Off-Season Rebound

Mikayla Carver was thirty-four years old and she had a plan. It was a petty plan, sure, but petty plans were the only kind that got you out of bed in October when your ex lived two thousand miles away and you had a week of vacation saved up.

"You okay over there?" Hugo asked. He was thirty-six, tall, tan in a way that said he still thought it was August. His arm was linked through hers as they walked the boardwalk, and the boardwalk was empty. Empty in a good way, she decided. Shuttered ice-cream stalls. A gull yelling at nothing. Saltwhistle in the off-season looked like a town holding its breath.

"I'm great. Why?"

"You've been rehearsing your surprised face for three blocks."

"I have not!"

"You have. You keep doing this little eyebrow thing." He demonstrated, badly.

She laughed and squeezed his arm. "Okay, fine. The plan is simple. We walk in. We order coffee. I laugh at everything you say, loudly. He sees us. He suffers."

"And then what?"

"Then we go home and I feel better about my life. That's the whole arc, Hugo."

He grinned. "I'm on board. Just so we're square, this is a fun weekend between friends and nothing else, right? No strings?"

"None. You're a prop with a nice jawline."

"A prop with a nice jawline and a café," he said. "Which, by the way, we're here. So, who are we looking at? Paint me a picture. Ex-boyfriend, what's he look like?"

"Aiden. Thirty-three. Brown hair he never cuts. Plays guitar badly at parties. Works here part-time, apparently, which I found out from his sister's Instagram, which is its own sad story."

"And you two were together how long?"

"Two years. I ended it two months ago. He got comfortable. Comfortable like a couch that eats your keys."

"Brutal."

"He's a good guy. That's the annoying part. Good guy, zero follow-through. Anyway." She spotted the café before she finished the sentence. Small, clay-colored, a hand-painted sign that said HUGO'S, which was funny, because the sign was there before Hugo bought the place and he'd kept it out of laziness. Mismatched chairs out front. One bike leaned against the rail.

She fixed her smile. Linked her arm tighter through his. Pushed the door.

The bell over the door jingled. The place was warm and half empty, two retirees doing a crossword, a dog asleep under table three. And behind the counter, wiping down the espresso machine with a rag, was Aiden Conner.

Her stomach did something stupid. She hated it immediately.

"Two coffees?" he said, not looking up yet. "Sit anywhere you like, it's all..." He looked up.

He stopped. The rag stopped. For one second the whole café was just the hiss of the machine and the dog snoring.

"Oh," Aiden said. "Huh."

"Hi," Mikayla said, and her surprised face was useless now, so she just went with bright and loud. "Aiden! Wow. Small world, right? Hugo, this is Aiden. Aiden, Hugo."

Aiden's eyes moved from her to Hugo's arm in hers and back. He nodded, slow, like he was counting something. "Small world," he agreed. "You're in Saltwhistle."

"I'm in Saltwhistle! Hugo here owns the place. Isn't that funny? We met in Miami, actually, back in March, at this awful networking thing, and..."

"And you came back." He said it flat, not a question exactly.

"Vacation," she said. "Off-season rates."

"Off-season rates," he repeated. He pulled two cups, set them under the machine, and started the shots. His hands still moved the way she remembered, quick, no wasted motion, and she hated that she remembered. "So this is Hugo."

"That's me," Hugo said, friendly, easy, no idea he was playing a role. "Great little town. Quiet."

"Quiet in October, yeah." Aiden slid two coffees across the counter. "On the house. Consider it a welcome-back."

"That's kind of you," Mikayla said.

"It's four dollars of coffee, Mikayla."

"Still kind."

He almost smiled. Almost. Then he wiped his hands on a towel and looked at her too directly. "You look good."

"You look..." employed, she thought, tan, exactly the same. "Good too."

Hugo, bless him, picked that moment to be useful. "Hey, I should go say hi to Lacey, she's prepping the kitchen for the market weekend. Excuse me a minute?" He squeezed Mikayla's shoulder. "Back in a bit."

And then she was alone at the counter with Aiden, which had not been in the plan. The plan had a crowd. The plan had witnesses.

"So," Aiden said. He leaned on the counter. "Two months."

"Two months, yeah."

"You flew here."

"Planes do that."

"Mikayla." He said her name the same way he always had, like it had too many syllables and he liked all of them. "Why are you here? Really."

"Vacation. I told you."

"You hate sand."

"I've grown."

"You hated sand the whole two years we were together. You made me book a hotel in the mountains twice."

Okay, so he remembered things. That was unfair. She sipped her coffee to buy time and it was good, which was more unfair. "Maybe I came to see the market. It's monthly, I read that online."

"It is monthly. It's Saturday. Today's Thursday."

"Then I'm early. I'm a planner."

He studied her. That was always the worst part of Aiden, he actually looked at you when you talked, like your words were data. "You brought a boyfriend to your vacation," he said. "A handsome guy who owns a café."

"He's... we're seeing each other. Casually. Very casually."

"Uh huh." He nodded, and something in his face did a thing she couldn't read. "Good for you. Seriously. You deserve..."

"Don't do the speech, Aiden."

"I wasn't doing a speech. I was doing a sentence."

"Your sentences turn into speeches. It's a known issue."

The dog under table three sighed hugely. One of the crossword retirees glanced over, then went back to seven across. Aiden picked up the towel and folded it, unfolded it, folded it again.

