Wish You Would (How You Get the Girl #3)

1. GIGI

1

GIGI

SEMI-CHARMED LIFE

“Well? How is it?”

I eyed the cocktail in front of me, the red, yellow, and orange a near-artistic blend of colors, and somehow managed to not grimace as the bitter taste clung to my tongue. “It’s…pretty.”

Kai’s face fell. This was the fourth Tequila Sunrise they’d made, and they still hadn’t nailed it. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The kid had enthusiasm for days. Alas, a gift for mixology, not so much.

“Hey.” I bumped my shoulder against theirs. “You’ll get it. And, in the meantime, Carl over there is happy to be your guinea pig.”

Cranky Carl, a regular at Heathcliff’s since my dad ran the place, lifted his half-empty Tequila Sunrise in acknowledgement, his lips pressed tight together in either a smile or a frown. It was always hard to tell with Carl.

“Carl is gonna need a wheelbarrow to get him out the door if he keeps drinking my fuck-ups.” Kai pushed their fingers through their tousled pixie cut, chunks of bleach-blonde hair falling right back over their forehead like they were the lead in a goddamn romcom. Vaughn’s voice echoed in the back of my head in that moment. You can’t just hire people because you think they’re hot, Gi.

I’d show him. Kai was going to be a damn good addition to Heathcliff’s if it was the last thing I did.

Just…not tonight. Tonight, we had a super popular cover band performing, and our ’90’s cocktail menu had to be on point. The Millennial moms demanded it.

“Okay,” I said, sliding the newest cocktail fail—cockfail?—down the bar to Carl. “You’re on beer duty tonight. I’ll make the cocktails.”

Kai nodded, shoulders dropping. “That’s fair.” They untied their apron and pulled it over their head. “I’m gonna take a quick break. Psych myself up for a night of slinging hops.” They tossed a grin my way and I grinned back, shaking my head as they vanished out the front door.

“You sure about that one?” Dante, kitchen master and all-around awesome dude, asked as he peeked out from the service window.

I faced him, resting my elbows against the bar. “Trust the process,” I said, earning a skeptical eyebrow raise.

“I don’t know, Gi,” he said. “Kid’s been here a month already.”

“And they’re gonna get the hang of things.” I shook off Dante’s doubt and shoved away from the counter. “You were not a munchie maestro right away.”

“Please.” He smirked. “I was born with a spatula in my hand.”

“That must have been painful for your mother,” I shot back, earning a boisterous laugh. The sound pulled a laugh from me in a way that only Dante did. He was simply the most contagiously joyful person on the planet.

“But seriously.” I leaned into the service window so that we were eye-to-eye. “Are you concerned?”

Kai was the first hire Vaughn, my brother and co-owner of the bar, had let me make all the calls for. There was a lot riding on the kid. If I couldn’t get them up to snuff soon, Vaughn would likely not trust me with hiring again. And if I couldn’t earn his trust when it came to hiring, the odds of him trusting me for other bar stuff was nearly nil.

I pressed my lips together and pushed an anxious breath from my nose, slow and steady. Panic played at the edges of my mind, but I blocked it out. Day by day, I reminded myself. Task by task. Trust had to be earned. And, with Vaughn, I had a lot of work to do. A lot of trust to earn.

“Honestly?” Dante said in response to my question. I raised my eyes to meet his, deep brown and soft, and the knot in my stomach loosened the teensiest bit. “Nah.” He looped his apron over his head and reached behind to tie it. “They’ll catch on. And in the meantime, our customers are gonna love their baby giraffe charm.”

I laughed, relieved. “They are like a baby giraffe, aren’t they?”

“Oh, yeah. I half expect them to take a header because they’re still learning to walk on those impossibly long legs.”

Wincing at the thought, I reached beneath the bar for my phone. “God, I hope not. That’d be a liability nightmare.”

