I stiffened. Did he remember me? There was no way. He was captain of the football team, and I was learning to knit with my friends on the weekends, watching only romance movies.
His phone beeped, and he pulled it out of his pocket and frowned at it.
“Problem?” I asked.
His gaze met mine. “Just something I need to take care of.”
“Well, I can manage my cart now, as long as I stay away from all the giant piles of cans.”
He laughed. “You sure?”
I nodded.
He grinned and grabbed his cereal, then hesitated. “You don’t need me to grab anything heavy for you before I go?”
I couldn’t take my gaze off of his teeth. They were perfectly white, and the front one had the tiniest chip in it. “No,” I said dreamily. “I’m good, but thank you so much.”
He nodded at me again. “It was good running into you. I’m sure I’ll see you around.” He walked toward the registers since we’d reached the front of the aisle. Since I wasn’t finished, I went on around to the next aisle. As I moved down it, I looked back to find him standing at the register but staring at me.
I quickened my steps to get out of sight.
Holy hot flash. I wasn’t in menopause yet, but I was having a hot flash right now.
Geez. Daniel Arthur was everything Rick wasn’t. Maybe I was crazy, but having an almost random guy help me without needing to be asked felt like a treat. Rick had always been like a child I had to care for. Constantly needing attention. Whining that he couldn’t eat if I didn’t cook. Whining when he didn’t like what I did cook.
Man, why had I put up with it?
I thought of Daniel again. I bet he was never like that with his wife. He seemed like the kind of man who genuinely loved other people more than himself.
Or maybe I was just romanticizing the first man I’d felt anything for in years. That was probably it.
I grabbed some snacks off the shelf and willed myself not to think of Daniel again. Right now my job was to pull myself and my life together again, not lust after guys I didn’t even know. My twenties and thirties were long gone. Forty-year-old me would not make the same mistakes as before.
Still, I smiled when I thought of Daniel.
4 Emma
An employee pushed the cart out to my car and loaded the bags. If only I could’ve taken him home with me to do the same, but Mystic Hollow was way too small to have grocery delivery. We were lucky to have two grocery stores.
As I pulled out of the parking lot, my car beeped at me. I looked down and the needle for the gas gauge was perilously close to the edge of the red line. Dang it. Of course I needed gas, but for some reason, it was the last thing I wanted to do in life. Getting out of the car. Pumping. Making awkward conversation with the person who inevitably pulled up on the other side of the pump. Smelling like gas for hours afterward. I wanted nothing to do with it. At least not right now.
Adulting was irritating sometimes. Scratch that. All the time.
I pulled into the gas station in town near my old high school, which was also on the way home. It hadn’t changed a bit since I was last here. There were even teenagers still hanging out on the wall to one side of the building with big sodas and skateboards. But now, instead of there being open lots on both sides, there was a little shopping center to the right that I instantly liked. It consisted of a collection of little stores with dark faux-thatched roofs, with robin’s egg blue painted walls, which only looked even brighter when combined with the white shutters and white doors. It had the same cozy feel as most of the places here. The only difference was that these stores had been built in the last ten years. I was glad whoever designed them had kept the small town feel to them. None of them were even over a single story in height. Nothing to obscure the skyline.
One of the stores was a coffee shop with a big sign that said Cafe Mama. Just the sight of the place had my mouth watering. If I needed anything in this world, it was coffee. I jittered up and down on my toes so much as I pumped the gas that I probably looked like some kind of weirdo, then I quickly moved the car and parked in front of the coffee shop.
As soon as I walked in the door, the scent of roasted coffee and sweet treats hit me, along with the fact that I saw someone I knew. Not too surprising for a town this small, but what was surprising was that she was one of the only people I was unbelievably happy to be running into, even if it meant delaying my coffee addiction.
I froze, not wanting to interrupt as she helped a woman with a walker get her coffee and situate it in a special carrying case that hooked onto the front bar of her walker before helping her sit in one of the plush, overstuffed armchairs. I stood there like I’d been cemented to the spot and let my gaze run over her. Beth was as easily recognizable now as she had been then. She was just under five feet tall, which meant pretty much everyone in town towered over her. Her blonde hair had been left long, and it was just as thick and luxurious as it had been in high school, something I had always envied and did all over again the moment I saw her. She had the same curvy body, and the same style. She wore light wash
