Mako (The Mako Saga: Book 1) (27 page)

In the months following his graduation, Lee, Mac and Danny took full advantage of their newfound inseparability while Lee looked for work in the world of academia. Outwardly of course, Mac was completely supportive of his choice to apply for jobs around the country, though inwardly she hated the thought of him landing as far away as Portland, Oregon or Salt Lake City, Utah. So when Lee finally got the call from Layne State College in Jacksonville—even though it was far from his first choice—Mac couldn’t have been happier that he’d only be a quick jaunt down I-10 from Tallahassee. Then came her parents’ decision to open a second Pourhouse location in Athens… so much for that.

****

“I’ve been worse,” Lee responded to Mac’s question, sitting upright in the sand and folding his legs together. “Don’t get me wrong, two years ago I hoped I’d be a little better than I am now. But I’ve most definitely been worse.”

“Yeah,” she nodded, “I see that.”

Watching the ends of her long brown hair dance in the breeze through the corner of his eye, Lee found himself feeling a bit more candid than usual.

“Listen, Mac, I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this in so many words, but I don’t think I would be sitting here right now if it weren’t for you and Danny.”

She smiled and shrugged off the compliment.

“Seriously, I know what you’re thinkin,’” he went on. “That whole speech about ‘that’s what friends do’ and all that, but it’s true. Three years ago, everything in my life was spiralin’ outta control. My marriage was shot, my career was circlin’ the drain, and I’m pretty sure everybody around me—my folks included—thought I was losin’ it. But no matter how bad things got, or how much I just wanted to crawl into a hole and be left alone, you guys refused to let that happen. Anyway, I’m grateful… real grateful, is all.”

Mac looked away and back out toward the rolling surf. “That’s not exactly what I was thinking.”

Lee raised a brow. “Oh,” he said, slightly befuddled. “Well, enlighten me. What were you thinkin’ then?”

“I wasn’t thinking that ‘that’s what friends do.’ I was thinking ‘that’s what family does,” she corrected. “Think about it Lee, we’ve all been friends for years now; and in that time, we’ve all seen each other through a lot of good times and some pretty bad ones, too. When I went out to L.A., I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life, just as you did with Karen. I had the business degree, the industry knowledge, the drive… the savings account!” She laughed out loud. “I’d done everything that I physically knew how to do in order to make my career what I thought I wanted it to be, and yet six long years later I was still working in craphole dive bars and picking up shifts waiting tables just to make rent. Bottom line, no matter how hard we work or how much we want it, sometimes things just aren’t meant to play out the way we want them to… and when that happens, family rally around each other, and that’s exactly what we did. Lord knows you did it for me once upon a time, ya know?”

“Yeah, well,” he said, recalling those nights on the phone.

“Man, talk about feeling like a failure,” Mac admitted. “After everything I’d worked for and sacrificed, to be faced with the sobering reality that I was heading home and right back to the bar?” She cringed. “Talk about a tough pill to swallow. But on the upside, at least I got to come home to my boys, and once I heard what was happening with you and Karen, I was glad to be home. At that point, I’d taken my spin on the ‘Wheel of Hard Times,’ and I knew damn well what it meant to me to have someone in my corner to see me through it. Because like I said...” She paused and fired him a look. “That’s just what family does.”

Lee gave her a warm smile. “What can I say, Mac? You’re one in a million.”

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” she chirped with a coy grin and a single, accusatory finger. “There’s nobody else like me, baby!”

“I’ll drink to that,” Lee snickered, clinking the neck of his bottle to hers.

The duo reminisced for a while, sipping their beers and doodling in the sand with their fingers as they talked the night away. Eventually, however, the conversation returned to the present.

“So tell me about Jax,” Mac asked, drawing back to lob a seashell into the incoming tide.

“Eh, it’s okay,” he mused. “Livin’ near the beach is nice, plus the concert scene is definitely a fair shake better than what we had in Tally. For sports, we’ve got the Jags—”

“Who suck,” she reiterated.

“True, but our Bucs usually come to town for a preseason game, at least. I did do two or three Suns games last season, and that was a good time. Then again, minor league baseball usually is.”

“Yeah it is,” Mac agreed. “I really miss those trips with my family down to Tampa to see the Yanks in spring training. Now that all of my brothers are married with kids, those are a lot harder to plan these days, ya know?”

