Kristy’s boyfriend Matt overhears this and rolls his eyes. “This whole situation is bullshit. I’ve never been given a section in the bar.”
“Apparently you need to bleach your hair,” I suggest.
The third girl who works cocktail, Ashleigh, is not a blonde, but she’s stunning and I hate her a little. Not for her looks so much as the way she fawns over James, and the way she rolls her eyes every time she looks at me.
She’s only slightly less rude to me than James himself, who actively looks elsewhere when I come to place my drink orders, providing terse answers at best. It grows so tiresome that I drop my orders with Brooks, the other bartender, whenever possible.
But James is here more, and at a certain point I get fed up with his Jekyll-and-Hyde routine. “Okay, what’s up?” I ask point blank. “Why are you so unfriendly to me during the day?”
He stiffens. “I’m not unfriendly. I’m just trying to do my job.”
“You are unfriendly. And you manage to do your job and not treat anyone else that way.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says. And then he walks away. Yeah, because walking away in the middle of a conversation isn’t unfriendly at all.
Between his attitude and my complete failure as a waitress, the summer is shaping up to provide quite the wallop to my self-esteem. Did I really think I’d ever make it as an anchor when I can’t even remember a drink order? If it weren’t for my inexplicable desire to be near James, I’d have quit already.
I’m standing across the bar from James when Brian comes out to talk to me about my latest slip-up. “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I keep messing up the abbreviations.”
“No prob,” he says, coming around behind me and rubbing my shoulders. “Don’t let yourself get all tense. This is supposed to be fun.”
It’s slightly awkward, having my boss — a married father of two — standing in the middle of the bar giving me a massage. I meet James’s eye and begin blushing, wondering if this is getting filed in the same part of his brain that led him to tell Brian I look like a whore in my uniform.
I manage to escape Brian’s hands and go check on my tables, but I hear a bottle break behind me and look back. A very heated conversation has ensued between James and Brian, with James now towering over Brian, his face a study in focused rage.
It ends with Brian retreating angrily to his office while James stands there with clenched hands, looking like he’s just figuring out what to punch and how many times.
Kristy sidles over to me. “Well that was exciting.”
“That’s the kind of excitement I can live without,” I reply.
“So what’s up with you two?” she asks, a little secret smile beginning on her face. “Are you dating?”
“Dating?” I gasp. “God, no. Nothing is going on.”
“He looked awful upset for it to be ‘nothing’,” she cackles.
I glance toward him at the bar, still steely-eyed and angry and impossibly good-looking. Something flutters low in my stomach. “He sees me the way he sees Ginny,” I sigh.
A little light comes into her eyes. “Awwww … do you have a crush on our James?”
“No,” I lie. “He has a girlfriend.”
She bumps me with her hip. “It’s okay, honey. I’m practically engaged and I have a little crush on him too. I’d be suspicious of anyone who didn’t.”
“You’re not going to say anything to him, right?” I ask, a little desperately. “He’s sooooo not interested, and it would make things super awkward since we live together.”
She laughs. “I’m not going to say anything. But I wouldn’t be so sure about the ‘not interested’ part. He stares at you way too much for that.”
I wish I could believe her.
**
When I’m not working lunch, I go to the beach with Max, or Ginny when she’s not temping. James never comes. As far as I can tell, he divides his free time evenly between running, reading and looking off in the distance, his mind focused on something too far away to see and too stressful to be good.
“Why does James never go to the beach?” I ask Ginny over the weekend, as we head home.
She looks confused. “He does go to the beach. All the time.”
“I haven’t seen him go once since I got here.”
“He just went yesterday,” she says. “While you were at work.”
“Let me ask you something, Ginny: does he only go when I’m not going?” I’ve framed it as a question but already I know the answer, and it shouldn’t hurt as much as it does.
“No,” she says haltingly. She’s lying. Her eyes are too wide, too worried. “Of course not. It’s just a coincidence.”
“He acts like he hates me.”
“You’re imagining things,” she says.
“Then why am I not imagining those things with Danny and Max?” I counter.
“Not everyone is going to salivate over you like they do,” she says.
“They don’t salivate over me,” I argue.
She rolls her eyes. “Elle, I think you’re so accustomed to being worshipped by anyone with a penis that you don’t know what life’s like for the rest of the world. He’s just not treating you like you’re special, and no offense, but it’s probably time you experienced how the rest of the world lives.”
There’s something close to spite in her voice, and it surprises me. We’ve spoken a lot over the years but haven’t spent more than a week together since I moved from Connecticut. And this new, bitter version of Ginny is one I’m not particularly fond of.
I’m still mulling this over later as I fold my clothes in the laundry room. Naturally I’m holding a lacy pink thong in mid-air as James walks in, because of course I’d have to be holding a thong at that precise moment. There’s a flash of surprise on his face, and after it comes the inevitable look of misery, as if just seeing me here is enough to sour his whole day.
“I’ll come back,” he says, turning out of the room.
“I’m all done,” I call to his retreating back. “The washer’s yours.”
“I’ll come back,” he says again, without ever even turning his head.
That is not normal for James, or anyone else. What it is, for me — as pathetically infatuated with him as I was as a kid — is devastating.
Chapter 12
We are sitting on the deck, and it’s the relaxed version of him, the sweet version that makes it hard to remember how much he seems to dislike me during the day. These moments, us sitting on the deck in the darkness and the swampy heat, waiting for tendrils of a breeze to graze us, are my favorite. Not just my favorite of the day, but of the summer, of the year, of many years. There’s something whole and content in me. It’s only as I sit here with my skin buzzing and a warmth like laughter residing in my chest that I realize how poorly all the moments before this one fare by contrast. That, as Max suggested, each of them held something wistful and grasping, a desire to be other than I am or have other than what I have.