When Linc found her, Mari was chewing her lip and sitting on the kitchen counter, a half eaten apple in one hand. Her gaze was firmly out the window toward the evergreens in the backyard.

He hesitated for half a second before he cursed himself. It wouldn’t do to go getting weird around her now, just because he’d learned some new information about her. Just because there was a whole new section of her life that he was gonna have to figure out how to incorporate. She was still his Mari. The same woman he’d been with for three years, serious about for two.

“Everything alright?” Linc asked as he crossed to the cabinet next to her, pulled out a water glass for an excuse at something to do while he talked to her.

“Oh. Yeah.”

Her eyes gave him absolutely no hints at what to do or say next. “What are you thinking about?” He internally winced. He sounded like a middle school girl trying to wheedle information out of her first crush.

Mari shrugged. “I guess I was thinking about our first year together.”

“Oh yeah?” He was delighted to hear she’d been thinking about him and not… anyone else.

“Yeah,” Mari said as she kicked her hanging feet in slow circles. “I was thinking about how much you helped me with everything.”

Linc nodded. He didn’t need to ask about what everything meant. He’d been there. As beautiful as she was, as put together as her professional life was, her personal life had been in total chaos. Linc had been amazed to learn that her parents had died more than a decade before. The way she’d been grieving them had seemed fresh. A tumbler kicked into place in Linc’s brain. Oh. “You, uh, weren’t just grieving your parents when I met you, were you?”

Her eyes met his and not for the first time, Linc wished she wasn’t quite so scrupulously honest. “Yes and no. I was really grieving Jay, I think. I wasn’t sure if he was alive. But I knew that no matter what, I’d never see him again. And I think all that sadness triggered sadness that I’d never really addressed about my parents’ deaths. I was too young when it happened, to really understand all the ways them dying would affect my life. And after the hurricane, after Jay, it all kind of came tumbling down on me.”

Linc nodded. He gulped and asked a question that had been pecking at the back of his mind for far too long. “Why didn’t you ever tell me about the hurricane?”

Mari let out a long, slow breath. One that told him she didn’t like the answer any better than he was going to. But of course, she was going to tell him the truth. “Part of me wanted to forget it. It was the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. And thinking about it was painful. And I guess, I had no idea how to talk about it. Parts of it were still so confusing. Just the simple, like, what the hell was that? I don’t know. It was easier to sweep it under the rug.” Her eyes held his. “But I see now that that wasn’t the right move. It was selfish. I was demanding all this comfort from you but I wasn’t giving you all the information.”

Finding it was the only thing he could do amidst his scrambled, raw feelings, Linc waved a hand through the air, as if to scrub her actions from the record. “Mari, people do crazy things when they’re grieving. And you don’t owe me anything.” He paused. “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

A moment later, he cursed himself for hesitating again. As a general rule, Linc was a nice guy, he did his best not to resent anyone or hold on to any crusty feelings. But this Jay guy was starting to bother him. Twice he had Linc second guessing what to do next with Mari when for three years things had been perfectly natural between them.

So he swept an arm out, held her close, and she rested her head on his shoulder. Linc hugged her, nice and gentle. A zing of worry skittered up his spine. He needed to support her. He needed to comfort her, just like always. So why didn’t this feel right?

***

A few days later, Jay sat at his mother’s kitchen table, attempting, and failing, to interpret her pointed silence.

He’d just explained to her everything about his Mari situation, barring some of the more sexual details. But even so, he’d been more detailed in his descriptions of his feelings for Mari than he had with anyone else. For some reason, Jay absolutely needed his mother to understand what was going on with him.

Kat Brady was a magical woman in a lot of ways. She was tough and smart and the things she was rooting for just always kind of… panned out. The only thing that hadn’t gone her way was when Jay’s dad had abandoned them twenty years before. But to Jay’s thinking, that had kind of turned out for the best as well. They were better off without him.

The absence of a father had made Jay even closer to his mother. There was very little that they kept from one another. Which was why, he supposed, his mother was so quiet after he’d told her all about Mari.

He watched as she carefully sorted silverware into their appropriate slots in the drawer until he thought he’d tear his hair out. Gently hip checking her out of the way, Jay took the handful of silverware and started sorting it himself.

She went back to the fridge and pulled out some lettuce to wash for the salad she was about to make.

Finally, when Jay thought he’d scream if she didn’t say anything, she said something. “That’s a hell of a thing to keep to yourself for five years, Jay.”

