Page 9 of Chasing You

I just smile, shaking my head as I throw the towel back over my shoulder. I’ve been working in this bar for the last three months, gaining the experience I need before opening a place of my own. Rosalie has become a part of my everyday life, and she’s the one person I’m not inclined to kill at five a.m. every morning when she wakes me up, getting ready to go for her morning run.

Flatting together in an apartment with thin walls doesn’t exactly suit sleep-ins, and Rosalie goes for a run every day.

Even Sundays.

It’s absurd.

Sundays should be purely reserved for rest. That’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow, cursing Rosie when I hear the door shut at five and then trying my best to fall asleep again.

I smile down at my shoes just thinking about my best friend. I never really had a best friend back at home in Ruby Cove. My circle of friends mainly consisting of my cousin and his dickhead friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I love those boys. But I always wanted a girlfriend, and Rosalie was the first person to welcome me to Sorrento three months ago, and we kind of went from there.

When I look up, piercing green eyes are looking straight at me. “Jesus!” I swear, throwing a hand over where my heart is beating erratically in my chest. “You should really announce yourself when you enter a room, hotshot.”

A smile pulls at his lips. “But then I wouldn’t get to see pretty moments like that, when you had that quiet smile on your face.”

Quiet smile.

I shake my head and look back down at my feet. Quiet smile. I guess that’s exactly what that was.

“Sorry,” he says.

I tip my head, meeting his eyes again. “No, you’re not.”

He scrunches up his nose. “Not really.”

I just shake my head, reaching down under the bar to grab him a hazy beer, the same as last night, before I place a paper coaster in front of him, followed by the beer. I feel an odd sense of comfortability with this man, and I'm not quite sure why. It’s like when you just have a bad gut feeling about someone, but for him, it’s a good feeling.

He tips the neck of the bottle in my direction before taking a sip.

I can’t help the way my eyes focus on his throat as he swallows down the cool liquid. His eyes catch mine, and the look in his gaze is anything but the look he gave me last night when heseemed so unsure of himself. No, this look is like he knows exactly what’s going on here, and I’m not sure that I do.

“So this is what you look like when you’re not trying to pick up chicks,” I tease, falling into the tone I used last night.

He just nods, looking down at his outfit of a blue linen button-up shirt and a pair of shorts. He looks just as good as he did in his pilot’s uniform, if not better.

When I saw him for the first time yesterday, he looked like he had no idea what he was doing here, but the way he looked at me was like I was the anchor to his confusion. Then he got up close, sat at the bar, and stared at me. If anyone else had done what he did, I would’ve given them side-eye and moved to serve someone else. But I got stuck in his gaze, and I think he got stuck in mine. I've never had such an intense interaction with someone I’ve just met.

Then I put his captain's hat on my head like it was nothing, and he let me. Something about his presence was immediately calming, and I didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“Who says I’m not here to pick up chicks?”

I raise my eyebrows, looking around the empty bar. “‘Cause there’s none here.”

His eyes narrow in on mine, and I feel my temperature spiking. “Just one.”

I pull my bottom lip between my teeth, looking down at my feet.

In any other universe, this would be absurd. Too forward, too abrupt, but it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like my mind is lying to me in telling me I’ve never met this man before.

He rubs a hand over the stubble that dusts his jawline as he laughs. “Sorry.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “It’s okay, I just—you don’t know me.”

He smiles. “I don’t even know your name.”

I frown. I never told him last night. I asked for his name but he never asked for mine. “Marina.”

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