Lee nodded. “Beyond all of that,” he smirked. “Well, there ain’t much else. The job is the job. Like the Jags, it pretty much sucks, but it serves its purpose.”

“Awww,” she teased. “Somebody getting tired of being chased around town by college girls in bikinis, is he? Such a tough life.”

“
Knock it off
!” Lee griped. “I take enough of that crap from Danny. I don’t need it from you too.”

Disregarding his protest with a wave, Mac turned her attention to the dorsal fin slicing through the current some 40 yards out. Thinking it to be a dolphin, she followed it down the shoreline with her eyes while considering her next question.

“So how’s the dating scene over there on the coast?” she asked, mindful to cloak her inquiry in the appropriate amount of apathy. “Jokes aside, between the jeep, the Ph.D., and the whole surfing thing, I’d venture a guess you’ve had a few bites in the last year or so.”

Lee shrugged. “Ya gotta have money to date,” he grumbled.

“Excuses, excuses!”

“Okay, you and Danny seriously need to start spendin’ a little less time together,” Lee muttered. “Anyway, dating is dating. I mean, it’s
meet stranger. Go out with stranger. Find out what you don’t like about stranger, or what stranger doesn’t like about you. Become awkward with stranger. Break up with stranger. The end.
It’s… whatever.”

“Woooowwwww!” Mac cooed. “And I thought Danny was cynical.”

“Okay, okay. So maybe I’m a little jaded, but gimme a break! Can you blame me?”

She laughed.

“I dunno,” Lee added. “I’ve been out on a few dates, but nothin’ that ever really took, and truthfully, that ain’t on them… it’s on me. I guess in a lot of ways, I’m still gettin’ re-acclimated to this whole bachelor thing, and until all of that’s outta my system, I’m not really lookin’ to get back on the relationship market.”

“Oh god,” she blurted. “Please don’t tell me you’ve applied to the Daniel Tucker School of Womanizing, have you?”

“No! Of course not,” Lee defended. “What I meant is, I kinda like being able to just come home, throw my keys on the table, and do whatever I want with my time, whenever I want. Actually been kickin’ around the notion of gettin’ a dog.”

“Boston Terrier?” she asked, drawing a nod from Lee. Not surprisingly, she even remembered his favorite breed.

“So how about you?” he shifted. “Found yourself a good ol’ Georgia boy up there in Athens?”

“
No!
” she said vehemently.

“Wow, subtle. Story there, I take it?”

She rolled her eyes and glugged her beer. “Yeah, but it’s stupid.”

“Okay, well you can’t drop that little bombshell and not tell me the story. So dish.”

Mac hesitated, silently weighing whether or not to oblige his persistence. “There was a guy… for a little while, but he didn’t last.”

“Let me guess… he was a Gator fan?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “It was a little worse than that… he was kinda married.”

Lee’s head snapped around to face her.

“Relax, I didn’t know!” Mac rushed to clarify. “I met him at work, and we’d only been dating a couple of months when I found out.”

“Oh, that’s nice” Lee sneered. “What made the douchebag finally fess up?”

“Oh, I didn’t find out through him,” she explained. “He came in for Happy Hour on his way home from work one day and left his cell phone on the bar. Anyway, it rang shortly after he left, and I answered it… yeah, it was his wife.”

“Wow, bet that was awkward.”

“Ya think?”

“Ouch. I’m really sorry to hear that, Mac. Really, I am.”

“Ah, don’t sweat it,” she said with a dismissive hand. “Believe me, there have been some boyfriends over the years that I hated to pull the ripcord on, but this guy? He wasn’t one of them. Honestly, I should’ve known he was a tool when he gave me flack for my autographed Nathan Fillion
Firefly
poster.”

“
Ooooohhhhh!!!
” Lee howled. “Strikes one, two,
and
three… you’re outta here!”

“Yeah, like I said… don’t sweat it. I only dated the guy for a few months before it happened, so it’s not like I wasted a bunch of time on him or anything. Still,” she hesitated, drawing an inquisitive look from Lee.

“Still… what?” he wondered aloud.

A sinister smile cracked the edges of Mac’s mouth. “Still… I can neither confirm nor deny that there
might’ve
been an anonymous call to his wife’s voicemail before it was all over.”

“
That’s my girl!
” Lee beamed.

