I debated over asking Alex to come to Emilia's beach house for more than a week. On one hand, I didn't know if I wanted to be in a situation with him where we were away from work and would probably have time alone together. Our relationship, both personal and professional, survived our first hookup, but part of me wondered if it would survive another. Especially when that other would potentially be more serious.

On the other hand, I really wanted him to come.

And the other hand eventually won out. Thursday before we were supposed to go, I called Alex over to the bar before we opened for dinner. I think part of me had been waiting for Ryan to not be there. He had already been teasing me over my interactions with Alex; we had known each other for too long for him not to notice. So I certainly didn't need to add fuel to the fire.

"Hey, what's up?" Alex asked as he came up to me.

"I actually had a question for you," I said, suddenly getting nervous. What if he said no? What if he said yes? Which would be worse? "Emilia's parents own a beach house a couple of hours from here, and they're away on vacation for a moment. Emilia invited us up for a couple of days, if you'd be interested."

"Emilia invited both of us?" he questioned.

I shrugged. "She knows we're friends, and trust me, they have plenty of space. And well, I figured you might need to get out of this town for a bit. It gets small after a while. We would drive up on Monday morning and then back on Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, whatever works best." I realized I was rambling so I shut my mouth.

I couldn't tell what he was thinking, but at the very least he didn't look like he hated the idea. Part of me wondered if he was thinking about the same thing I had debated: would anything happen between us if we went away together.

"Yeah, sounds like fun."

I couldn't help but smile as he said yes. "Great!" Realizing I probably sounded a little too excited, I scaled it back. "I can drive, if you want," I offered. "No point in taking separate cars since we have to go and come back at the same time."

"That sounds good," Alex said. "Just let me know when to be ready by."

"Perfect."

I had to admit, knowing Alex was coming with me up to the beach house made me a lot more excited for the trip. And it definitely helped me get through the crazy weekend, so by the time Monday rolled around, I didn't even feel tired. Just excited.

I had told Alex I would pick him up at three so we could get there early evening. Emilia had promised that dinner would be waiting for us. She had left on Friday, although I wasn't sure what she would be doing there alone for a whole weekend. Maybe she just wanted the peace.

And when I said I would pick Alex up around three, I meant I would pick him up at exactly three. The clock in my car ticked from 2:59 to 3:00 exactly as I pulled up in front of his house. I leaned forward to look out the window at it as I waited for him to come out. I still couldn't believe that he had a place like this.

Two minutes later, Alex threw his bag in the backseat and then sat down next to me in the passenger's seat.

"You're late," I chastised him.

"But I have an excuse." He handed me a cup of iced coffee.

I took a sip. It was good coffee. "You are forgiven."

He snorted. "Well, that's good," he said. "I don't think it would have been a good way to start the trip, you already mad at me."

I just rolled my eyes and pulled away from the curb. "I feel like that statement implies that me getting mad at you is inevitable."

He shrugged but gave me a playful grin. "I'll try and avoid it."

I loved driving along the coast. With the windows rolled down at warm, salty air flowing through the car, I gradually became more and more relaxed. And since it was Monday mid-day, no one else was really heading in our direction, making it actually fun to drive the long stretch of road.

"You and Emilia have known each other for a long time, haven't you?" Alex asked me.

I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. His hair was messy and blowing in the wind, but he hadn't complained about the open windows. Good. I hated when people tried to tell me what to do when I was driving.

"Yeah, since we were little," I told him. "Everyone goes to the same elementary, middle, and high schools around here, so once you meet someone in kindergarten, you know them until you turn into an adult."

"That's cool, though, that you met all the way back then and are still friends now. That's a long time."

"What about you?" I took the moment to try and get him to talk about his life. "Do you still talk to any of your friends from high school?"

And once again, personal life talk was apparently not the way to go. I could immediately see tension filling his body. "No," he replied. "No, not really."

My hands fidgeted on the steering wheel for a moment as I tried to come up with something to break the tension. "Well, we used to drive our parents crazy." I figured it was best to keep the conversation on me, although I was starting to get a little frustrated that he wasn't giving me anything when it came to his past.

"Oh?" And just like that, the tension lifted. He seemed to be trying to hide a laugh.

"Well, of course, our favorite place to hang out was Coral Brews," I told him. "Which, given that it's a bar, wasn't exactly the most child-friendly place. My dad loved it, but my mom was convinced that us being there was going to get them shut down. Or arrested. Potentially both."

"But let me guess?" Alex asked. "There wasn't really anything she could do to stop you?"

"I mean, when you're a kid, those bar stools are like a jungle gym," I said. "So, eventually my mom got the mindset of, 'if you can't beat them, join them.' So whenever we were there she just watched us like a hawk. Emilia's parents weren't super thrilled, either, but they became resigned to it eventually."

"Did she help your dad run the bar?"

"Who?"

"Your mom."

I felt a familiar pang of sadness hit my stomach when my thoughts moved from my early friendship with Emilia to my mom. "Yeah," I said. "She did."

"Sorry." Alex could read the sorrow on my face. "I didn't mean to bring up a bad subject."

I shook my head. "She's my mom. How could she be a bad subject?" I fell silent for a moment. "She was the one who took care of front-of-house stuff. The staff all loved her, the town loved her, tourists loved her. Everyone loved her."

"Most of the staff now," Alex said. "They knew her?"

"Most of them knew her for a short while," I said. "We have a relatively fast turnover with our servers, most don't stay for more than a couple of years. But some of the older members, like Connor and Ryan, they knew her really well."

"She sounds like she was amazing."

"She was." I tapped the steering wheel with my thumb. "You know, it's hard," I said. "I mean, losing her, obviously. But my dad and I don't talk about her that much, he's still grieving. He doesn't make it obvious, but I know he is. And then the staff don't really know how to talk to me about it, since they don't want to make me uncomfortable. So I really only can talk to Emilia about her. But sometimes it feels like if I don't talk more about her, she'll just disappear."

I glanced over briefly at Alex to find he had a bit of a distant look in his eye. "Yeah, I know what you mean, actually."

Despite my slight annoyance that Alex pretty much continually refused to tell me anything about his life before Delphine, I couldn't hold it against him. I couldn't be completely certain, but I figured he had lost someone. And probably recently. And I knew from experience that everyone had their own timetables of when they would be comfortable talking about it.

"I'll show you a picture of her sometime," I promised him. "Apparently I look exactly like her."

"Let me guess, everyone says that?"

"Literally. Everyone."

We spent the rest of the drive conversing over less serious topics. And while I still didn't learn anything concrete about his life, I did discover that his love for animals came from a mix of frequent trips to the zoo as a child and a teenage rebellious streak of trying to talk his parents into getting more and more ridiculous pets.

"It never worked," he said, laughing, as we turned down the final road leading up to Emilia's house. "But my mom is a bit of a clean freak, so even the idea of having something like a snake or rats or an iguana in the house was enough to make her go nuts."

"I feel like none of those animals are really that dirty," I pointed out.

"No, not really," he agreed. "But that didn't stop my mom from freaking out."

I snorted as I pulled into the driveway and stopped the car. "So did you ever have a pet?" I asked as we got out.

"Nope."

"That sucks."

"Did you?"

"Nope."

"That sucks."

I grinned and threw my bag over my shoulder. "Well, this is it," I said, standing in front of the giant house. Emilia's parents had been in real estate.

"You weren't kidding," Alex said, staring up at it. "This is nice."

I was a little disappointed that he didn't look more impressed than he was. But then again, if he did come from a family with money, maybe he saw houses like this all of the time. "Come on." I started up the front path. "I'll give you a tour."