The Guest Book (12 page)

“Yep! Sure did. Almost every year. That house is where my dream of coming here to live started.” He smiled with one corner of his mouth. “I thought living here would feel like being on permanent vacation.”

“And does it?”

He turned up the other corner of his mouth. “Tonight it does. Tonight it feels like the life I dreamed about.”

“Nate, I—”

“Hey, Macy, can we start walking back now? I gotta be honest. The ocean waves and the moonlight and the way you look are killing me. I’ve got high standards I hold myself to, but if I sit here much longer I’m not going to be able to.”

“You could kiss me, Nate, if you wanted. I wouldn’t mind,” she offered.
I wouldn’t mind at all
, she thought to herself, taking in the cleft in his chin, the curve of his lips, the smell of him. “I mean, one kiss wouldn’t hurt.” She’d never had a guy
resist kissing her before, and it left her feeling confused and a little rejected.

“I could kiss you,” he said, standing up and offering her his hand. “I could indeed. And it would be amazing. That I do not doubt.” He started to pull her toward him but then stepped quickly away, keeping his distance. “But if I start kissing you, I fear I wouldn’t stop.” He turned away from her. “So come on. Let’s get you home.”

He took her hand and walked her back to the public access, steadying her with one hand as she slipped on her shoes. As they left the beach, it was if a spell had been lifted — gone was her plan to make cranberry spritzers to sip on the roof deck with him to keep the night going. Instead, she accepted that the night had to end, and she did her best to accept that Nate was a bona fide respectable gentleman who was honoring her with his restraint — not rejecting her. He teased her about her flip-flops, and she teased back, making quips about his lame sermon jokes as the two of them returned to the familiar territory of Time in a Bottle.

After climbing the steps with her, Nate pulled her in for a hug. “Macy?” he asked as he held her so close she could feel his heart thumping beneath his shirt.

“Yeah?” she answered, her voice muffled by the folds of his T-shirt. She hoped he had changed his mind and wanted to kiss her after all.

“Believe the fairy tale.” He pulled back and looked her in the eye. “All of it. Don’t be afraid of it.”

She nodded and wondered if he was the answer to the
prayer he’d told her she could count on God answering. The truth was, this all felt like a fairy tale.

Nate kissed her cheek and all but pushed her inside before she — or he — could move those few inches that would change everything.

A
s she showered and dried her hair the next morning, she struggled to shake the image of Nate’s face so close to hers on the porch, the way he’d seemed genuinely bereft at the thought of ending their night. She couldn’t quite decide if his mix of charm and chivalry was part of his job or just part of him. Could he really be what he seemed or was there bad stuff she just hadn’t discovered yet? Her cynical side told her there had to be.

She donned cut-off denim shorts and a tank top that could stand to get paint on it. At some point after Wyatt had asked Macy to help paint, Brenda had committed her to it, springing it on her at breakfast earlier this morning.

At the last minute, Macy rubbed some pink-tinted lip gloss onto her lips. She took one last look in the mirror. She didn’t look like she was trying too hard, which was her goal. With
his looks and smug demeanor, she could tell Wyatt was used to girls throwing themselves at him with some regularity. That would not be her, Macy decided, no matter what he looked like.

She crossed the yard to Buzz’s house with a sense of purpose. She was doing a good thing for Buzz, who had been so sweet to her family. Painting Buzz’s house for him was the least she could do in return. Besides, her mom had basically insisted she go.

Something inside her asked,
Does the fact that Wyatt looks the way he does have anything to do with your burst of altruism?
There was a voice inside her that would forever sound just like her mother, even when Brenda was nowhere around. Macy silenced the voice with a knock on Buzz’s front door. She saw Wyatt’s truck parked in the drive and ignored the little thrill that surged through her. Wyatt pulled open the door and leaned lazily against it as he sized her up.

Macy decided right then and there that he looked like Matthew McConaughey, minus the blue eyes. The bad thing was, she’d always had a thing for Matthew McConaughey and saw all his movies, even the stupid ones that flopped at the box office. She let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding and shrugged, holding up her hands with a smile.

“I’m here to paint!” she said in a sing-song voice.

Wyatt smirked at her. “So I see.” He held the door open so she could walk through, and she wondered why they’d never met as kids. She thought of him being inside Time in a Bottle when she wasn’t there, of Buzz dragging him out when he snuck in. She wondered how many times that had happened and if there was more to the story.

She decided that eventually she would ask him if house painting was the only kind of painting he did. But then she immediately chided herself for even going down that path. It wasn’t likely that Wyatt was her mystery artist. And yet … he had admitted to being in the house and often looked at her like he knew more than he was letting on. She smiled at him.

“Where do we start?” she asked, dispelling the thoughts that were running away with her imagination.