The two chatted well into the early morning before finally electing to turn in for a few hours of sleep. It went without saying that tomorrow would be a busy day, though crossing the lobby floor en route back to the condo, Lee’s thoughts drifted back to the present, and how much he really had missed everyone—not just Mac, but all of them.

She’d been right. It shouldn’t take an all-expenses-paid trip from a multimillionaire to get them all together more often. That should always be a priority, no matter what life threw at them.

So with that in mind, Lee made a silent pact with himself as he stepped inside the elevator: Come hell or high water, and regardless of what the future had in store, he would never wait two years to see any of them again.

On a related note, it helped that he’d never again have to sweat the cost of airfare after this trip… even to a tiny, out-of-the-way destination like Athens, Georgia.

Chapter 15: Exodus

Waking the next morning to the smell of fresh-brewed coffee, Lee rolled out of bed and threw on a t-shirt and a pair of gym shorts before setting out in search of the morning’s first dose of caffeine. Traipsing barefoot across the cool tiles of the kitchen floor, he retrieved a mug from an overhead cabinet, filled it with the hot, black liquid, and allowed himself a moment to savor its steamy, eye-opening effects.

“Ah, gimme a break!” someone moaned through a pillow as the coffee pot coughed its final series of perks. “What idiot does construction this early on a Sunday?”

Rounding the snack bar into the living room, Lee spotted a single leg dangling over the arm of the sofa as Link—still half-dressed in his jeans and undershirt from the night before—lay sprawled across its cushions like a contorted pretzel.

“That ain’t construction, sport,” Lee replied. “That’s just your t33-year-old body tellin’ your brain that it can’t drink like it’s 22 anymore. Now get up, pop a couple of aspirins, and drink a glass of OJ. You’ll feel better.”

Slumping himself upright, Link yawned through a stretch and ran his fingers through the porcupine of cowlicks atop his head. Then, staggering to his feet with a final wobble, he steadied himself and began the long, head-splitting shuffle toward the bathroom medicine cabinet.

“Morning, guys,” Danny said spryly, strolling out of his room just in time to pass Link in the hall. “How’s that last Jäger Bomb working out for ya there, genius?”

Link said nothing, opting instead to give his friend the finger as he closed the bathroom door.

“Poor guy,” Danny remarked, joining Lee in the kitchen and grabbing a glass of juice from the fridge. “He can still pound it with the best of ‘em, but he just doesn’t recover like he used to.”

“And you do?” Lee sniped in Link’s defense.

“No way,” Danny chuckled. “But sometime around age 30, I figured out that a little water at 2:30 in the morning never killed anybody. Know what I mean?”

“Be careful,” Lee cautioned, topping off his mug. “I was there for a fair share of the hangovers that drove you to that little piece of wisdom, so don’t judge him too much. Thanks for makin’ coffee, by the way.”

Danny nodded and grabbed a stool at the snack bar. “So,” he chirped. “It looked like you and Mac were having a nice little moment out on the beach last night.”

Lee’s lips thinned, though not in surprise. He’d had an inkling that this was coming. “Yeah, I don’t know what that was all about,” Lee balked, stepping to the pantry in search of ideas for breakfast. “Two old friends catchin’ up over beers on the beach—ya know, I think that might be the first time in history that’s ever happened.”

“Oh look, sarcasm!” Danny retorted. “Because that’s not a defense mechanism or anything.”

Lee shot him a glare.

“Hey, don’t catch a ‘tude with me, bro,” Danny pressed. “I totally busted you checking her out last night when she came out for dinner, and why not? She looked hot!”

“C’mon, Danny,” Lee groaned, placing a box of pancake mix on the counter beside the milk, eggs and bacon he’d found in the fridge. “How many times do we have to go over this, anyway? Mac’s like a little sister—to all of us, not just me. Rollin’ the dice on something more?” He shrugged, cracking four eggs into a bowl and tossing the shells into the trash. “I don’t know… it’d just be weird.”

“That’s such a cop-out,” Danny grunted. “It was one thing to play the ‘group chemistry card’ back in college when we were all hanging out 24/7, but that’s not the case anymore. We’re all adults, with our own lives and our own careers, and we all live in different places now. Add to that the fact that for the first time in the decade-plus that you’ve known each other you’re both single, and you’re an idiot not to at least consider it.”

“Well alright then, Casanova,” Lee shot back. “If you’re so high on her, then why don’t
you
take her out?”