Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,7
on, you know? Like, it said, ‘The future Mrs. Brad McBoring’ or whatever?” Nora nodded. “We somehow started talking about pageants, and we were laughing about what our talents would be if we were in one.”
“You would do a dramatic monologue,” Nora said.
“Yes, the one from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House where Nora—hey, her name is Nora, too!—is talking about how she subsumed her tastes into her husband’s so much that she’s effectively his doll.” She struck a purposefully melodramatic pose and cried, “‘You and Papa have committed a great sin against me! It is your fault that I have made nothing of my life!’” She made a silly face and broke character. “And then I made some big pronouncement about how I would die before I’d ever be a beauty queen, and…” She performed a big shrug. “Here I am.”
Nora laughed. “And what was your talent going to be?” she asked Law.
“I’d make the perfect martini.”
“Oh, Maya would definitely beat you,” Nora said dismissively. “She’s prettier, too.”
He could not argue with that.
“Yeah,” Nora said to Maya after Benjamin wandered away to serve someone else, “but why do you guys dislike each other so much? It feels like a long-standing grudge. Did he stand you up at the prom or something?” She laughed like the idea was ridiculous.
“Benjamin is six years older than I am, so no, no one was jilted at the prom,” Maya said, fake-laughing along with Nora, but the truth wasn’t that far off. She wasn’t sure how—or how much—to explain. She liked Nora. They were fast becoming friends, and she didn’t want to run her off by sounding like a lunatic with a gold medal in grudge holding. “We never really knew each other as kids,” she added.
Well, he didn’t know her. She knew him. Or knew of him. She’d always thought he was cute, running around at track meets in his little shorts, his muscles rippling as he hurled his body over the bar in pole vault. He and Rohan both competed in the eight-hundred-meter run, and Benjamin always won, which Ro always put down to the fact that he was older. The two boys had a friendly rivalry that was heavy on the friendliness, and indeed, Benjamin had always seemed like a nice guy. Everyone liked Benjamin, including Maya.
Until he ruined her first play. Romeo and Juliet. She was fifteen, and she’d had big dreams even then. She’d worked so hard to get that first play off the ground. Law had been dating her Juliet, and he’d talked her into impulsively skipping town the day of the show, forcing Maya to cancel it. She still remembered the anger and shame. All that work down the drain.
But she didn’t want to get into it. It sounded so stupid from this vantage point. She’d just been so mad at him, and by the time the anger had faded, they were settled so far into their groove of bickering and feuding that there was no climbing out of it.
So she went for the rest of the story, which was all true. “We just don’t like each other. When I opened the theater, we started having all these conflicts. Parking, noise from the bands he has in here on weekends, you name it. And the new pizza oven out back belches smoke. My patrons used to like to go out behind the theater during intermission, but they can’t anymore.” She shrugged. “We just sort of got into the habit of being at odds. Oil and water, you know?”
“But doesn’t it get tiring?”
Not at all. If anything, it was the reverse. Fighting with Benjamin made Maya feel alive in a way that nothing else did—which was annoying, but it was what it was. She picked up her drink. “Everyone needs hobbies.”
An hour later, Maya was still sitting at the bar, though Nora had left. She should just leave, too. But as in the aftermath of a play, the mermaid queen gig had her hyped up. It was a common phenomenon among actors. The energy you needed to put on a show couldn’t be turned off with the flip of a switch. She needed a step-down of sorts before she went back to her quiet apartment. If she was doing a play, she usually wasn’t out of the theater until well after eleven, and Lawson’s Lager House was the only thing open. Plus, its proprietor aside, she loved this place. It was familiar and cozy and she could always find someone