Page 108 of 'Til All the Seas Run Dry

“Everyone’s fine.” Esther flapped her hands in front of her face. “I’m just… it’s just… I… I’m going to miss you,” she said before releasing a sob.

“Oh, darling,” Jory said, rushing around the counter and wrapping her arms around Esther. “Darling, darling Esther. It’s just a few weeks. And then I’ll be back.”

“But what if you don’t come back?” Esther cried. “What if you get your skin back and never want to come back? You’ve waited for so long.”

“Esther,” she whispered. “I’ll be back. I promise.”

“You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“I can keep this one.”

Jory let Esther cry into her shoulder. She felt tears pricking the corners of her own eyes and swallowed against the lump in her throat. She had told Esther about the sealskin weeks ago. She had told her that she didn’t know when she’d be back. For the longest time, she’d thought of nothing but going home. The pull of returning to the sea and her family had been so strong that she felt it on a cellular level. But that pull had quieted of late or, at least, had been lessened by a nearly equal pull in another direction, by another person. She was beginning to contemplate a life where she didn’t have to choose. Where maybe,maybe, she could have both. She could have everything.

“Esther,” she said, holding her friend’s shoulders in her hands and easing her away. “I don’t have to be all of one thing. I can be a bit of a lot of things. I can have my skin and be that part of myself. And I can be here, in this store I love, with the people I love, and be this part of myself, too. It might be a while, but I’ll come back.”

Esther sniffled and Jory reached back to pluck a tissue from the box on the counter. Esther took it and wiped her nose. “I’m sorry. I promised Hank I wouldn’t cry on your last day.”

Jory smiled. “And what did he say to that?”

Esther huffed a breath. “He told me that it’s okay to be sad and that I could cry any damn time I wanted to. He also told me it’s not your last day.”

“It’s not,” Robbie said from the back doorway, and Jory smiled at him over Esther’s shoulder.

She hadn’t heard him come in. He was wearing his customary all-black and held a cardboard drink carrier with three hot to-go cups in it. But not like the Styrofoam cups from the diner. These were white cups with black lids and thin cardboard sleeves like the ones from the coffee shops in bigger towns.

“Robbie,” Jory said, squeezing Esther tighter as she burst into a fresh wave of tears, “where did you get those?”

“These? The diner.”

Esther turned her head to look and then wailed, “But the diner doesn’t have fancy coffee.”

“Right you are, sugar-butt.” He slid the carrier onto the counter. “Or, I should say, right youwere. Alright. We’ve got a London Fog for Esther, a quad latte for Jory, and an Americano with two raw sugars and two pumps of pumpkin for yours truly, the most basic of bitches,” Robbie said, pulling cups out and scanning the sides for names before putting them on the counter in order.

“Robbie,” Jory said. “When did the diner start making fancy coffee?”

“Oh. That,” Robbie said, blowing directly into the sip hole in the lid of his drink, forcing a whistling sound out of the vent. “Since Boss had a new espresso machine delivered to them yesterday and told me to teach them how to use it this morning. Carol made these. She’s a natural.”

“Callum bought them an espresso machine?”

“Oh yeah. La Marzocco. It’s a beauty. Top of the line. He told them that he wanted to have certain coffee available for you when you were in town and said he was happy to buy the machine if they’d be willing to learn how to use it. Carol might never come back down to earth after all that caffeine. And Diego made better latte art on his first try than I did after a month.”

He began straightening pens in the pen cup before using the sleeve of his sweatshirt to dust the top of the counter before looking up suddenly.

“Wait. Why is Esther crying?”

“Because she’s allowed herself to believe that I’ll be leaving and never coming back.”

“Aw, Est, you goose. Of course she’ll be back.”

“That’s what I told her. My friends are here.”

“That, and the huge piece of property Boss bought just outside of town for the bottling facility.”

Jory’s jaw dropped.

Robbie kept absently straightening items. “He says that there is a higher-than-average population of people like him in the area, and he wants to be able to provide safe work for them with flexible schedules.”

“You mean vampires?” Esther sniffled.