Vienna (an Iwan & Lemon Short Story)

Today is my birthday, so I want to give everyone a present!

Iwan and Clementine have a special place in my heart, and so when I had the opportunity to include them into Sounds Like Love, I jumped at the chance — but that also gave me the opportunity to write a little prequel connecting The Seven Year Slip to Sounds Like Love!

If you haven’t read The Seven Year Slip, that’s perfectly OK! Bookmark this and come back to it when you have a hankering for a little Iwan/Lemon love.

For everyone else, I hope you enjoy it!

This short story is from Iwan’s POV, so please enjoy this little peek into his chaotic, lovely mind.

Happy Reading!!

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Vienna

It was a shitty car.

I pressed the unlock button again just to make sure that yes, Budget Rentals did, in fact, give me a 2006 Chevy Aveo hatchback. I wasn’t sure if it looked more like a shoe or a death trap, but either way, the lights flashed on it when I pressed the button. Great. It was ours. My mother told me I should’ve reserved a car back when I booked the plane tickets, but I figured there would be more options than, well, this.

Lemon hummed politely as she rolled her suitcase up beside me. Her brown hair was pulled back into a tiny ponytail, large sunglasses pushing her bangs out of her face, as she surveyed our chariot in question. “It’s a nice red color at least. How long’s the drive?”

“Four hours.”

She barked a laugh. “Good thing you haven’t had those leg lengthening surgeries yet. It’s fun-sized, like us!”

I gave her a tortured look. “I was joking about those surgeries.”

“Oh no, be my guest. I wonder if the doctors would let me break your shins. I’ve always wanted to…” She grabbed the handle on the hatchback and opened it.

“What did my shins do to you?” I asked, loading my suitcase in, and squeezed hers in beside mine. I had to shimmy them in because the trunk was so tiny. It also didn’t help that even though we were professional travelers by now, Lemon had insisted on bringing half a dozen bathing suits, cover-ups, and sun hats, after we both came back from a vacation to Tossa de Mar, Spain, sunburnt within an inch of our lives.

She waved her hand dismissively. “Not your shins, just shins in general. I like your shins actually. They’re very nice for shins.”

“You’re saying ‘shins’ so much it’s starting to not sound like a word.” We got into the 2006 Chevy Aveo, and to my utter dishonor, I had to scoot the seat up a little bit. I couldn’t imagine anyone taller than me squeezing into this Hot Wheels car; small graces that I wasn’t seriously considering that ridiculous surgery. As I pulled my seatbelt on, Lemon stilled my hand on the buckle and leaned over the middle compartment. Not that it took much effort, the car was that small.

She brushed her nose against mine. “And I like you just as you are. I hope I don’t have to say that, but I will anyway.” Her voice was soft and sweet, the edges curling up in coyness like the first taste of a lemon pie.

I shifted toward her, marrying the space between us, and kissed her gently on the mouth. “Only like?” I asked.

I felt her mouth quirk up into a smile. “We’ve got four hours, I want some wiggle room.”

A laugh bubbled up from my chest, and unwound a tense knot that I hadn’t realized had ached there since our flight took off from JFK in New York City. We’d traveled together before—to Scotland, to India, to this small little island off the coast of Washington where we had the best oysters we’d ever eaten—but this time was a little different. We weren’t going somewhere with an itinerary.

I was going home, to a town that built me, a town I’d escaped from years and years ago and only just recently returned, and finally I was bringing the person I loved the most with me. I’d wanted to open up a restaurant in Vienna Shores, North Carolina, ever since I wanted to be a chef. I knew what kind of food I wanted to serve there—my grandfather’s favorites, fried freshly caught fish and fries and spears of pickles and cold drinks—and I knew what kind of place I wanted it to be—welcoming and intimate—but getting up the courage to go back…

I didn’t have that until I came crashing into Clementine West again, and she shook that dream back to life.

With her, I could do anything.

It was the way she looked at me with those large eyes that reminded me of the perfect consistency of hot chocolate, as if I was the only thing worth looking at, the only thing worthy of her time.

I’d spent seven years dreaming of those eyes.

I’d spend a lifetime more happily drowning in them.

As I pulled out of the parking garage, and started the long trek down the shoreline toward home, Lemon turned on the radio. A Taylor Swift song mumbled through the grainy speakers. Even the sound system was bad. This wasn’t how I’d imagined introducing my girlfriend to my home, but the rental service was fresh out of premium cars.

“Oh!” She snapped her fingers. “I didn’t tell you—while you were in line for the rental car, I was waiting for our suitcases at baggage claim, right? And I saw this girl in a pickle costume just go running across the airport.”

“A… pickle costume?”

“A pickle costume. It was jarring.” And she said it with a straight face.

I glanced at her.

She blinked.

“Lemon,” I chastised.

“It was a dill-light.”

“Lemon.”

“I really relished the moment.”

I flicked the blinker on and merged the tiny toy car into highway traffic. “You’re trouble.”

She leaned against the middle console, grinning at me. I concentrated on the Ford Escape in front of me, refusing to give her any more fuel for her fire. It didn’t matter. Clementine West was a lot of things, but mostly? She chiseled away at every one of my walls until I was nothing more than a lovesick fool, and fuck, how I never wanted to be anything else. “Ooh,” she cooed, “are my puns pickling your fancy?”

“You’re gherkin me around, Lemon.” And I loved her for it.

Delighted, she barked a laugh and clapped. “There’s my Iwan,” she said, her voice dripping in adoration that made my knees weak. “You’ve been so frown-y since we left New York. Tell me more about Vienna Shores.”

I fiddled with the air conditioner. Was it stuffy in here or was it just me? “It’s on the beach.”