“I know, Ma. I know. I wasn’t trying to keep it from you, I just—”

She held up a hand and he instantly fell silent. “I’m not mad you kept it from me, honey. I’m just sad that you held it inside for all that time. That’s the kind of sadness that can change you if you let it. And you kept it all close to your heart this whole time? I’m just sad you were so burdened and I didn’t even know.”

Jay listened carefully to her words. And then he scoffed. “Come on, Ma. You knew. You knew a little bit.”

“Well,” Kat shrugged and shook back her stylish salt and pepper hair. “I knew that there was something you weren’t telling me. And that it probably had to do with a girl. And considering I started getting that feeling right around the time you came back from the hurricane, I figured you’d met her down there.”

“So you pretty much had all of it figured out,” Jay laughed.

“Well,” Kat shrugged again. “I didn’t know her name.”             

She grinned at her son. But it fell away as she considered the predicament that he was in. “Have you talked to Marcus and Eli about it yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ask them what they would do in your situation?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me guess. Marcus said that he would run in there, guns blazing, and get his girl old west style. And Eli said that no matter what, her happiness was tantamount, no matter if they ended up together or not.”

Jay raised an eyebrow at his omniscient mother. “You’re good.”

She tipped her head to one side and started tearing the washed lettuce into a bowl. “I’ve known those boys a long time. Almost as long as I’ve known you.”

“So if you know me so well, what do you think I’m gonna do about it?”

Kat considered for a minute. “I think you’re gonna take a beat to get your head on straight. And then when you know how you feel, you’re gonna be honest. And then you’re gonna let her get her head on straight.”

Jay sighed. “It’s not the most romantic tactic.”

Kat grinned. “Romance is overrated. Your father was romantic. But you and me? We’re similar. Straight shooters, but kind. That’s a good recipe right there. You can’t start a relationship on shaky ground and expect it to flourish. And the way you’re approaching this? Well, you want to build something with this girl. And that’s good. It requires honesty. And patience.”

Something in the way she was talking had Jay’s ears perking up. In the past, whenever she talked about relationships, she always talked in the past tense. But something about the way she was talking now made Jay think she was talking in the present tense.

He’d had the feeling, over the past few months, that his mother might be seeing someone.

“Hey there!” a familiar voice called as he slid through the unlocked door off the back porch. It was Ryan Bird, Eli’s dad. He had been Kat’s next door neighbor since Jay had been born. And he’d been more of a father to Jay than his own had been. Even before the asshole had abandoned them.

After Eli’s mother had died, Ryan and Kat had banded together to raise the boys. Marcus was always over at one of their houses anyways. So suddenly, they went from three family units to one. A cobbled together family. It had always just kind of worked. And it gave Jay peace of mind to know that Ryan was always just a yard away if his mom needed anything.

Jay stood to greet Ryan, he hadn’t known whether or not he’d see him on this trip to visit his mother. However, when Ryan stepped into the kitchen and walked over to kiss Kat on his cheek, Jay suddenly got the very strange feeling that he was intruding on their time. A strange sensation rose in his stomach and he wasn’t sure why. He’d seen Ryan kiss Kat on the cheek a thousand times over the last twenty years.

But there was something else in the room, something there that Jay could feel but couldn’t quite name.

“Staying for dinner with us, Ryan?” Kat cleared her throat and tipped her head back toward Jay.

“Jay!” Ryan exclaimed, as thrilled to see him as he would have been to see Eli or Marcus.

They hugged, good and hard, the way Ryan always hugged, and then pulled up chairs at the kitchen table.

“I hope you don’t mind me crashing. I’ve gotten spoiled over the last few years that if I smell something good coming from Kat’s house, I just kinda find my way over here.”

“No, no worries,” Jay replied easily, looking between the two of them like he was trying to read the language that was being thrown back and forth right now. He couldn’t have said exactly what it was, but he would have sworn they were communicating with one another somehow, Ryan and Kat, without looking or speaking.

Kat brought the salad to the table and then patted Jay on the shoulder to tell him it was time for him to bring the rest of the food over. Still perplexed, his mind absolutely spinning with suspicion, Jay opened his mouth to say something about it.

Kat beat him to the talking punch. “So, why don’t you tell Ryan about your mystery woman?”