"You know what's funny," he said. "I keep a list. Little list in my head. Things I'd tell you if you ever called. New songs I wrote. The guy at the pier who juggles knives now. The fact that I finally fixed the... remember the wobbly table in my kitchen?"

"You fixed the table?"

"Level as anything. Took me a year and a half."

She laughed before she could stop herself. "You absolute..."

"Hey, it's done. It's done." He grinned, and there it was, the old grin, crooked on one side, and the whole stupid plan wobbled under her feet. "Anyway. You're here with Hugo. Who seems nice. Is he nice?"

"He's nice. He's a prop, mostly."

"A prop."

"A very attractive prop."

"Right." He said it lightly, but she caught the pause, the little hitch where he decided not to ask more. Two years of learning a person and the software was still installed, apparently. Both directions.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You just did, like, nine times."

"Why here? Of all the beach towns. It's a coincidence, right? You didn't know I worked here?"

And here was the fork in the road. She could lie. She was good at lying, she did it with charts for a living, softening numbers, shaping stories. But he was looking at her with that face, and she was so tired, honestly, two months tired.

"Might I ask why you care?" she said instead.

"Because..." He stopped. Wiped the counter where nothing was spilled. "Because I've spent two months trying to figure out why you left, and now you show up in my town with a jawline, and that feels like information."

"That's a weird way to process information."

"It's what I've got."

Mikayla looked toward the kitchen. Through the doorway Hugo was visible, laughing with a short woman in an apron, completely unbothered, being paid nothing for this role and enjoying it anyway. Good man. Wrong prop.

"Aiden," she said carefully. "What would you say if I told you the jawline was a bit?"

"A bit."

"A show. For an audience of one."

He set the towel down. He looked at her for what felt like a full verse of one of his bad songs. "I'd say," he said slowly, "that I have a table to show you. And it's not the wobbly one."

Mikayla opened her mouth to answer, and that was when Hugo came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron, smiling at both of them as a man would who arrived at a party he had already heard all the gossip from.

"So," Hugo said. "Lacey wants to know if the drama is over or just getting started."

"Hugo," Mikayla said, and her voice came out about an octave too high.

"Because Lacey says just getting started. I say over by lunch. We've been watching through the doorway. Very good show."

"You've been watching?" Aiden asked.

"Honestly, from the moment she walked in and laughed at my joke like a dolphin being trained." Hugo pulled the apron off and hung it on a hook. "Also, Mikayla, sweetheart, you told him, right? About the plan?"

Mikayla put her face into her hands. "I was getting to it."

"You told him?" Aiden said. "You told him the plan? There was a plan and he knew about it?"

"She told me the whole thing. On the beach two days ago. Walk in, order coffee, laugh loudly at jokes, the ex sees us, the ex suffers." Hugo counted the steps off on his fingers. "Her words. The ex suffers."

"The ex suffers," Aiden repeated. And then he laughed. He laughed the way he used to laugh at two in the morning, too loud for the room, head back, no dignity in it at all. One of the crossword retirees looked over again, this time at both of them, and muttered something about coffee shops going downhill.

"It's not that funny," Mikayla said through her hands.

"It's so funny. You flew two thousand miles to make me jealous with a man you describe as a prop."

"A very attractive prop," Hugo said. "I'd like that part repeated, please."

"She did say that," Aiden agreed. "I have it written down in my head next to the knife juggler."

"I hate both of you," Mikayla said. "This was a good plan. It was tight. It had structure."

"It had a jawline," Hugo said. "That's all it had. No offense."

"None taken, because you are the jawline."

Aiden was still grinning, that crooked one-sided grin, and Mikayla realized her cheeks were hot, actually hot, which was ridiculous, she was thirty-four years old, she ran meetings with vice presidents, she did not blush in cafés. But here she was, blushing in a café, in front of the two men she had picked to make her ex jealous, one of whom had ratted her out cheerfully within ten seconds.

"So the plan's dead," she said. "Fine. Noted. The plan is dead."

"The plan was always dead," Aiden said. "You brought it to the one café in town."

"Which I picked because you work here. That was the whole point."

"Which she picked because it's mine and I said sure," Hugo confirmed. "I bought the place in the spring, Lacey runs it, and I'd never met the part-timers. I thought, fun, my two worlds colliding. Then I saw Aiden's face when she walked in and I thought, ah. Ah ha. This is not a vacation fling. This is an operation."

"You could have said something," Mikayla told him.

"And ruin the show? You ordered a flat white like a woman on a mission. I was entertained."

Lacey called something from the kitchen in Spanish, and Hugo waved over his shoulder without turning around. Then he looked at the two of them, at Mikayla sitting at the counter with her coffee going cold, at Aiden standing there with his towel, and he said, "Okay. Here's what's going to happen. Because I'm a good host and an even better wingman. There's a bottle of very cheap wine in the back that Lacey brought me from her cousin. It's terrible. We're going to drink it on the beach."

"It's October," Mikayla said.

"It's October. It's cold. The wine is red. It cancels out. Come on."

He did not really wait for an answer, which was sort of his whole personality, Mikayla remembered now. He just started collecting things, two glasses from the shelf behind the counter that did not match each other or anything else in the café, the bottle, a corkscrew, a blanket that looked like it had