He looked at her with the amused expression he always seemed to wear and pointed to the kitchen. “I’ve already taped it off,” he said, holding his arm out to let her go ahead of him. She rounded the corner into the kitchen and saw he had painted their names on the wall, blue paint against the former eggshell color. She stopped short and stared at their names there together.

“I was just fooling around,” he said. “Testing the paint. I wrote my name, then figured it wouldn’t be fair not to include yours.”

There was something so permanent about their names being painted on the wall. Even though Macy knew they would soon be covered by a coat of paint, underneath, their names would always be there. She turned to look at Wyatt, but he looked away, grabbing a roller and dipping it in the blue paint. He held the roller above the pan, studying it instead of her.

“You want this one?” he asked. “I’ll do the trim?”

“I guess with two of us working, this will go fast,” she said, reaching for the roller.

He handed it to her. “If it goes too fast, I might just have to think of another project to get you over here again.”

She smiled at him as she caught his eye. For just a moment, he seemed disarmed and uncertain. She liked that she could do that to him and, as she rolled the first streak of blue paint across the eggshell-colored wall, she found herself wanting to continue this strange dance that had sprung up between her and Wyatt.

They worked in companionable silence with the radio supplying a sound track for her thoughts. As they grew more comfortable around each other, they both began to sing along to the songs they knew. Wyatt sang off-key most of the time but didn’t seem to care. Macy didn’t have the world’s greatest voice, but she could carry a tune. Still she sang softly, sometimes only mouthing the familiar words.

Even though she was supposed to be painting, Macy found herself watching Wyatt out of the corner of her eye whenever she could. She was paying more attention to him than the wall, and her snail’s pace was evidence of it.

Wyatt smirked at her when their eyes met. He gestured to the largely blank wall. “This is what I get for hiring an amateur.”

She gave him a half-smile, glad he thought it was her inexperience causing her to go so slowly.

“So tell me about Emma’s father,” he said, ending a long stretch of silence between them. He was facing the wall he was painting, so Macy studied his back for a moment, the way his shoulders flexed under the thin cotton of his T-shirt. The last thing she wanted to talk about right now was Chase. Interesting that it had taken so little time for both Nate and Wyatt to go there.

“Gee … way to keep it light, Wyatt,” she quipped.

“No, I mean, I’m just curious, and we’re obviously going to be here longer than I thought we’d be, so why not ask about the doofus who bailed on you and that adorable little girl?”

“Well, you pretty much nailed it. He’s a doofus.”

“Oh. Well, good to know I’m still a good judge of character.”

Macy hoped that was the end of that exchange. She didn’t want to think about Chase, shooed the image of him from her mind. She’d promised him she’d think about their relationship, but she’d hardly thought of him at all, and she didn’t want to. She focused instead on smoothing the paint over the walls, letting the rhythmic motion of the roller lull her. There was nothing wrong with working in companionable silence.

“So that’s all you’re going to give me?” Wyatt asked after a few minutes. “You’re a locked box, huh?”

She stopped rolling and shook her head. “Uh, no. I’m not a locked box. I’m pretty open about things.” She thought about her suspicions that he could be the artist she’d once traded pictures with. She hadn’t been open about that to either Nate or Wyatt. But that wasn’t the kind of thing one rushed into asking. “Where’d you grow up? What do you do for a living? And, by the way, did you used to draw pictures in a guest book in the beach house I’m staying in?” It just didn’t fit in to the normal flow of getting-to-know-each-other conversation.

“But you aren’t open about him,” Wyatt observed.

“It’s just that things with Chase are … sort of strange.”

“How so?” Wyatt asked. Macy could tell he was trying to sound casual, but there was an edge to his voice.

“Well, if you’d asked me about him a few months ago, I would’ve told you he wasn’t in the picture at all and hadn’t been since Emma was a tiny baby.” She dipped the roller into the paint and let the excess drip off slowly, grateful they weren’t having this conversation face to face. Painting was a good distraction.

“But since I’m asking you now …”

She sighed. “Well, yes. Recently things have changed. He’s shown up again, much to my surprise.”

“And he’s … where now?”

“At home.”

Wyatt pushed further, a teasing edge to his tone. “Whose home?”

She pictured Chase, sitting on her loveseat the morning she’d left. She still thought about it as her home, and yet he was there now, and she wasn’t. She had assured both her mother and Max that he was doing her a favor by staying there. House-sitting, she’d called it.

“My home,” she answered. “He’s been sort of … staying there. But on the couch,” she hurried to add. She looked over at Wyatt, who had stopped painting and was looking at her.

“So why are you here with me if he’s there?”

She laid the roller back in the paint tray and met his eyes. “I don’t know. Everything’s happened so fast and … you just don’t understand. My life was great a few months ago. Well, not great, but … predictable. I had Emma and my mom and Max, and I could manage it all. Then Chase came back, and we came here, and I prayed a crazy prayer, and everything’s gone haywire.”