“Mystery woman?” Ryan asked, his eyebrows flying upwards. He’d known that Jay hadn’t been terribly interested in any one particular woman ever since the hurricane and he’d always wondered about that. Jay wasn’t a rolling stone at heart. He was a romantic. Ryan knew that even as a boy, Jay had wanted a marriage someday. Something solid and real and true. He wondered if he was about to hear the reason that those natural inclinations had been put on hold for half a decade.

Jay kept his eyes on his mother for a half a second, knowing that she was probably executing some pretty stellar evasion tactics right about now. But the mention of Mari had his mind working double time. He found that she drowned all his other thoughts out. Suspicions about his mother’s romantic life could wait.

Jay sighed and plunked the food on the table. He sat heavily in the chair across from Ryan, tugging at his blonde hair.

“Well,” he started, and prepared to tell the whole story again. He realized, as he told it, that part of the reason he’d never told it before Mari had come into his life, was that the story felt unfinished. But there had been no end in sight. Jay had the strange feeling that right now, the universe was choosing between a few different endings for this story. Jay just needed to hold on.

***

Mari couldn’t help but roll her eyes at the gaggle of teen-aged girls who skittered past her as she ate her lunch. She took a humongous bite of her sandwich and chuckled as she watched them all giggle and lean on one another, chattering like a flock of sparrows as they spotted a corresponding group of boys across a courtyard.

Sometimes she couldn’t believe that she worked in a damn mall. But it had been the only available office space to rent and apparently most of the non-profits in Ocean City did the same thing. Rented the crappy offices on the second floor of the mall. Where no shoppers ever dared to go. Mari would have preferred to be working someplace with a little bit better of a view, but she supposed that people watching was a close second to a majestic natural landscape.

Even though she’d been working at the Ocean City branch of her organization for two months now, she’d only just realized that the mall’s indoor courtyard was the best place to eat lunch. The palm trees still dressed in Christmas lights, and the algae green fountain in the middle just added such a touch of classiness to the two-seater tables that were scattered around. She was being a brat, but really, she did like it, more than she thought she would.

Mari jumped a little when her phone vibrated in her back pocket. She flushed guiltily. She’d been jumping every single time her phone did anything, always expecting it to be Jay. It was Friday now, and they hadn’t seen one another since their Monday morning surf session. Jay had texted her twice, once just to check in and once to see if she and Linc wanted to come to a party at Eli’s house next weekend. She’d very vaguely responded to both. Interacting with Jay gave Mari the same feeling she got when someone accidentally shined a flashlight in her eyes. She felt stunned, momentarily exposed, and then she saw spots for hours afterwards. She knew that her motto was go slow, so that nobody got hurt here, herself included. But it was hard to go slow when even a cordial text message from him made her feel like she’d just stomped a brick down onto the gas pedal.

When her phone wasn’t in the pocket she’d thought it was, Mari frowned. She shoved her sandwich into her mouth, held it between her teeth while searched for her phone with both hands. It buzzed again.

Finally finding it, and cursing herself for wearing cargo pants with so many pockets, Mari lit up the phone’s screen to see two texts from Jay. She involuntarily bit down on her sandwich.

You’re in my seat, the first text said.

And then.

Nice look, chipmunk. You saving that sandwich for winter?

Mari swung her head around, looking for him. He could see her? She knew she must look like an idiot with her sandwich hanging out of her mouth, but still, she couldn’t quite get her brain to work well enough to get her smooth on. She spotted him up on the second floor balcony that overlooked the courtyard. He leaned over the rail and grinned at her, saluting her with the small bag he held in his hand. She waved back dazedly.

Mari tried not to watch him as he jogged down the escalator towards her. But there really was something aesthetically pleasing about the way the man moved. He truly was like a water animal of some kind. Fluid, smooth, graceful, but also with just a hint of playful in each of his movements. Mari supposed that the glowing blonde hair and the muscles for days currently stretching his button-up shirt didn’t hurt matters.

“Hi,” he grinned as he approached her table. He ducked his head and kissed her cheek like he didn’t think twice on the matter and Mari had to fight her hand to keep from pressing her fingers against the spot where his lips had been, where his slight stubble had scraped her.

“Hi,” she mumbled around her sandwich, finally pulling it out of her mouth and tossing it into the container in front of her. She took a healthy swig of the iced tea she’d brought in a little thermos. “What are you doing here?”

“Eating lunch,” he responded and set a little canvas sack on the table next to hers. He started unpacking his lunch, offering Mari some carrot sticks.

She took one, crunched down on it. “And why are you eating lunch in the mall?”

