Rooms - James L. Rubart [50]
“Diet Coke, please,” Micah said.
“Classic Coke okay, sweetheart?”
“Sure.” Micah smiled.
Julie ordered the same.
“I’ll getcha your drinks and be right back atcha.” The waitress winked at Micah.
“Haven’t lost your touch, have you, Micah?” Julie opened her menu and studied it.
“What touch?” He tried not to laugh.
Julie dabbed her napkin in her water and wiped off her side of the table. “You’ve never been one to just hang out somewhere since I’ve known you.”
“True.”
“Let alone hang out in a place as laid back as the beach. It’s been more than three months with no end in sight. What’s going on? You act like you want this work-from-the-ocean charade to go on forever.”
“It’s growing on me.”
“What’s her name?” Julie spun her knife on the table and watched it twirl.
“There’s no name.”
“What is her name?”
“It’s not a her.” He looked out the window at a gray ’66 Mustang and folded his arms. Maybe there was a her. But he wasn’t ready to think of Sarah in that vein, and it wasn’t why he was drawn to Cannon Beach. Maybe a partial reason but certainly not the main one.
The waitress returned with their drinks and took their order. Micah was grateful for a break in the conversation. But it was a short respite from Julie’s cross-examination. Up till then, she’d asked questions with a smoldering burn. Now flames leaped from her eyes as she leaned in and spoke in a jagged whisper.
“If it’s not a her, then what is it? Our lives were on track. We’ve pegged off every goal we set for the business, and we finally took our relationship to the next level!” Julie fell back in her chair. “Now you’re hanging out at the beach and telling me our relationship is ‘on hold.’ You wanted to figure things out. You said, ‘Six, maybe seven weeks tops, Jules!’”
She pushed her silverware to the side and leaned back in. “Explain to me what is so captivating about a home on the beach that convinces you to spend 90 percent of your life there?”
“You haven’t been to the place.”
“I don’t want to go to the place.” She took a sip of her Coke, then smacked it back down on the table.
Micah grabbed a handful of Sweet’N Low packets and built a little wall. A moment later their food came. Both picked at their meals.
Micah felt Julie’s eyes on him, studying him as if they were in a deep negotiation.
“You’ve changed.”
She was poking him, trying to provoke him and hear him defend himself with cries of “Not true.” But it was true. “Yeah, I have.”
It stopped her.
“Come see the house, Jules.”
“Come back to your life. Our life.”
“It’s not over yet.”
“What’s not over? The house is helping you ‘rediscover yourself’? Figure out ‘who you are’? Are you kidding? I played along when you first said it, but now that three months have skated by, it’s a wrinkled, old excuse.” Julie waved her hands in the air. “Find yourself. Find yourself!”
“I’m not the same person.”
“Whatever you think you’re becoming isn’t the real you. The real Micah is conquering the world, on his way to becoming one of the youngest billionaires in the world. Trips to the Alps. To Saint-Tropez. Parties in Hollywood every other weekend. Hardware companies begging to ally themselves with RimSoft.”
Something stirred in Micah. Something saying with deep conviction Julie was right.
“The real Micah is confident, knows where he’s going, and is in love with me. You can’t keep living in both worlds. You’re going to have to choose one way or the other. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now.”
The two worlds flashed into his mind at the same time. The world of the house, Rick, and Sarah, and the world of Seattle, RimSoft, and Julie. For an instant both worlds lingered. Then something snapped.
Business jaunts off to Italy, to Australia, and to New Zealand, being invited onto movie sets whenever he wanted, suites in Las Vegas thrown at him, multimillion-dollar software deals, the magazine covers and TV profiles—he missed it. How could he stay in Cannon Beach? Too small. Too confining. What had he been thinking? For a weekend.