Slow Burn by Starlight

Chapter 3

Three

“Whoa, the Scottish dude’s freaking out,” Ralphie said as he stepped down the lighthouse stairs. Ruthie clattered behind him in her lace-up boots. As soon as it had started raining, Ralphie had remembered that he’d left the canopy off his skiff. All of Ruthie’s fantasies of cuddling by the lighthouse window watching a rainstorm sweep across the bay disappeared.

“He has a name,” Ruthie pointed out. She prized accuracy in all things, and “the Scottish dude” could mean anyone from Scotland. Although context was important too, and Alastair was the only Scot in Lost Harbor. “It’s a cool one, too. Alastair Dougal.”

But Ralphie was too preoccupied with his canopy to worry about such details. He flopped a hand at Ruthie and loped down the winding pathway that led back to the brewery and other Yatesville structures—cabins and yurts and workshops.

So much for the dinner she’d been dreaming about for so long.

But she didn’t have time to dissect everything that had happened, because Ralphie was definitely right about one thing. Alastair was freaking out.

She bounded down the last couple of steps and dashed over to the bench where he was cursing up at the sky.

“What happened? Did you get some bad news?”

He glanced at her wildly; she got the sense that he barely saw her. Which was strange in and of itself, because she usually felt the opposite with Alastair. Out of all the people she knew here in Lost Harbor, he felt like the only one who saw her and not some long-gone memory of her.

She saw that he held an envelope in one hand and a letter in the other. “Are you okay? Is someone ill? Talk to me, Alastair.”

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out, so he closed it again.

Someone must have died. That was the only explanation for his shocked muteness and the horrified look on his face.

Lowering her voice, she said, “I’m so sorry. Was it someone you were close to? A relative back in Scotland?”

“What?” He focused on her, his eyebrows coming together in a frown.

Finally, a word.

“Your news.” She gestured at the letter. “I’m just assuming…”

“No one’s dead. I mean, no one else is dead.” He clenched his jaw, the muscles knotting tight.

“Oh. Okay. That’s a relief…” Except he didn’t look at all relieved. The pace of the rain picked up, a steady drumbeat on their heads. “Do you want to go inside? You’re getting drenched out here.”

He nodded, but when she moved in the direction of the brewery, he refused to follow. “Sorry, I’m not in the mood for other people just yet.”

“Come on, then.” Veering toward the lighthouse instead, she beckoned him to follow. “I’ve got these amazing potstickers and a bottle of yarrow ale that’s barely been touched.”

“Where’s Ralphie?”

“He had to go. Boat emergency,” she added, to lessen the embarrassment at least a little. How long had he actually spent inside the lighthouse? Maybe half an hour?

She braced herself for the inevitable teasing from Alastair, but it didn’t come. Maybe he was too shaken up with his news, or maybe he sensed that she’d rather not get teased at this particular moment.

“Nice of him to leave some potstickers behind,” was all he said. “I could use a bite.”

The two of them trudged up the short flight of concrete steps. She let out a sigh as she surveyed the remains of her dream date. “Oh well, it’s a start,” she murmured to herself.

On occasion, she still talked to herself, the way she used to back when she had an imaginary friend. Did that count as talking to yourself? She wasn’t sure. Sometimes, like now, she did it in front of Alastair, which was probably a sign of how comfortable she felt with him. He already knew she was weird, so she had no need to hide that fact from him.

“Should I ask?” Alastair surveyed the scene of her dinner debacle. “Or should this go in the archives?”

Hands in his pockets, with that mystery envelope tucked under his arm, he leaned against the wall between two of the angled windows. The slowly setting sun picked up glints of copper in his dark hair.

“It wasn’t a complete disaster. It was…nice.”

Nice and brotherly. Nice and anticlimactic. None of the fireworks she’d dreamed about.

“We talked about some childhood memories,” she added.

“Yeah? Like what?”

“The time we went blueberry picking and ran into a black bear. We climbed a tree to escape it, mostly because Ralphie really loved climbing trees. But I sucked at climbing and I lost my grip and fell about five feet from the bear.”

“Shite.”

She’d stayed still as a log while the bear had sniffed her all over. She could still remember its hot, earthy breath. Finally, the bear had ambled off, no longer interested in the little lump of human.

“I was fine, but Ralphie missed the whole thing because he kept climbing to the top. He wanted to see his house.”

She caught Alastair’s grimace.

“Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best childhood memory. But he also told me that I grew up better than he thought I would.”

Alastair squinted at her. “You sure that’s a compliment?”