He looked up at her, took a big bite of his own sandwich. “I work upstairs. There’s a section of offices that are mostly occupied by non-profits.”

“I know,” Mari swallowed, eyeing him with surprise and interest. “I work up there too.”

Jay’s eyebrows rose. “Since you moved? Two months ago? And we haven’t seen each other until today?”

Mari shrugged, fighting against her body’s impulse to grin like a fool. There was no reason to grin right now. So she swallowed it down. “I guess so. Although this is my first time eating in the courtyard.”

“Ah,” Jay said as he nodded sagely. “You’ve finally become wise to the ways of the courtyard. It’s definitely the best place to eat in the mall. Plus, if you make eyes at the girl in the smoothie stand, sometimes she gives you a free one.”             

Mari turned to where he’d gestured with his sandwich and sure enough there was a young twenty something with bleached blonde hair and a visor on, furtively glancing over at Jay. She frowned the second Mari caught her eye.

Mari turned back to Jay, a smile on her face. “Something tells me that I wouldn’t be enjoying the same smoothie privileges. In fact, I think just sitting at this table with you has ensured me spit smoothies for life.”

Jay looked up, studied the hellfire that was spouting from smoothie girl’s eyes towards the back of Mari’s head and he shrugged, conceding. “Then I definitely shouldn’t take you to the vegan ice cream spot on Fuller. Who knows what they’d do to your desserts there.”

“Ah,” Mari smiled into her iced tea. “More admirers?”

Jay shrugged. “All I know is that I go in, I smile, and I leave without paying and with twice the amount of ice cream I need.” He chewed thoughtfully. “And usually a phone number scribbled on a napkin.”

Mari laughed and shook her head. “Well, that smile is pretty deadly.”

Something flipped in Jay’s stomach and he ruthlessly ignored it. Things were going so well, it wouldn’t do to get all tied up and spoil the moment. “Oh yeah?” he asked playfully, tossing said smile in her direction.

Mari shrugged, keeping her face intentionally bland. “I mean, it’s the same smile that convinced me you weren’t a murderer, over the course of like six hours, in the middle of a hurricane, while we were abandoned on an island. You gotta know those pearly whites have some fire power.”

Jay couldn’t wipe the grin off his face and he was delighted when the one that Mari had been attempting to stifle finally bloomed as well. “I’ve been told something along those lines before,” he conceded.

They fell silent as Mari helped herself to more of his carrot sticks and pushed a small container of yogurt toward him.

He frowned as he looked at it.

“It’s vegan,” she said, one eyebrow raised.

He was immediately, almost embarrassingly, awash with relief. He couldn’t have said why it had deflated him so much when he’d thought she’d forgotten he was vegan. But her statement had his eyebrows rising in confusion.

“Why are you eating vegan yogurt?” he asked as he peeled the aluminum top off the yogurt, and carefully set it aside to recycle it.

Mari frowned as she watched him arrange his lunch. He obviously brought only reusable items or ones that could be recycled. She couldn’t say why that set off a tiny, irritating firework in her chest. But it did. She wanted to roll her eyes at herself.

He took a few bites of the yogurt, with her spoon, and then passed it back over to her, his eyes on hers. He was obviously waiting for her response still.

Mari sighed. She knew that he was going to take her next statement to mean something large. Something larger than she wanted it to be. But not necessarily larger than it actually was.

“I eat vegan now.”

“Oh?” Jay looked vaguely surprised. He cleared his throat. “Since when?”

She raised an eyebrow at him, and sucked her teeth, annoyed that he was making her say it out loud. Couldn’t he just go ahead and make his own assumptions? “About five years.”

She didn’t give him the satisfaction of saying the words since I met you out loud.

Understanding lit in Jay’s eyes and he nodded. He took a long swig of water he had in his thermos and eyed her over the rim, his expression somehow both inscrutable and open at the same time.

“So, I never asked, which non-profit are you working for?”

Grateful that he’d changed the subject, and still wary of the way the air was charged between them, Mari shifted in her seat and took a gigantic bite of her sandwich, hoping that a little lack of grace on her part might quell the electricity that couldn’t seem to stop zinging around the courtyard. “ARC. The Animal Rights Coalition.”

Jay nodded. “Cool, they’re good people over there. We did some work with you guys a few years back on that shrinking habitat report. You all handled the species impact half and we handled the atmospheric impact half.”

Mari nodded, remembering that report well. She hadn’t worked on it personally, but she’d worked side by side with the people who had. And they’d been working with Jay. God. Small world. And it had still taken five years for them to find one another again.

