Page 2 of No Judgements

NO SHOES, NO SHIRT, NO PROBLEM.

USE YOUR CELL PHONE? GET OUT.

One person who isn’t so good at following the rules? Me. The last one, anyway.

“Beckham!” Ed bellowed at me from behind the counter. I whipped around and saw him glaring at me. He jerked a thumb at my cell phone, then the glass side door. “Take it outside if it’s that important.” His irritated gaze fell on Drew, who happened to be his nephew, but whom he still treated like any other customer. “You, too.”

Drew held up a calloused palm, nodding as he slid off his orange vinyl counter stool and headed toward the door, his phone still clutched to his chin. “Look,” he said to whoever was on the other end of his call. “I get it. But you’re going to have the window boarded up anyway. So it’s not going to make any—”

The rest of his conversation was lost as he stepped outside.

Sorry, I mouthed to Ed. Then, to Caleb, I said quickly, “Listen, I’m at work. I never should have picked up in the first place. I only did because... because...”

WhyhadI picked up, especially since Caleb and I hadn’t spoken in months? Maybe because it was eight o’clock in the morning, and he never called this early. I’d assumed it was an emergency, only not an emergency concerning him.

“Look,” I said. “If that’s all you wanted, I’ll talk to you later, okay?” As in, never.

“No, Sabrina. I’ve got to talk to you now. The thing is, your mother—”

I knew it. My pulse quickened. “What about her? Is there something wrong?”

“She’s fine. But she’s the one who’s been bugging me to phone, since you won’t pick up when she calls.”

My heartbeat slowed. Of course. I should have known. Caleb would never have called, let alone volunteered to fly fifteen hundred miles to get me of his own accord... not after the way we’d ended things. Or not we, exactly, considering the fact that I was the one who’d packed up my things, handed my keys to his doorman, and left, making me, technically, the one who had ghosted.

But not really. What else could I have done? What kind of relationship had the two of us even had? Not one I’d wanted anything to do with anymore.

Now I was heading for the door again—the Mermaid’s side door. A rush of humid, saltwater-scented air greeted me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk, ignoring the glare from Ed as well as the curious looks my fellow servers, Angela and Nevaeh, threw me. Neither of them could imagine what was so important that I’d dare take a call during the morning rush. I hardly ever got calls anyway, so this was a first.

A first that was probably going to get me fired.

“Caleb, look—”

“She’s really worried about you, Sabrina. We all are.”

It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing.

“You know your mom pals around with all those meteorologists from the station,” Caleb went on. “She says they tell her this one is a real monster. If there were such a thing as a Category Six, this would be it. She says—”

“Tell my mom I’m fine,” I interrupted, aware that Drew Hartwell was standing only a few feet away from me, his own cell clutched to his ear, having a not dissimilar conversation. I could hear him telling whoever was on the other end of the phone, “Well, for one thing, because I have other things to do right now than restore a century-old window you waited until the last minute to notice needed repairing. And for another, because I’m going to have to special-order the replacement glass, and there’s no way it’s going to get here before the rain does.”

Except that Drew Hartwell didn’t look particularly worried. He never did. Even now his free hand—the one not holding his phone—had crept beneath his well-worn, sun-faded Little Bridge Island Bocce League T-shirt to scratch lazily at his flat stomach, unconsciously revealing a trail of dark, downy hair that disappeared into the waistband of his cargo shorts... the sight of which caused my stomach to give a pleasant lurch, as if I’d just taken a spin on a Tilt-A-Whirl.

What was wrong with me?

Realizing I was staring, I glanced hastily away, remembering the whispered warning my coworker Angela Fairweather had given me on my first day of work: “Stay away from that one. There was a time when that old pickup ofhis was parked in front of a different house every week. For a while, it was a different house anight.”

Because apparently Drew Hartwell—with his lean six-foot frame, tousled dark hair, permanent deep-sea tan, and summer-sky blue eyes—was as much of a player as Caleb and his friends, just of a different variety: Drew was the homegrown style.

Having been born on Little Bridge Island, Drew had never lived anywhere else, with the exception of a few years on the mainland.

Whereas Caleb and his best friend, Kyle—who’d turned my entire life upside down in a single moment—had been born in New York City and had traveled all over the world, thanks to their trust funds and wealthy parents.

And yet Caleb still didn’t know a thing about women. Or at least the one he was currently speaking to.

“I can tell your mom that you’re fine all you want, Sabrina,” Caleb was saying into my ear. “But she isn’t going to stop calling. She said to tell you that she thinks it’s time you stopped being so stubborn and gave up on this little solo adventure to find yourself, or whatever it is, and come home. And that it shouldn’t take a Category Five hurricane for you to realize it.”

I smiled wryly. It sounded exactly like something my mom would say. “Well, do me a favor and let her know that I haven’t quite finished finding myself, but when I do, she’ll be the first to know. In the meantime, I’m perfectlycapable of taking care of myself. I don’t need help from her, or anybody else—especially you.”