Dante chuckled and turned away from the window. Soon after, the mostly quiet bar filled with the sounds of Dante and the other cook banging around in the kitchen, opening up for the day. I looked down at my phone, bypassing numerous notifications from dating apps and social media accounts. Opening my calendar app, I glanced over my task list for the day. Everything was on track. Everything was all good. Everything was—

“Goddammit.” The voice was accompanied by the squeak of the front door’s hinges as the members of Patti Mayonnaise stomped inside. “Would it kill you to come prepared for once in your life?”

“Well, excuse me for having a life outside of the band.” The lead singer shook her Britney-esque bangs away from her face and glared. “Some things take precedence, you know.”

I tucked my phone back beneath the bar and watched as the band dropped their equipment at the base of the stage in the corner. Patti Mayonnaise had been performing at Heathcliff’s for a couple months now, a recent addition to our lineup, and they always brought in a lot of business. They were popular in the tri-state area, and it took work to get them here regularly.

I was fucking proud of that.

“I’m just saying,” the guitarist said as he began to unload his instrument. “Maybe glance at the setlist before showing up for sound check?”

At this, she rolled her eyes and uttered a response I couldn’t hear. The bickering quieted as they began setting up their equipment. I yanked my attention back to prepping supplies for the cocktail menu. Not only were Tequila Sunrises on the list, but also sparkly pink Cosmopolitans, Sex on the Beaches, and the I’ll be Pear for You, a Heathcliff’s special.

As I chopped and sliced and juiced, I idly listened to them set up and go through sound check. Something inside me mellowed at the sound of their routine. The familiarity of it all, the dissonant organization. Working out the kinks and synching with a group of people that would back you up and hold you steady through the highs and lows of a performance.

God, I missed it.

My fingertips played against the countertop, mimicking the notes of the keyboard. I hummed along with the singer as she ran through vocal warmups, and I burned with a feeling I hadn’t had since I’d come back to Port Agnes almost a year ago.

The stage, the lights, the sound vibrating through my bones. Music moving through me like lifeblood…

I—

“How’re things going tonight?”

Vaughn’s voice jolted me back to the moment. I dropped the knife I’d been holding, the clatter breaking the spell.

“Fine,” I said, blinking rapidly to bring myself back to the present. To the here and now.

To my new reality.

“Yeah?” Vaughn’s dark brows lifted as he took in the abandoned knife and the spaced-out look on his sister’s face. “You sure about that?”

I picked the knife back up and wiped it on my apron, shaking off the tendrils of nostalgia. Get your shit together, Georgia. “Yep. Just getting ready for the show.”

Vaughn glanced toward the stage. He’d been skeptical of the band. He’d doubted their ’90s “gimmick,” as he called it, would bring in an audience. He’d been proven wrong more than a few times over by now.

Not that he’d say that out loud.

Mostly, he was probably just glad he didn’t have to be here on show nights.

“All right, well. I’m about to head out to study group.” He held up his notebook and dogeared copy of Madame Bovary . He’d finally—after months of nagging courtesy of me, and his girlfriend, Anya—enrolled in classes at the local college. His first class started a couple weeks ago, and he’d taken to the English major life like a fish to water. A big ole fish, with a manbun and a shit-ton of tattoos. “Need anything before I go?”

“Nah.” I smiled. “Get outta here. Go be a nerd.”

He grumbled, but there was pride in the set of his shoulders as he rounded the bar.

“Thanks for holding things down here,” he said as he backed toward the door. “I appreciate you.”

“Don’t mention it,” I called back, waving him away. It’s the least I can do, I didn’t say. Because he’d heard it already, about a million times, and he’d forbade me from saying it again. It was true, though. I owed my brother so very much. A lifetime of Saturday night shifts could never repay him for everything I’d put him through.

But it was a start.

As the door swung closed behind him, the opening guitar riff from “Smooth” filled the bar. My attention whipped back to the stage in time to catch the singer closing her eyes as the music moved through her.

Something burned inside me, both hot and cold, and I forced my eyes away. This, I told myself as I grabbed a new lemon to slice. This was my life now.

Life from the sidelines was safer, anyway.