She made a face at him as she poured some yarrow ale into a glass. “He was smiling when he said it, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. Besides, you never saw me when I was little.”

As she brought him the glass, she took a quick peek at the envelope under his arm. Certified letter. Return address in New York. Wild with curiosity now, she handed him the beer. “Come on, why don’t you get buzzed and tell me what’s going on.”

“I will. I just need a minute.” He guzzled down half the glass of ale, while she shuddered. Beer was not her thing. “Tell me more about little kid Ruthie. I bet you were adorable, all chubby cheeks and red curls.”

“Yes, like a miniature clown. Actually, I was pretty cute when I was little. Puberty was my downfall. That’s when I started wearing glasses, too. Did you know that for the first three years I kept deliberately losing them? Then I mistook one of my father’s statues for our golden retriever and bonked my head into it so hard, I needed stitches.”

She lifted her hair to show him the mark on her forehead.

Alastair looked bemused by that story. “I want to laugh, but I’m thinking that must have been painful.”

“Just another highlight of my wonder years.” She laughed, since again, what could you do? Anyway, she wasn’t that person anymore. Now she was a poised, confident woman with a master’s degree who could laugh off her childhood insecurities.

“After that, my parents laid down the law. I had to wear glasses. I pretty much wrote off the rest of my high school years.” She said it lightly, of course, because why not? It was over and done with now. So what if she’d shed many tears over her social pariah existence?

“Just because of some glasses?” Alastair frowned as he finished off his ale. “Lots of people wear them. Plenty of young ones too.”

“It wasn’t really the glasses,” she admitted. “It was my attitude about the glasses. Maybe they were more of an excuse than anything else. I was just really, really shy. I’ve told you that. Glasses made it easy to hide until high school was over. The only problem…” She hesitated, pulling her lower lip between her teeth.

“Problem?” he prompted.

“Ralphie. We started off like this.” She held the index fingers of her two hands together. “I went down and he went up.” Separating her hands, she opened her arms as wide as possible, one above her head, one lower down. “Everyone loved Ralphie. And everyone forgot about me. Potsticker?”

Dropping her hands, she went to the table and snatched up the plate of potstickers and two forks. It gave her a chance to hide the flush coming across her face. Even though all that was in the past, it still embarrassed her.

He was shaking his head when she got back. She handed him a fork. “I doubt anyone forgot. My guess is that you wanted to be invisible and they obliged you.”

“Maybe,” she admitted, jabbing a fork into a potsticker. “I did get a 4.0 average out of my lack of social life. And I got to watch Ralphie date his way through our class, the class above us, and the class below.”

He helped himself to a potsticker too. “So now you want to be another notch on his bedpost, is that it?”

“No,” she said defensively. “God. You make it sound so gross. I just want…” She shrugged, searching for the right words. “I just want him to see me. I want to prove to him that I’m not the same ridiculously awkward girl I was back then.” To emphasize her point, she waved the potsticker in the air—only to watch in horror as it flipped off the tines of the fork and landed with a squishy thwack on Alastair’s forehead. A spray of soy sauce flicked across his face.

Alastair clapped his hand to his forehead and peeled off the sticky dumpling. “You were saying? Something about awkward? I didn’t quite catch it because of the random potsticker attack.”

She dashed back to the table to grab a napkin. “I’m so sorry. Let me get that soy sauce out of your hair.”

“It’s Nama Shoyu,” he grumbled as she dabbed at his face and hair. “Expensive, too. Never planned on using it like aftershave.”

“It’s just a couple drops, don’t be so dramatic.” His hair was soft, she noticed, as a lock slid through her fingers. It had a thick wave to it. And he smelled nice, apart from the soy sauce. A cool, fresh whiff of the outdoors. “And yes, I still have my awkward moments, in case we still needed proof of that. Hang on, there’s a drop inside your ear. How the heck did it get in there?”

As she delicately blotted that bit of soy sauce, he gave a low rumble of laughter. Then another. His laugh was so infectious—like a chuckle deep in his chest—that she giggled too. Then he threw his head all the way back and roared.

She watched, smiling along with him. He wasn’t laughing at her, she knew, or even because getting soy sauce in your ear was funny. It was a release from whatever tension that envelope had caused him.

“Ruthie, you really know how to lighten things up.” He wiped his eyes when he was finally done laughing.

“Feeling better now?”

“Actually, yeah.”

“More relaxed?”

“A bit.”

“Less grouchy-bear?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Then what’s in that letter?”

Her rapid-fire interrogation technique worked. He opened his mouth, and this time he didn’t snap it shut before he spoke. “I just inherited a fortune.”