Page 18 of Smartasses
“Is that where Ruby Sue is?” he asked as he walked over to the wall near a support divider.
He’d already noticed this spot was shielded from the view of people walking the other way on the deck and the ping pong table around the corner. He put his shuffleboard stick into the holder attached to the wall and sat down on the single lounge chair, daring her without saying a word to come over.
“Are you kidding?” Aubrey laughed and strutted her way to him. “She’s got to be in her seventies and is the only one who knows the secret ingredient in her pecan pie recipe, so no one else could make it if she got locked up. I pity the sheriff if he ever tried to lock up Ruby Sue.” She put her stick next to his and sat down on the chair between his legs, leaning back against his chest. “The town of Salvation would turn on him before the single light on Main Street turned from green to red.”
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close as they looked out onto the horizon. “What’s your life like when you’re not kicking ass at shuffleboard?”
“Not the way I expected it to be, that’s for sure,” she said with a chuckle.
Aubrey might be trying to keep it light, but there was no missing the tension stringing her tight. For the first time since they’d met, it felt like he was getting to see more of the person she was rather than just the image she presented to the world. If he was someone else, he might not have realized, but there was no one more equipped to understand perception versus reality than a guy who’d spent the past decade in Hollywood. Life had taught him that there were always layers.
“I went back to help my gran out at her bakery, thinking that I could sell some donuts and write on the side,” she continued. “That was my plan anyway. But then Gran had a stroke. She recovered fully—thank God—but she can’t take care of things like before. I’m all she has left, and I’m not going to leave her.”
He could picture that. Watching her interact with her friends—even when she was stealing one of their pants—showed just how much they all cared about each other.
“What do you want to write?” he asked, genuinely curious about what else she was hiding behind all that impulsive extrovert exterior.
“Narrative non-fiction about people like Andrée Borrel who was the first female paratrooper recruited to parachute into occupied France to train the resistance, or Gertrude Benham who circumnavigated the globe seven times before she died in 1938.” The words came out in a rush of excitement as if they’d been building inside her for a lifetime, leaving a heavy silence after they were all said as if she needed a minute to box all those hopes and dreams back up. “Instead, I’m up at oh dark hundred making donuts and running the bakery. It’s hard to travel for research if you have to fill the Long Johns or refill the coffees of the old men in town who spend their mornings gossiping over crullers before handling the accounts, putting in the supply orders, and everything else involved in running a business.”
“So you’re doing what you need to do but not what you want. I can understand that.”
“No offense,” she said, sitting up and twisting around at the waist to give him a look of disbelief. “But are you serious? You know what that’s like, Mr. Movie Star?”
Not surprised by her reaction, he shrugged. “I want more than to be The Admiral.” He paused, waiting for the lightning strike from the fates or the superfan with the IG to pop around the corner, phone at the ready to snap a video of his confession. He’d never said that out loud to anyone except his brother. He hadn’t planned on saying it out loud to Aubrey. It just sort of happened. It seemed confessions to virtual strangers who a person never saw again wasn’t just a thing that happened in the movies. “That’s not to say I don’t appreciate everything that’s happened. I do. I know a lot of people don’t get the chances that I have. Still, I feel hemmed in sometimes or like I betrayed the person who I was going to be.”
“That I feel.” Aubrey relaxed back against him, letting out a long sigh. “I love my gran, but I miss that person I was in college. She was fun and had all sorts of plans and dreams.”
“Is that what this week is about for you, getting some of that back?”
“At least for a little while, yeah, I guess it is.” She sat up, her ornery sparkle glinting again in her eyes. “Speaking of which, how about we play one last time and loser buys ice cream?”
The quick conversation change nearly gave him whiplash, but he understood. There was giving someone a peek at the soft underbelly, and then there was throwing everything wide and letting someone really take a long eye full. He wasn’t into that either.
“I feel like I’ve been hustled,” he teased. “Don’t think it went unnoticed that you really were telling the truth about being a champion shuffleboard player. I thought it was hyperbole. Are you keeping any other secrets I should know about?”
Her cheeks turned pink, and she hurried off the chair, all but skipping a few steps away in her rush. “Forget the game. Let’s just go grab an ice cream. My treat.”
Seriously, he would need a neck brace if she kept switching things around so quickly. Not that there was any question of him not going with it. Ice cream and Aubrey were a pretty damn good combination.
“You footing the bill would help my damaged male ego,” he said, playing it up with a melodramatic sigh that would have gotten him fired from a regional theater group.
“Heaven forbid that take a beating.” She rolled her eyes, not buying it for an instant. “Come on, there are waffle cones with our names on them.”
He hadn’t planned to hold her hand as they walked to the ice cream stand near the pool, but it just came naturally—sort of like how he’d trusted Aubrey with the truth about his career. If anyone got ahold of that story, it could ruin any goodwill the public had for him, but he could trust her. He just knew it in his gut the same way he knew within the first few pages of a script if it was a winner. Aubrey wouldn’t do him wrong.
