Breathe, I coached myself. It had been several years since I’d had a panic attack, but one threatened now. I straightened up again, drawing a slow breath. The trick was to lower my heart rate, which would break the cycle.
A rapid heartbeat convinces your brain that something is wrong, a therapist had explained to me years ago. And in turn, your brain tells your heart to get ready to flee. Which elevates your heart rate even more. Fear begets fear, in other words.
At twenty, I’d needed someone to help me learn to control my panic. At the time, the worst mistake I’d ever made was simply to walk through the wrong parking lot at the wrong hour of the night. I’d paid for that mistake.
But now, at twenty-five, I had quite a few more mistakes under my belt.
And now I would pay for those, too.
To calm myself, I counted the pine trees across the road. There were nine of them. Between their straight trunks, flashes of Nest Lake sparkled in the distance.
I’d grown up here in this house, where only glimpses of the water were visible. If my father had purchased a house on the other side of the road, with lake access, his property value would have risen tenfold.
But that’s just how life worked. Sometimes the distance between wealth and scraping by was as thin as a country road.
After a few minutes, I was breathing more easily. I lifted our overnight bags out of the car and pulled them into the house. I would need to put my game face back on so I could make it through the family ritual here in my father’s house. Even though my mind would be a quarter mile away at the general store. Everything had begun there.
The first night he’d come into the store, it had been right before closing time, and I’d been working alone. And since John had worn soft sneakers, and was kind enough to prevent the door from slamming, I hadn’t heard him approach. When he’d greeted me, it had startled me so badly that I’d dropped a full mason jar of pickled onions, breaking it on the floor.
“I’m so sorry,” he’d said before helping me clean up the mess.
I’d been so flustered that I hadn’t gotten a good look at him that first night. I’d sold him his first meat pie and a soda to go with it, my heart pounding with unnecessary fear.
Even if I had gotten a good look at him, I wouldn’t have recognized him. I wasn’t the kind of girl who paid a lot of attention to rock songs on the radio, or the people responsible for them.
But after that disaster, he’d always whistled on his way into the store. Whenever I’d heard the first part of “You Are My Sunshine” drifting down the street, I’d known he was on his way over for supper.
After a week, I’d felt comfortable enough to tell him I appreciated the warning. “You have no idea how much that helps. Last fall I was mugged. And even though it’s been almost a year, every time someone walks up behind me, I jump.”
His turquoise eyes went wide with surprise. “Shit, I’m sorry. You got mugged here, in Nest Lake?”
I laughed. “Can you imagine? No—this was in Boston, in a parking lot at the university.”
John rubbed his whiskers with the knuckles of one hand, his chiseled face still full of concern. “That sucks.”
“It really, really did.” I changed the topic. “I made whoopie pies today. Do you want one for dessert?”
“Hell, yes. Whatever that is. It sounds naughty.”
That made me blush, because my crush on him was already blooming. “You don’t know whoopie pies? The official treat of Maine? They’re everywhere. Mostly, they’re dreadful, but you didn’t hear it from me.”
“You want me to eat something dreadful?” Those bright eyes twinkled.
“I said they were mostly dreadful. Mine are exquisite, naturally. You should know this.” I surprised myself by flirting with him. It had been so long since I’d felt flirty with anyone.
When I handed the bag with his food over the counter, he reached right in and plucked the whoopie pie off the top. “Mmm,” he said after taking a big bite. “Sweetness.”
“It’s not too sweet, though,” I argued. “Most of them are, but mine have dark cocoa and cream cheese in the frosting. For tang.”
He licked his lips. “It’s perfect. You’re the sweetness.” He winked at me as he walked out.
And that naughty wink did funny things to my insides.
After that, he called me “sweetness” from time to time. The man was a charmer. I looked forward to his visits so much that I soon found a way to prolong them. A trip to our dusty attic at home produced an old card table and two chairs. I set these up on the screened porch at the front of the store.
I was too shy to let on that I’d put the table there just for him, but he figured it out right away. From then on, he ate his meals sitting on the porch, instead of carrying his food back to his room at Mrs. Wetzle’s. After I locked up the store at eight, he would often be sitting there, staring out into the darkness and listening to the crickets.
“Can I ask you a favor?” I said the third time I found him relaxing on the porch an hour after he’d eaten his dinner.
“Shoot.”
“If you’re walking back to the B&B, can we walk together?” I’d been nervous to ask, so all my words tumbled out in a rush. “There hasn’t been a… mugging here for years. But I’m creeped out anyway. And I asked the guy at Kreemy Kone to walk me home a couple of times, but he thinks I’m hitting on him.”
John laughed. “The teenager who wears that Metallica T-shirt with the arms cut off? He ought to know better than to think you’re hitting on him.”
“You’d think.” I smiled at him to cover my own embarrassment.
“Happy to help,” he said, rising to go.
And that’s how our friendship began. Never mind that he was devilishly handsome, with wind-tossed hair and a sinful mouth. Even though he let his beard grow out all summer, that brilliant level of attractiveness could not easily be dimmed.
I’d begun to worship him even before June turned into July. But we remained strictly friendly, even as our chats grew longer, night by night. Instead of walking home after the store closed, I began sitting with him at the table. Sometimes he bought a six-pack of beer and we’d drink it on the porch after I locked up. We spent hours just shooting the breeze and talking about our lives.
Of course, John/Jonas left out some very crucial details. In the beginning, I left out a few doozies, too.
Even so, we never lacked for conversation. I told him that I was majoring in hospitality. “Although I hate that word,” I said with a giggle. A giggle! Like a school girl. But it was hard to keep my head when he was nearby. “I want to open a restaurant someday.”
“If you’re opening a restaurant, I’m eating there,” he promised.
He told me he was a composer in Seattle. That explained the strains of the guitar that I often heard drifting into my window in the morning. Or late into the night. He had the most beautiful hands, with long, supple fingers. I was dying to watch him play the guitar, but he never volunteered, and I was too chicken to ask.
Even if I’d managed to gather enough courage to ask for a private concert, I still wouldn’t have figured out the man playing the guitar had already been nicknamed “the golden kid,” by Rolling Stone. Or that his first album had been compared to early work by U2.