Page 1 of Cocoa Kisses
Chapter One
Taylor
ImarriedLeviTaftfor the third and last time when we were ten. We divorced later that afternoon when he ditched me to go swimming at Kyle Siever’s house. I should have known then that a boy always looking for adventure was destined to break my heart. And he did a few more times in fifth grade before I’d had enough and quit speaking to him.
I ignored him all the way through middle school. But we lived next door to each other, and by our freshman year of high school, we were friends again. By our senior year, we were best friends. We even chose to go to the same city for college. Different schools, but we lived on the same block and shared a car.
After graduation, he threw himself into his career as a globetrotting journalist, and I wanted to throw myself off a building after working for the IRS for a year. So our paths diverged. I took the well-trodden one back home to Creekville to open a café. He took the less-traveled one that led to war-torn countries on faraway continents. I haven’t seen him in years.
Not that we don’t talk. We do. Texts. DMs through Instagram. But he hasn’t posted in a while, so until twenty seconds ago, as far as I knew, Levi Taft was in Europe on assignment. He’d been in a country so small, I thought it was the capital of another country until I looked it up. It’s one of the -stans. Kind of a map speck, like Andorra.
See? You didn’t know Andorra was a whole country either.
Anyway, all of this explains why I’m totally unprepared for Levi to walk into my café ten days before Christmas. He’s not looking at the register where I’m standing at first, so I duck. By which I mean squat with my head below the counter, my jaw dropped far enough to gather flies if we had them in December. Lots of flies. So many flies.
“Gal?” Mr. Greer’s trembly voice calls. I’d been ringing up a treat for him and his wife.
My name is Taylor, but any female under sixty is “gal” to Mr. Greer.
“Uh, yes, Mr. Greer. Dropped something. Hang on.”
I wish I had a tube of lipstick in my pocket. And a brush. Also breath mints. Or my whole bathroom vanity, really. And the Queer Eye guys on Facetime.
“Taylor?” Levi’s voice.
The mellow timbre of it rolls over me almost like a scent memory, immediately triggering a supercut montage of about two hundred Levi flashbacks in one second flat.
I look up, and there he is, his face peering down at me from beside both of the Greers.
“Are you hiding from me?” Levi asks, smiling a little.
“Yes.” I blink up at him, trying to take him in.
“Why?” Mrs. Greer asks.
“I don’t know.” This is not true. I know exactly why seeing Levi walk in made me want to run for cover.
“You should probably get up so I can hug you,” he says.
“He’s handsome,” Mrs. Greer says. “You should do that.”
“Are you a good young man?” Mr. Greer asks.
“I try to be,” Levi says.
“Then I agree with my wife,” Mr. Greer tells me. “You should hug him.”
It’s been four years, and if Levi is cool, then I’m cool. This is fine.
A smile tugs at my mouth. Levi is here!
I surge to my feet and run around the register, grinning now. Levi steps away from the Greers like he knows what’s coming, and I launch straight into his arms.
“Hey, weirdo,” he says, wrapping his arms around me and lifting me from the floor.
“Long time, no see, wonderboy.” I squeeze him tight until he splutters and gives my waist a playful pinch.
I step back and look him over. “I can’t believe no one told me you were coming to Creekville.” He’s wearing jeans and a soft gray sweater beneath a black peacoat. Maybe all of those things should look like he stepped out of a glossy department store ad, but that’s not Levi. These clothes look broken in, like they’ve become so used to the shape of his lean frame that they could never fit anyone else. It would be like trying to walk in someone else’s Birkenstocks.
