Coming Swoon (Brunch Bros #4)

Chapter 21

Chapter Twenty-One

Crane Cove, Oregon

“Oh, no.”

The kitchen was a mess. Sybil hadn’t noticed the chaos she’d caused while trying to create order in her pantry and cabinets until she’d taken a break to go to the bathroom and came back to the shocking reality that everything in her kitchen was on the counters or the floor.

Cans, bags, and boxes of food were strewn in half-finished categories in front of the pantry. Baking dishes, serving dishes, cookie sheets, and small appliances cluttered the counters.

Thank god she hadn’t started on the fridge.

All the nervous energy that had spurred this ill-advised bout of organization drained from her body, leaving her with only dread and an adrenaline hangover.

How the hell was she supposed to put all of this back before he got to her house?

Why the fuck had she agreed to have him over?

Well, she knew the answer to that one. Peter still had a magic mouth and magic hands, and she wondered if the rest of his talents had stayed the same. She’d wondered until she couldn’t sleep and then screamed into her pillow while her vibrator made her come.

Why had she agreed to talk to him? What was there to even say? “You broke my heart and made me cry but gave me the best sex of my life, so yes, my bedroom is up the stairs, last door, thank you.”

The stovetop clock caught her eye. She hadn’t given Peter a precise arrival time, but it was after the time she told him he was allowed to show up.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” she cursed and started cramming dishes back into cabinets.

A knock at the back door almost made her drop her vintage Pyrex. The door creaked when it opened, and Peter paused halfway through and stared at the mess she’d created.

“Trying to pack up and skip town?” he asked, eyes darting around the room.

Sybil gently set the Pyrex on the counter. If that broke, she’d never forgive herself.

“More like trying to fix the mess inside my head by making a mess in my house,” she said ruefully, surveying the damage again with more critical eyes. “And I need to oil the hinges on that door.”

“Are you sure? Makes a great burglar alarm.” He closed the door behind him, the hinges illustrating his point. “Do you want help cleaning up or help ignoring the problem?”

Sybil laced her fingers on top of her head and did a slow turn to assess the situation.

“I need help cleaning,” she admitted.

“Good thing I’m very good at taking directions.” Peter kissed her cheek and shed his coat.

Warmth spread through her body, and she stooped to pick something off the ground so he wouldn’t see the blush she was positive was on her face.

“Why did you come in through the back door?”

“Because you said I wasn’t allowed to climb in through the window,” he answered, pushing his sleeves up to his elbows.

“But you could’ve come in through the front door,” she pointed out, trying and failing to ignore the muscles in his forearms that flexed when he hefted her crockpot off the counter.

“Are we not sneaking around anymore?”

“We are, but my nosey neighbor might think you’re a burglar if you come in through the back door after dark.” She assessed her empty pantry for a moment. “God, I should’ve waited for Eloise to help me with this.”

“Probably,” he agreed. “I’m not known for my organizational prowess. Where did you want this…thing?”

“The crockpot?” Sybil tilted her head. “Peter, do you not know what a crockpot is?”

“I know what a crockpot is,” he said, “I just didn’t know that’s what it was called.”

She laughed. “Put it down. I think I want to tackle the pantry first.”

They worked in relative silence for a while. Occasionally Sybil would ask Peter to hand her something, or he’d ask her if she wanted to keep something close to or just past its expiration date. The conversation, or lack thereof, was in the no-man’s-land between awkward and comfortable. It was a relief when he finally said, “Do you think we could have that talk now?”

“I don’t really know what there is to talk about,” she said, stacking cans like she worked at a grocery store.

“I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand why you’re so upset with me.”

He sounded so sincere that she had to laugh.

“You don’t understand?” she mocked. “You have no idea why I might be upset with you? Not the tiniest little inkling of a clue?”

“If I knew, I would have apologized by now. I will happily crawl over broken glass if you point me in the right direction.”

Sybil gripped the can she was holding so tightly that the label tore.

“You never showed up.”

London, Seven Years Ago (October)

In five years, the bookstore hadn’t changed much. The gold lettering on the window and the door was more chipped, but the cat still napped in the display, trying to catch errant rays of sunshine amidst the London gloom. It still smelled the same too, like dust, groundwood paper, and old wood.

Sybil trailed her fingers along the spines as she browsed the shelves. In five years no one had established a better cataloging system, either. Books had been added not by genre or author, but by wherever space could be found at the time. What had Peter called it?

