Page 19 of You Weren't Mine Then

He was about to finish his coffee and leave when he noticed the woman who stopped at the bar in Life’s A Beach, her long, ashen pink, paisley dress cascading down her body. She spoke with Ben, the barman, and stood with her back to the room, but Finn immediately recognized that dark brown, smooth hair, cut above the shoulders, and the lean, long body. He hadn’t seen her in four years, ever since she had nearly knocked him dead with a kiss, but he knew it was her just by that slender back and neck. He could still remember how they felt in his hands.

He left his table by the window and approached the bar. Ben was busy making a smoothie, and the sound of the industrial blender whirred in the half-empty café.

He stopped behind her. The rays of the afternoon sun kissed her bare nape. “Jane?”

She turned around. “Finn!” she called, looking as surprised as he was.

They looked at each other, hesitating for a brief moment, before they simultaneously reached for one another. She threw her arms around his neck, and he grabbed her waist, and they hugged like old friends.

He was bathed in her familiar, lemony smell. Her body in his arms felt soft yet strong, lithe and supple.

“Oh my God, what are you doing here?” she asked, her lips hovering close to his neck, just as he said into her hair, “I didn’t know you were back in town.”

She pulled herself back, and they stood, holding each other’s hands, scanning the other’s face as if looking for the familiar and noting the differences.

She looked mature, as if the features of her face had found their rightful place. Her eyes looked larger, and their almond shape lent a cat-like quality to her face, their dark brown highlighted by the contrast of her skin tone, as always. Her lips were Anne-Hathaway-like, and he remembered exactly what kissing them felt like. The kiss that had started as an almost-accident had become the standard by which he measured others. None came close.

If she wore makeup, he couldn’t see it. He didn’t know what others saw when they looked at her but, to him, she looked absolutely beautiful. Maybe because he knew that behind that quiet, fragile-looking, almost translucent façade, she was the complete opposite—a colorful, strong, lively woman with an artistic soul and a sarcastic streak that not many knew. And an ability to derail a man off his axis with a kiss.

“What are you doing here?” he repeated. “I thought you were in Chicago.”

“After college, I moved to San Francisco,” she said. “I could ask you the same.” Her smile was wide, her eyes sparkled.

“Anne, your smoothie,” Ben said from behind the bar, setting down a tall glass with mango-colored liquid.

“Thanks, Ben,” she said, dropping her hands from Finn’s to reach for her purse.

“Add it to my bill, Ben,” he hurried to say. “I have a table over there,” he added to her. “I was about to leave, but I’d rather stay if you join me.”

“Oh. Sure. Thanks.” She took her drink and followed him.

“Anne. Ben called you Anne. I keep thinking of you as Jane.”

“That’s okay,” she said with a smile.

In ten minutes by the window overlooking the ocean, they were all caught up. She had come back from San Francisco two weeks before and had just been to a friend’s gallery in Wayford to drop off a few paintings that he had offered to exhibit for her. Her dream to live off art hadn’t materialized. When she couldn’t afford to pay the San Francisco rent and her parents offered she use her grandparents’ old house and just pay her aunt her part of the rent, and help at the bakery, she had decided to return home.

“Take a step back and reevaluate my options. So far, the decorated cakes line I started for them already sells better than any painting I ever tried selling at the gallery I worked for in San Francisco,” she said with a chuckle. “So, I either had the wrong dream or used the wrong canvas to paint on.”

He had to hold himself back from reaching over the corner of the table and smooth a hand down her cheek because her lips smiled but her eyes didn’t.

“But enough about me. Tell me about you. Are things going swimmingly?” she asked.

He scoffed. “They were. But I didn’t make it on the Olympic trials. I found a sponsor, and competed, and tried again, but I didn’t improve my times, so …” He shrugged.

She nodded. He knew she understood the swimmers’ lingo from that day she had questioned him about it in the library. “Wow, the Olympics.”

“It was a stretch, but I had to try. So, here I am, kinda like you,” he said. “Came home to good old Riviera View to weigh my options.”

From the sympathetic smile on her face, he knew she understood exactly how defeated he had felt at first and what it had taken to adjust. He had a feeling he didn’t have to tell her how lost he had been, having to find a new focus, a new dream, a new goal. He could see that she was just at that place now.

He didn’t add that realizing his dream had reached as far as it ever would, and being back home, living at his mother’s again, without the routine he had been used to for a decade, had depressed him so much that he had spent the first two weeks doing nothing. Nothing, except sleeping in, going out with old friends, and hooking up with a woman or two. He couldn’t even say for sure if it was one or two. That whole period was a gray cloud that he had been lost in. But once he got his act together, realizing it wasn’t all or nothing, he focused on finding a job coaching a leading club, one that he could push forward and where he could still compete nationally on a semi-professional level.

“I got a job coaching a club in Blueshore. They’re leading in several strokes and age groups. If it goes well, I might move there.” Blueshore was an hour away. “I finished a meeting with one of their directors just before you came in.”

“Congratulations!” She raised her smoothie glass and clinked it against his iced coffee. “A good way to continue living your dream even if it’s not …” She raised her shoulders in a you-know gesture. “That’s kinda what I’m aiming at. We should drink to that!”

“Speaking of,” he said after taking a sip, “that exhibition of yours, will there be a grand opening or something?”

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