5
“Birth control?”Audrey repeated what her sister Ava had just said as she wrote the specials of the day on the board. It was barely six in the morning and even though Audrey had been up for an hour and a half, she still wasn’t firing on all cylinders.
She’d had a dream about Josh last night. A very sexy dream that she wished she’d never woken up from. But her damn alarm had interrupted things just when they were getting good.
“Yeah.” Ava nodded. “Jenna’s going to talk to her today.”
Jenna was Blake’s mom. She and Ava’s fiancé Asher had been divorced for quite a few years, and she’d even remarried. But unfortunately, her second marriage hadn’t worked out either. So, she was newly single. And was apparently going to be speaking to their teenage daughter about going on birth control.
Ava continued, “Blake says that nothing is happening with her and Noah, but they’ve been together for a while now. And they’re teenagers.”
Noah Barnes was such a good kid. Well, a good teenager. He was a good student, a star athlete, and worked two part-time jobs. When Asher and Blake had moved here last summer Blake hadn’t been happy about the move. Thankfully, she made friends and met Noah and that had eased the transition. The two teens had been pretty much inseparable for over six months.
A funny side note to that story was that Asher and Blake had coincidentally moved to Hope Falls the exact same day Ava got left at the alter and decided to stay in Hope Falls.
It wasn’t a coincidence, it was fate,Audrey heard her mother’s voice in her head.
Maybe it was fate. If that was the case, Audrey wanted to put in a formal request for fate to start working on her behalf with Josh.
“Mom put me on birth control when I was Blake’s age, since Ian and I had already been together for two years.” Ava said as she hopped down from the counter where she’d been sitting while Audrey got things ready to open.
“Yeah, me too.” Their mom had put her on birth control after she’d gotten a steady boyfriend in high school and she’d been right around Blake’s age. “I just can’t believe that Asher is okay with all of this.” Audrey said as she hung up the board displaying the specials.
“He’s not. Not really. What father wants to think about their fourteen-year-old daughter going on birth control. But Jenna made some good points. One of which was that he had been sexually active at that age. Which she knows because they were together then. She also reemphasized that it’s just a talk. That’s all. Jenna’s not putting her on anything. She just wants Blake to know that if that’s something she wants, then Jenna will support her. Not like Mom who didn’t really give us a choice because she wanted us—"
“Us to have choices in our future,” Audrey finished their mom’s mantra in chorus with her sister.
That was what their mom would always say was the reason any of them should be on the pill, so they could have choices in their future. Looking back and thinking about how young their mom was when she was left to be a single parent to four girls under the age of five, it made sense.
“Thanks for this.” Ava held up her iced caramel latte with two shots of espresso. “I have back-to-back clients all day and I’m going to need it.”
Ava gave Audrey a hug and headed out of the coffee shop. As Audrey looked around, she couldn’t help but be proud of what she saw.
When she’d envisioned opening up a coffee shop in her mom’s honor, this was exactly what she saw. Her mother loved Old Hollywood, which was why all of the girls were named after starlets from that era. Grace’s namesake was Grace Kelly. Ava’s was Ava Gardner. Vivien’s was Vivien Leigh. And Audrey had been named after Audrey Hepburn. All of their middle names were Christmas themed, which was another one of Cora Wells’ obsessions.
Black and white portraits of each one of the girls’ namesakes hung on the walls, along with James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, and Cary Grant, who were some of her mom’s other favorites. The décor had a vintage Hollywood theme, there was a large black chandelier hanging in the center of the room, there were a half dozen bistro tables arranged throughout the room, a farm table on one side, and two oversized couches with coffee tables in front of them lined the opposite wall.
As she wiped down the counter and got ready for the morning rush, the conversation she’d just had with her sister replayed in her head. She had two takeaways from it. One, she was so proud of Asher, Jenna, and Ava for the way that the three of them were co-parenting. They truly put Blake first. And second, teenagers in this town were getting more action than she was.
Audrey was a virgin, which had never bothered her before she turned thirty. She honestly hadn’t really thought about it that much before then.
She didn’t need to have Ava’s degree in psychology to know that her father “peacing out” when she was two had to have affected how she felt about men. It wasn’t just the trauma of her father abandoning them, either. It was that their mother never moved on. She never got over him. Until her dying breath, she maintained that Mason Wells was the love of her life. That sort of blind devotion in the face of total abandonment had definitely shaped the way that Audrey viewed relationships.
Then there was watching her sisters in their romantic entanglements which she’d had a front row seat to as she grew up. They were all different and equally dysfunctional, from what Audrey had observed.
Grace dated people, but nothing was ever serious. She kept men, well, men before Easton, at arm’s length. No one she dated actually knew who Grace was beneath the mask of cold indifference she put on. Sometimes they didn’t even know her name. Audrey had lived with Grace all through college and she remembered one time some dude had come to pick her sister up and had asked if Tracy was home when she answered the door. If it was a first date, Audrey would have understood, but it was their third date and he didn’t even know her name. Grace hadn’t cared at all. She went and enjoyed a very expensive dinner at Spago in Beverly Hills. She then proceeded to date the guy for the next three months.
Audrey couldn’t ever imagine being intimate with someone who didn’t know her at all.
And then there was Ava who started dating Ian when they were both twelve. Ian ended up dumping her on her wedding day, which was honestly the best thing he could have ever done for her sister. Audrey grew up watching the two of them. They went from preteens, to teens, to adults and their relationship never changed. It was almost like they were too close to each other to even see who the other person was. They’d been together so long that they took for granted that they actually knew each other, but the truth was they didn’t.
Audrey knew that wasn’t the case with the man Ava was set to walk down the aisle with on Valentine’s Day. Asher saw her sister. They saw each other.
And then there was Viv. Viv loved men but was terrified of commitment. Part of the reason Hope Falls had been such an easy sell when Audrey had asked her sister to move here was the tourist nature of the town. It always cycled through what she referred to as “fresh meat.” Guys that were in town for a week or two was what she considered a perfect amount of time to spend with someone. Long enough to have fun, not long enough to get bored.
Audrey was the opposite. She was sort of scared of men but loved the idea of commitment. When she was a preteen, she’d seriously considered becoming a nun. She loved helping people and had no desire to ever get married or even have a boyfriend. But that hadn’t panned out, mainly because she wasn’t Catholic.
She’d had the same boyfriend all through high school, but besides some heavy petting nothing happened. They broke up when Chris went back East to college. Not long after he left, she saw on his social media that he was Facebook official with someone else and, plot twist, it was a guy. It hadn’t surprised her to find out that he was gay. It actually made a lot of sense considering how little had happened between them physically since they’d been together for four years.