I said.
He shook his head. “No,” he confessed, glumly enough to make me wish I hadn’t brought it up. “I gave them to her before we even sat down to dinner.”
I slapped him on the shoulders, narrow and scrawny though they were. “Rookie move, my man.”
He nodded. “I know that now, but… I thought I was in love, you know?”
I shrugged. “It happens to the best of us, my man.”
Ryan sighed and settled back into his barstool. “Not to a guy like you, though.”
My eyes grew wide. “Of course it has. Trust me, I’ve had my heart broken a dozen times before I ever met Carla.”
Ryan shrugged, looking all of seventeen in his stained “Roy’s Retreat” T-shirt. “Yeah, but now the future’s bright, right?”
I chuckled, grinning even as I wondered—was it? Everything in my life seemed up for grabs. My job, my income, my future, even my residence. Everything but Carla, I realized. Then again, whenever things went too well for me, they usually mucked right the hell up.
“I hope so, my man. I really do.”
He nodded. “It must be hard, with so much family drama involved.”
I nodded back. “You said a mouthful, Ryan. Carla’s all tied up with her folks, and I don’t blame her. But it’s not the most romantic scenario for a new relationship.”
“New?” Ryan wrinkled his nose, turning slightly toward me in his barstool. “You guys always seem so great together, it seems like you’ve been with each other forever.”
“Just a few months,” I said, before correcting myself. “Barely a few months, I mean. This is kind of the most vulnerable point right here.”
Ryan snorted, looking around the deserted dive bar. It was humble, with the proverbial fish nets and plastic crabs on the walls, wherever there wasn’t a neon beer sign, that is. “Lucky you won’t find any temptation here, Kellan.”
I frowned. “It’s not here I’m worried about, Ryan. Siesta Key might not be the sexiest town in Florida, but South Beach sure is, and every minute Carla stays there, the more prone she is to temptation.”
He shook his head. “You must not know Carla well then,” he said, in a slightly scolding tone that made him seem wise beyond his ears. “She’d never do that to someone.”
I nodded. “You’re probably right, Ryan,” I agreed. “I guess I’m just a little paranoid, that’s all.”
“You must be a lot paranoid if you think a girl like Carla would ever cheat on you,” he harrumphed.
I shrugged. “Yeah, well, I’m not alone. Not too long ago, just before we came down here, as a matter of fact, Carla thought I was cheating on her.”
“Were you?”
I widened my eyes in mock shock. “Hell no! Of course not! But I can see how it might’ve looked that way, which is my point exactly. When you care about someone so much, you’ll do almost anything not to lose them.”
“Including losing sleep over who they might be sleeping with?” he asked, and his tone made it clear it wasn’t a rhetorical question.
“Exactly,” I answered, if only to myself.