She rolled her eyes. “And Long Island is on a long island. C’mon, what do you love about your hometown? You never really talk about it.”

No, I guessed I didn’t. I kept turning the air conditioner vent left and right, but I couldn’t find a breeze—or maybe I just wanted a distraction. The drive was boring, and I’d taken it so many times I knew it by heart. “Vienna Shores is… small. A place where everyone knows everyone.”

“So, like Stars Hollow.”

“Sort of, I guess? If Stars Hollow was mostly full of tourists most of the year and then a ghost town in the winter. Lily loves it. She was bereft that Mom moved up to the city, and begged her not to sell the house, so we rent it instead. Lily comes back a lot to see friends. I never really made very many—most of the people I met were there for a summer, or a week, on a vacation so they never had to be their real selves. But I had a few friends—a lot of them are still there, I think.”

Lemon leaned back in her seat. “They never left?”

“Sure, but like me, a lot of them go back. In one way or another. Small towns are a bit like Hotel California. You can check out but never leave. Sometimes a place sorta becomes part of you, you know?” I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, glancing over, because I knew she did know what I meant. Her aunt’s apartment was as much a part of her as her lovely eyes, even after she sold it. “There’s a good pizza shop where my grandpa and I always ate, and whenever I couldn’t find him in the kitchen, he was out on the pier fishing. Mom worked in a law firm down on Main Street across from this really cool music venue called The Revelry. I think it’s still there—it’s ancient. Maybe we can go one night when they have a band playing.”

She gasped, pressing her hand to her chest. “James Iwan Ashton, asking to go out in public to a concert? And there’s not even a restaurant attached? Who even are you?”

I rolled my eyes. “Ha.” Then, quietly, I added, “They have a local beer I want to try—”

“I knew it!”

“Guilty.”

The radio rolled into the next song. It had a bright beat to it. Lemon sat up a little straighter and darted for the volume. “Oh, this is the song I was telling you about!” She turned it up. “Baby Penny has been obsessed with it.”

“Only Drew and Fiona’s baby?”

“Hey, she likes what she likes, and if this gets Auntie Clementine to get her to sleep? I’ll sing her anything.” She bobbed her head to the song and hummed along to the lyrics off-key. While the highway stayed congested, the lanes narrowed as we drove deeper onto the Outer Banks. It was a strip of islands off the coast of North Carolina, best known for their wild horses and tall tales of pirates. I spent so much of my youth here, camping in state parks and making water-bongs out of plastic bottles on the beach with friends. I got my first tattoo up at Kitty Hawk, and spent a summer working in an oyster estuary. The road that curved down the islands was the same, though the buildings changed from hurricanes and erosion, but even the more it changed, the more it seemed to stay the same, too.

“And that was ‘If You Stayed’ by Willa Grey, written by the OBX’s own Joni Lark.”

“Oh,” I realized, pulling myself out of my thoughts, “I know her.”

Lemon gave a start. “You what?”

“I know Joni. We went to school together. She’s written a lot of songs over the last few years. I play her songs a lot in my kitchens.”

“Seriously?”

“…Yes?” I asked, because it sounded like a trick question.

“And you never told me?”

“I didn’t think it was that important?”

“Well, it is, and now I am deeply mistrusting of your other celebrity connections.”

“I wouldn’t call Joni a celebrity—”

She went on, ignoring me. “I mean, who else do you know? Taylor Swift? Bon Jovi? Kendrick Lamar? Roman Fell? The Pope?”

Biting in a grin, I shook my head. “You’re the coolest person I know, obviously.”

“You can’t butter me up as a distraction! This is a very important conversation.”

“I might know… Jess Stone? A few of the Iron Chefs? Um—Nick Offerman came into my restaurant once?” I wracked my brain for a celebrity, but I really couldn’t recall anyone who I took a point to remember. The truth was Lemon had been the only one my brain decided to remember in the seven years between meeting her in that apartment, and seeing her again in my publisher’s conference room. The years I’d spent seeing her in every crowd, glimpsing her, but never at the right time. Never the right year.

Until it suddenly was.

The rest of those seven years were blurry images against the sharp and bright memory of her.

“I promise you, that’s the extent of my coolness. Cross my heart,” I added, making an X over my chest with my pinky, and offering it to her.

She eyed it skeptically. “Says the boyfriend who is a world-renowned chef.”

“Minor detail.”

“With a bestselling cookbook,” and to emphasize, she reached into her backpack and took out—

“Why did you pack my cookbook?”

She held it up with a roll of her eyes. “Because it’s written by my favorite person, duh. And you never know when you might need a good recipe,” she added, flipping through it. The spine was cracked and the corners bent. How many places had she carried it to and I hadn’t noticed?

My chest ached with how much I loved her.

“You could always just ask the chef to cook you something,” I said.

She smiled at me, and it made me feel like a sunflower wanting to drink in all of her light. “I hear his lemon pie is delightful.”

“He can arrange that.”

“Maybe a private lesson, too…?”

“Mmh, you might have to pay for that. He doesn’t work for free.”

“What’s his price?”

In reply, I threaded my fingers through hers and kissed the back of her hand, and the ring there on her fourth finger. “Just a lifetime.”

She leaned over and kissed me gently on the cheek. “That’s all?” she asked teasingly.

It was more than I ever thought I’d have when I fell in love with her in that small Upper East Side apartment that was no longer hers, but was a part of us, nonetheless. And it would never be enough.

The miles went by, and the stereo hummed new top hits besides classic anthems, and we rolled down the windows and let the wind rush in with the salty smell of the ocean, and as she sang along to the radio, I couldn’t help but think—

She was terrible singer, but her voice sounded like love.

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Happy Reading!

xoxo,
Ash