“So you’re with Future World?” she asked him, remembering the name of the non-profit her group had partnered with on that project.

He nodded and Mari eyed him critically.

“What?” he asked after a minute.

She shrugged. Wanted to pretend it was nothing. But she found that that felt like a lie. And she’d promised herself she wasn’t going to lie about this. Lying led to hurt people. And she didn’t want to hurt people. So she sighed, told herself to take it slow and to tell the truth. “It’s just pretty crazy, Jay. What happened to us. You know?”

He nodded, watching her while he chewed.

She tugged a hand through her black hair, didn’t notice the way it fell like water, right back into place, but he sure did. “And I don’t know,” she continued. “I’m a vegan now and you’re working in environmental conservation like we’d talked about.”

She let the words hang there for a second before she picked them back up.

“It just meant something. Our time on the island really meant something. But there’s no explaining it to other people. We’re the only two who are ever really gonna understand what happened on the island.”

He was stock still. His eyes on her face like nothing could have torn them away. His heart raced in his chest. And across the courtyard, the smoothie girl sat back on the stool behind the counter, propped her chin on her fist and kissed a certain fantasy goodbye.

Mari forced her eyes to go to his. “For a long time, I was the only one who knew what had happened. And now you’re back. And there’s two of us. And I don’t know, that’s spinning me.”

“Yeah,” he agreed instantly. “It’s a relief and a burden at the same time.”

She nodded immediately, that was the perfect way of putting it.

“It’s a relief to have somebody be able to verify my feelings,” she started.

“And it’s a burden to remember how shitty that fucking hurricane was,” Jay finished with a wry smile.

Mari nodded and a tear slipped out of her startling green eyes. She didn’t bother brushing it away, part of her knew that Jay would do it. And he did. He reached across the table and used one rough thumb to erase the tear from existence.

***

It was Sunday when Mari got a call on her cell phone from a number she didn’t recognize. She usually didn’t pick up those calls, but it was an Ocean City number, so she figured she would.

“Hello?” she puffed into her headphone cord. She was currently jogging up a very steep hill.

“Mari?” a deep voice asked.

“Yeah.” That was the best she could do. Wind was currently at a premium for her. She wasn’t wasting any on words right now.

“This is Eli Bird, Jay’s friend. Are—are you alright?”

“Yeah. I’m running,” she responded, panting.

When he spoke again, she could hear the smile in his voice. “Ah, I see. You answer the phone when you’re running? That’s badass. I basically flick off the world, squeeze my eyes closed, and pretend the torture of cardio isn’t happening to me.”

As the top quarterback in the league, Mari was sure he was exaggerating. She knew for a fact that he could run a 4.5 40. She wasn’t an avid sports follower, but the fans around here were diehard. And the Stingrays had had a really great season. It had been impossible not to get caught up in the party a little bit.

“Did the starting quarterback of the Stingrays just call me a badass?” she wondered aloud.

“Jay told me you went surfing with him earlier this week. In January. So, yeah, your badass title is firmly in place.”

She smiled, as much as she could while gutting it up a real asshole of a hill. “So, what’s up, Eli?”             

“I wanted to invite you and… Linc, was it? To a party at my house next weekend.”

“Yeah, Jay mentioned that.”

“Okay, well, I just wanted to make sure you knew the invitation is genuine. I know you’re new to Ocean City. And there will be some good people there. My girl included. I think you’d like each other.”

It was sweet. Really sweet. If it had been any less sweet, Mari would have had cause to wonder if Jay had asked Eli to check in on the status of the invitation. But Mari suspected that Eli was calling out of the kindness of his own heart.

“Well, I’m definitely in,” she decided right then and there. “I’m pretty sure Linc is out of town next weekend, but I’ll check with him and let you know.”

“No worries! It’s not an RSVP thing. We’re just gonna have dinner and shoot the shit.”

“Should I bring anything?”

“Nah, we’ll have food and drinks.”

“I’m vegan.”

Eli laughed, one hard chuckle. “Why does that not surprise me?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing. Yeah, we’ll have vegan food for sure. Hope you can make it! Saturday at 6 pm. I’ll text you the address.”

“Okay. Thanks for the invite.”

Mari hung up the call and sprinted the rest of the way up the hill. She liked Jay’s friend. She couldn’t say why that irritated her. But for some reason, liking Eli felt like it had just made a complicated situation even more complicated.