His gaze swallowed her in a way that made her feel like she was the only person on the planet. She cleared her throat and looked down at the menu. “That’s fine. I can take the rest home if I don’t eat it.”
He turned back to the bartender and ordered their burgers. When the bartender left to put in the order, Luke swiveled on his bar stool to face her. “If the world ended tomorrow, and I had one last meal, it would be this burger.”
“You would choose a burger as your last meal?” she asked, surprised. “I can think of so many things that I’d have over a burger.”
“You’ve never had this burger.” He tipped his beer up to his lips, and she tried not to watch for fear she’d be goggling at his attractiveness. She liked how easily the conversation was going, how he didn’t put her on the spot.
“You’re very confident,” she said, meaning more by her comment than just his certainty about his choice of last meal.
He took a long look at her before shifting his eyes down to his beer and having another sip from his bottle. “What would you have for your last meal, then?”
“I don’t know if I’d be worried about my meal. I’d be too busy trying to do everything I wanted before the end.” She sipped her rum and Coke, savoring the coconut flavor. A string of paper lanterns hanging from the thatched roof above the bar rattled as they danced in the wind. With the warm breeze and the hiss of the sea behind them, she felt herself relaxing.
His eyebrows rose in interest. “What do you want to do before you die, then?”
“Learn how to knit.”
He laughed. “You could choose the hardest, most unreachable thing in the whole world—bungee jumping, mountain climbing, world travel—and you picked knitting? That’s something you could do right now. I’ll buy you a How-To-Knit book on the way home. Come on, you can do better than that,” he teased.
With a grin, she thought some more.
“Meet a world leader?”
Callie shook her head.
“Swim with dolphins?”
“Stop,” she giggled. “I’m actually trying to think of something but you keep distracting me.”
“So no clowning classes?”
“No! Nothing like that,” she laughed.
“Well what would you really want to happen before you die? Really.”
“I’d like to be closer with my mother,” she said, immediately feeling fire shoot through her veins at admitting that out loud. She’d never done that before. Luke’s easy talking had pulled her in and she didn’t know how to do this: get personal with a stranger. The things she wanted to do before she died were very intimate desires, the kinds of things buried so deep down in her heart that she wasn’t sure she wanted to share them with anyone. The fuzzy memory of her father leaving—a memory that had almost faded completely with time—filtered into her mind, reminding her of the turning point with her mom. It caused Callie to tense up.
His face softened, and she realized then that she’d bristled. She noticed that her knees had moved slightly away from him, her arms folded across her body. She straightened them out, channeling that moment of calm before his question and let her shoulders drop. She leaned back toward him again, grabbing her drink to have something to do with her hands, stirring it with the little black straw in the glass.
“Why aren’t you close with your mom?” he asked gently, turning toward the sea, as if the gesture would make the heaviness of the conversation go away. The bright sunlight made the water shimmer like diamonds on the horizon. When he didn’t get a response, he turned to her. “You can tell me,” he said with a shrug. “I’m an outsider. What would it matter if I knew?”
The answers bubbled up in her mind. She took another drink of her rum and Coke. Her mom hadn’t really been there for her since her dad left when she was eight. Callie wanted to know if her mother wished she hadn’t been so distant with her after her father left; if she wondered why Callie couldn’t just turn off the hurt like her mother obviously could; if she missed her. She opened her mouth to say it, but then she clammed up, choking the answers back. “What do you want to do before you die?” she said, steering the subject away from herself.
“I’d like to have a family, kids,” he said with a smile. “Travel.”
She was surprised by his answers. Lots of people wanted those things, but here was a single guy with his whole life in front of him, and the first thing he’d said was family. Not to mention, kids were a huge investment—emotionally, financially, time-wise. In all the relationships she’d been in, not one of the men had mentioned children, and she’d never felt the need to press them on it. She didn’t take marriage and children lightly.
“Where would you travel?” she asked, sticking to the easier side of the conversation.
“Malta, maybe. Belize… Somewhere exotic.” He smiled at her.
“They’re both by the water,” she noted, comforted that he wasn’t trying to get anything more out of her. He was easy to talk to; it was as if he sensed when to pull back and push forward, and just as she felt uneasy, he made it all better.
“I could never live away from the water. I love it too much.”
“Me too. I used to look forward to my visits here as a kid. I couldn’t wait to feel the sting on my face from too much sun and the salt in my hair. It’s fantastic.”
“When I’ve been surfing all day, that night when I lie in bed and close my eyes, I feel like I’m still on the swells of the waves.”
Callie knew that sensation. She got it too.
He smiled and said, “My mother used to tell me that feeling was the ocean soaking into my soul.”
“Mmm, I love that,” she said, feeling the tension leaving her.
The bartender arrived with two plates, setting them in front of Luke and Callie. He grabbed a few paper napkins from behind him, folded the wad in half, and set them on the table between them.
Callie looked down at the massive burger.
“You were warned,” Luke said.
“I underestimated what you meant by ‘big’.”
“You get a T-shirt if you finish it.” He pointed to an array of pastel garments pinned to the slant in the ceiling above the bar, all reading I survived The Beach Bum Burger Bash with a line drawing of the burger in front of her.
“Enticing,” she said, holding back her grin.
“You’re considered royalty if you have one of those shirts.”
“Do you have one?”
He looked at her as if her question were ridiculous. “Of course I have one! That’s my picture right there on the wall of fame.” He nodded toward a small bulletin board with five photos pinned to it. Luke was wearing the navy blue T-shirt over an Oxford button-up with the sleeves rolled, smiling an enormous smile.
“Quite an achievement,” she teased.
“Don’t make light of it. I’m one of five people on the Outer Banks who can eat the whole thing.”
“Now you’re just showing off.” She giggled. “It can’t be that hard.”