Melting - Sean Ashcroft Page 0,3

himself to take it, and then disappeared without so much as another word. I drank half a bottle of maybe the worst house red in the entire civilized world and burst into tears on the walk home,” I said. “So. I’d call it average.”

“Ouch,” Marissa winced, pulling out a stool to sit beside me. “New flavor?”

“This is plain vanilla ice cream from the convenience store,” I said, passing her the second spoon I’d grabbed. “It tastes so fake. I’m having a good time.”

“I can’t believe you’re eating that on purpose,” she said, accepting the spoon and taking some as I pushed the tub over anyway.

“It tastes like I’m six years old, which is about the last time I remember not being exhausted or feeling completely unlovable.”

“You were expecting to find love on a first date?” Marissa asked, raising an eyebrow between spoonfuls of cheap vanilla ice cream.

“I was expecting not to be abandoned with a made-up excuse,” I said. “I don’t even know what I did.”

“Well, we can do a post-mortem later and talk about all the walls you have up when it comes to people you don’t know and how you project the same general air as a praying mantis, or we can just call him an asshole who’s missing out on what would have been the best thing that ever happened to him.”

“Praying mantis?” I asked.

She was right about the walls. I knew that.

But the mantis thing was new.

“Yeah, like you might bite someone’s head off,” Marissa explained, making a head-cutting gesture with the spoon and her other hand.

I frowned down at my spoon. “I think it’s only the females who do that? Like, after mating. I didn’t even get laid last night. I’d take a hookup at this point, I’m ready to throw dignity out the window in exchange for seeing someone else’s dick.”

“Do you know about the internet?” Marissa asked. “Because if you just wanna see a dick I’m almost positive I have one I didn’t ask for in my Twitter DMs right now.”

“I wanna see a non-creepy dick belonging to someone I’ve at least had a coffee with, or something.”

“So you don’t actually want a hookup.”

I sighed.

I just wasn’t a hookup kind of person. Sometimes I wished I was. Maybe I could be. Maybe…

“Oh, I forgot to mention the other thing,” I said, grabbing another spoonful of ice cream to brace myself. “Dad talked me into spending the summer in Oregon.”

Marissa gave me exactly the look I’d expected—one part surprise, one part skepticism, one part relief.

She’d been telling me to take a vacation for months. Well, no, she’d been telling me for years, but ever since The Breakup, an event so significant to my life that it was capitalized in my brain, she’d been even more worried about me working myself to death than usual.

In the beginning she’d bought my bullshit that work was healing, but by now she’d seen right through me.

I just couldn’t think of anything to do other than work.

“When you say the summer…?”

“I don’t know how long for,” I said.

Part of me was hoping I could get away with maybe a week—it was a long trip from New York—but another part of me…

Well, New York was starting to feel like the harsh place everyone had warned me it was when I decided to move here in the first place. It’d been kind to me at first, but after Aaron, it didn’t feel quite so warm.

A solid few weeks by the Pacific, tucked away in the sleepy little seaside town I used to call home didn’t sound completely awful. Not right now. Especially not after last night.

I could hide out in my old black-walled bedroom and wallow in my misery until I either got over it or accepted it as a permanent part of my life.

“Good,” Marissa said. “A few weeks without you here to scare the customers might be enough to turn this place around.”

“I yell at one customer…”

“One customer in front of her grandchildren,” Marissa pointed out.

“They were brats. She was a brat who thought she was old enough to get away with it. Aliyah was practically in tears over that woman’s crap. I’m the head chef, the only person who gets to make the servers cry is me.”

“You’ve never made a server cry,” Marissa said.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been in their shoes. They have a hard enough job without me on their backs.”

“Take a vacation before you lose it at another little old lady,” Marissa said. “No matter how rude