Wyatt chuckled, his smile a welcome relief. “My grandmother always did say to be careful what you pray for.”

“Well, I wish your grandmother could’ve given me that piece of advice before last Friday night.”

“Mind if I ask what you prayed for?”

She shook her head. “Uhhh … I’m not really ready to talk about it. Not yet.”

“Is that why you’re spending time with Pastor Nate?”

She blanched. “Are you spying on me?”

Though they had both been doing a good job at keeping their tone light, she did wonder how he knew so much about her.

“Buzz is my dad, remember? Whatever I miss, he usually feels obliged to fill me in on.”

“Nate’s a nice guy. And …” She couldn’t think of what to say next.
I’m attracted to him? He looks at me in a way that makes me think he knows me better than I think he does … kind of the same way you do? And I suspect that one of you may be the mystery artist I’ve been looking for the majority of my life?

“I’m just trying to understand you, Macy. You’ve got a guy at home and—best I can tell—two guys here.”

Macy could feel her blood pumping as she decided what to say in response.
Two guys?
she thought, pressing her lips together to refrain from smiling. “I’m just here to have fun, to relax. That’s all. It’s the beach. A vacation. I’m not looking for a lifelong commitment here.” As she said it, she wondered if her statement was even true. On one level, yes. But if one of
them turned out to be the artist, she would want to see where it went beyond this vacation.

“That’s fair,” Wyatt said, squinting up at the corner he was painting with his small brush. “But getting back to Emma’s father — “

“His name is Chase.”

Wyatt dropped the paintbrush into the bucket and walked over to the refrigerator, talking as he walked. “Ah, yes. Chase. What does
he
think is going on here at Sunset Beach?”

“He doesn’t think anything. I mean, it’s none of his business.” Macy raised her voice so he could hear her over the sound of the ice dispenser dropping ice cubes into cups.

“But he’s in your house, obviously hoping you come back to … him?” Wyatt walked back holding two glasses of water. He handed one to her. She took a sip, thinking of the calls from Chase she’d ignored since they’d been there. At some point she’d have to answer and find out what he wanted to tell her.

“Look, Chase left me. He was gone for five years. Then he just showed back up and I—” She tried to think of the right words to explain what happened when Chase showed up. “I—” She tried again. And then the words suddenly came to her. “I didn’t know how to tell him I wasn’t interested in him anymore. I felt like I had to give him a chance. For Emma. She deserves to have her father in her life.”

“So he’s there because you’re too afraid to tell him it’s over?”

“I just wanted to be sure it
is
over.”

“I think you need to make a clean break. Strike out on
your own. You don’t need Chase to be your safety net.” He sounded just like Avis.

Macy clenched her jaw, pushing aside the urge to drop the roller and stomp out of the house. That would only affirm what she feared —that she didn’t face the hard things in life. “Chase is not my, quote, ‘safety net,’ unquote. He’s someone I have a history with.”

“And you’re seriously thinking there might be a future with him?”

“I did.”

He put his water glass down, his eyes boring into hers. “Did?”

“Yes.”

“What changed?”

She looked down at her feet. A drop of paint had dried on her left foot, and she rubbed at the spot with the big toe of her right foot. “This trip.”

“Can I give you a piece of advice?” Wyatt asked, his voice softening. He didn’t wait for her to answer. “Cut Chase loose. Tell him it’s over.” He ran a hand through his hair and exhaled. “Take a risk.”

She smiled. “You don’t know who you’re talking to. You hardly know me. If you did, you’d know I’m not a big risk taker.”

He winked. “I know you better than you think I do.”

Later that night, Macy would lie in bed and stare at the guest book as it lay illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the window. She would wonder why she hadn’t just
come out and asked Wyatt how he knew her so well. And whether a certain guest book had anything to do with it. But in this moment, she couldn’t make herself ask. Later she would wonder if it was because she simply didn’t want to know yet, because the truth was, she was having fun being pursued by both Nate and Wyatt. And not knowing was fun.

“Say” by John Mayer came on. Wyatt laid his brush across the paint can and strode over to the old boom box that had probably been around back when they used to come to Sunset Beach ten years ago. He cranked up the volume and began to sing along.

Macy listened to the words of the song and tried not to stare. During the ukulele solo, Wyatt picked up a paintbrush and pretended to play it. Macy laughed. And when the song ended, he dipped his brush back into the paint and resumed his work as if the musical interlude hadn’t just happened.

She went over and turned the music back down a bit, feeling as though he’d just let her see a side of him that few ever saw. She stole a glance at him out of the corner of her eye. Her mother’s voice chided her for thinking like this about Wyatt so soon after her date with Nate. So she moved over to paint the wall with their names. She could feel him watching as the paint covered his handiwork. But neither of them said a word.