“He’s also dead,” King replies as he flips on the lights. Jack Johnson starts playing overhead, and he grabs a navy shirt from one of the racks and switches out the bright pink one he was wearing before. This one is a lot more flattering than the other, clinging to his skin like a glove. “Passed nine years ago.”
“Oh.” Then I see the logo on his shirt and the colorful words “King’s Surf Shop” front and center. “You own the place now.”
He nods once. “Bought it before Skewer died.”
“How?” He would have only been nineteen at the time.
Letting out a bone-weary sigh, he folds his arms and pins me with a sharp look.
I do my best not to wither. “I’m guessing you own the bakery now too?”
Before he can answer, though I’m not sure he would have said anything, his eyes jump to the open doors as a customer walks in, wide-eyed and eager.
“Whoa, look at this place! This is legit!”
King plasters on a smile and greets the customer with all the warmth he’s failed to give me this morning.
I shuffle over to the corner with all the t-shirts, looking at the many designs lined up along the wall. One of them, with its palm tree and stick-figure person with a surfboard, looks like it was drawn by a little kid, and it’s instantly my favorite. It looks like it’s a crowd favorite as well, as it has the lowest inventory out of all of them. It has a very King feel to it.
As surprised as I was to see him in the bakery this morning, I’m not surprised that he took over the surf shop. He’s always been happiest on the water, and he started teaching surf lessons for Old Man Skewer when he was thirteen. King’s a natural born teacher, and I can’t help but picture him now, straddling a board in a form-fitting wetsuit with a broad smile on his face as he helps other people find joy in riding the waves.
It’s strange, but I’ve missed his smile more than anything over the years. Like Bill, he has—or maybe had—the kind of smile that could brighten even the gloomiest of days.
Trying not to get lost in thoughts of what could have been, I lean my hand on the t-shirt display, but it collapses under my weight and sends me tumbling to the floor. I shriek, protecting my head from the avalanche of wood shelves and polyester shirts, but it’s over in three seconds flat.
I might just stay here. If the humiliation doesn’t kill me, King probably will.
“Georgie?” His voice is muffled through all the shirts.
“I’m fine,” I squeak back.
“You need some help?”
“Nope.”
“Okay then.”
I feel his footsteps through the floorboards. He’s literally walking away from me! Groaning, I lift myself onto my elbows and start army-crawling free, muttering curses under my breath. I’m pretty sure the last decade used up all the good fortune for my lifetime, leaving me with nothing but tragedy from now on.
And to think, at one point I thought I was pretty lucky in life. I had a great apartment, a promising career, a loving boyfriend…
Now I have none of those things and nowhere to go, and the only man who might help is about as likely to come to my aid as he is to give up surfing.
By the time I get free, King is ringing up his customer and chatting away like the carefree people-person I remember. Sitting myself on the floor, I start grabbing shirts to refold. He was right when he questioned my decision to come here. Outside of the summer season, Willow Cove is a sleepy little town with not a lot going on. It’s not like Manhattan, where my days were full to the brim. I spent all my summers as a teen here with my parents as they did marine research for the university they worked for, but when I turned eighteen, I was so excited to go anywhere that wasn’t here.
Graduating high school opened up the world to me, and New York was this big, magical place with endless opportunity. I was lucky to find my first job in a bakery a block from Central Park, even luckier a few years later to be working on a day when a network exec was looking for fresh talent. She put me in a competition I wasn’t qualified for, and by some miracle I made it to the top three and met Lane. He was cute, and his passion for baking was intoxicating.
After the competition wrapped up, he asked me out. We bonded over puff pastry and fondant, and he shared my dreams of owning my own bakery, suggesting we make one together. We were already suited romantically, and he thought we would be great together professionally as well.
I helped him build a baking empire, complete with a TV show and franchises, and he and I were going to take on the world. At least, we were until he decided out of the blue that he wanted to take it on without me. Nothing like a little live television to spice up a breakup, am I right? It’s not like I poured my soul into our franchise…
“And then I took her on a floatplane at sunset,” King says, his deep voice cutting through my reverie.
“That sounds incredible!” the customer replies, apparently enthralled.
I’m probably not allowed to be jealous of whichever woman got such a romantic date with King, but I am. He did that with me, once upon a time, and he has always been a romantic. Definitely not the type of guy to stage a public breakup for the views. For all his gruffness this morning, I can still confidently say that King would never humiliate me, no matter how hurt and angry he might be.
“We ended up on this tiny little island right as the sun was setting,” King continues, “and since I’d been carrying the ring in my pocket for weeks, I figured that was as good a time as any.”
I gasp, my stomach doing a flip. The woman I’m jealous of is me!
The man on the other side of the counter whistles low. “I’m not sure I can top that.”
“Oh, you can.” King’s eyes meet mine, his expression falsely nonchalant. “See, when I asked her to marry me, she panicked.”
“No!”
“Yes. And I get it. The proposal came out of nowhere. She needed time to process. But for her, that meant forcing the pilot to fly her back to Willow Cove without me.”
“Wait, she left you on the island?”
King nods, still looking right at me. “The plane came back for me later that night, but not until after she packed up and left town.”
“For how long?”
“About ten years.”
The man laughs uncomfortably. “That’s rough. Maybe I’ll keep my proposal nice and simple. Nothing that’ll scare her off.”