A treasure hunt.

She yawned. Jet lag was a bitch. Sleep had eluded her on the flight from Portland to Heathrow, and she tried to hit the ground running once she landed in London, but she was dead tired by six in the evening. Her little nap turned into her waking up at one in the morning, and she never got back to sleep. So she turned up at the bookshop as soon as it opened because she had nothing else to do.

The antique clock by the register announced the passing of another hour with twelve chimes.

Doubt seeped into the cracks of her anxious excitement. Where was he? The Peter she’d known would have camped outside the bookshop all night so he couldn’t possibly miss her arrival. But the shop had opened three hours ago and there still wasn’t any sign of him.

At least the employee babysitting the register was ignoring her. He couldn’t ask her if she needed help finding anything because there wasn’t any possible way he could know where anything was located. But he’d started looking her way more frequently over the last hour, so she pulled a book from the shelf and pretended to read the back cover.

The cat from the window wound its way between her feet, rubbing against her legs in search of affection. She crouched down and scratched it behind the ears, then under the chin. The cat purred, chirped, then trotted to a faded green velvet chair shoved into a corner. It looked at Sybil and meowed.

She could take a hint.

Book in hand, Sybil sat in the chair, and the cat jumped into her lap and curled itself into a warm, purring ball of fur. She was trapped now, because it felt like bad luck to move a cat, so she opened the book she’d grabbed and started reading.

The Light Below was a serial killer mystery thriller that followed Honor Gardner, an FBI agent, as she returned to the small town she’d grown up in to investigate a string of mysterious killings. It had a stronger romantic B-plot than most books in the same genre, since her local law enforcement counterpart was her ex-boyfriend.

The clock chimed the hours as they passed, each ting becoming more and more mocking as the day wore on. Her heart sank lower and lower, and by four in the afternoon, it was somewhere under the floorboards.

Peter wasn’t coming.

Sybil didn’t know why she’d assumed the narrative arc of her life would change. In the last five years, she’d watched Peter’s life play out in pictures in magazines and online. He was famous enough, or spent time with people famous enough, to have his picture bought and sold. His life had outgrown her exponentially. She couldn’t compete with the gorgeous actresses and musicians he spent time with these days. After college she’d moved back to her small, quiet hometown and started a business. Stardust Coffee was popular enough that she’d signed a long-term lease for a storefront in the heart of downtown Crane Cove, and soon she’d be able to retire the cart she’d been using for good. She was proud; she’d started with nothing and clawed her way to success by sheer grit and determination. But when she held it side by side to Peter’s life, it looked small and insignificant.

For five years she’d lived her life as fully as she could. She’d casually dated a few lackluster guys, had sex—some good, some bad—but she couldn’t shake the golden-haired boy with the sparkling blue eyes who, for a few eternal weeks, had meant everything to her. Hope had driven her to buy the plane ticket to fulfill the promise they’d made to each other on the train platform, and hope proved yet again that all it did was crush her.

“We’re closing soon,” the man behind the register shouted from his post.

The cat jumped off her lap, and Sybil knew it was time to go. The Peter she’d known five years ago never would have made her wait all day.

She put the book back on a shelf. It was a good book, but she didn’t need or want a memento from this day.

The bell over the door jingled, and her heart leapt into her throat.

A short, squat woman wiped her shoes on the doormat, and Sybil’s heart broke a little bit more.

And even though hope was a spiteful bitch, Sybil still looked up and down the street when she left the bookshop, because a little of Peter’s silly romanticism had rubbed off on her, and maybe, just maybe, he’d be sprinting down the street to try and arrive before the bookshop closed.

Maybe she’d come back tomorrow, just in case.

Sleep didn’t come any easier her second night in London. Sybil lay awake, hoping Peter was okay while also hoping something horrible had happened to him that had kept him away. Maybe he’d been hit by a car and was in the hospital. That was a comforting possibility. He’d have been there, except his leg was broken in two places and he was in traction.

At three in the morning, she opened her laptop, connected to the hotel Wi-Fi, and searched Peter’s name. If something had happened to him, a news outlet would have picked it up.

Under Top Stories, there were pictures and small headlines about him being spotted around London with actress Sasha St. Jaine, a striking ingenue he’d recently filmed a romantic movie with, at least according to the short article detailing their day out. Sybil checked the date.

She slammed her laptop shut.

The bastard was in London.