Chapter 2
Brandon
The old man in front of me grumbled something under his breath that sounded a lot like “this is fuckin’ highway robbery” before throwing a few bills and a handful of change onto the counter.
I forced a smile on my face and slid the money across the counter, the register chiming with a pleasant sound as I opened it up to deposit the cash inside. The funny thing was that out of anyone in the surrounding area, I was the cheapest.
The receipt was quickly snatched off of the counter the moment I slid it across to him. “Have a good day, Mr. Nelson. The keys are in the ignition.”
He grumbled at me again before turning and walking out of my shop, slamming the door behind him.
Sighing, I sagged against the counter where I let my forehead rest against the cool surface. Honestly, if I wasn’t in this business to keep people from going bankrupt while trying to take care of their old beaters, I really would’ve contemplated selling out a long time ago.
All right, maybe that was a little dramatic.
I did actually enjoy the work I put into running this place, along with my customers who came and went along with their car needs.
While Ellington Heights boasted plenty of the overly wealthy, Edgewood was a blue-collar working class population with not much money to squeeze out of the already relatively dry pockets.
Even if I wanted to stoop down to scum lord territory and start charging for my services like my competitors, there would be no point to. Not that I would in the first place, but dealing with people like Roger Nelson had me fantasizing quite heavily these days.
I supposed it was part burnout from work and part wondering if there was more to life than living in the back of my shop’s garage for twelve hours a day.
Most people my age were out starting families and getting married while I was too stubborn to waste my nights down at the local bars trying to look for anything that wasn’t a casual one-night stand.
Instead, I buried myself in work like any normal habitual singleton and kept myself preoccupied in between periods of seemingly unending loneliness.
These days, I was finding myself more and more restless for reasons unknown. Though, I had a feeling that my sister’s constant badgering also wasn’t helping.
Back behind the door leading down to my office, the desk phone rang.
“Speak of the devil,” I muttered to myself.
Pushing off from the counter, I headed toward the back of the shop. With my lobby empty and no cars up on the risers to work on, there wasn’t really any excuse to avoid my sister’s lunchtime phone call like I’d been doing for the past few days.
I loved her but damn was she a pain in the ass sometimes.
Settling down into my swivel chair, I lifted the phone off of the receiver. “Carmichael’s Body Shop.”
She snickered. “Why do you sound like that every time you answer the phone?”
Frowning, I said, “Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to act all tough.”
I rolled my eyes. Leave it to my sister to have an insult geared up the second I picked up the damn phone. “It was nice talking to you, Lila. Have a nice afternoon.”
“No, wait! Don’t hang up!”
Smirking to myself, I said, “What’s that now?”
“Ugh, you’re such a brat.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Real mature, Brandon.”
See, the thing about getting a sister later in life was that we never got to experience the sibling rivalry thing back when we were kids, on account that we didn’t even know each other.
After my mom married my step dad, and along with him came a bratty teenaged girl and her three older siblings that were two years younger than me, I’d been met with the realization that getting picked on wasn’t nearly as bad when I had someone to dish it back to.
“So, what’s up?”
She huffed at me. “Did you get a chance to look at those dating profiles I sent your way?”
Holding back a groan was a Herculean effort.
While I appreciated my sister accepting me for who I was without question—to the point where she was constantly asking me about who I was seeing—since getting engaged, she’d begun to go into overdrive worrying about my plus one.
Going so far as to have a matchmaker create profiles for me to look at of all of the guys within a fifty-mile radius that had dating potential.
Never in my life had I ever thought I’d have someone trying so damn hard to set me up with someone because they were terrified I was going to die alone.
“No, I’ve been kind of busy.”
Lila groaned. “Brandon, come on. I think this batch is really good! There’s some definite cuties in there.”
My nose wrinkled involuntarily. “I hate the way you just said that.”
“My matchmaker tried giving you both options this time around. Since she wasn’t really sure what your preferences were, and frankly neither did I, so she got you cute guys and super manly—”
Oookay.
Time for this god forsaken conversation to end.
“Bye, Lila.”
“Hey, wait!”
Thankfully, the alarm at the front of my store chimed, signaling a new customer. “Gotta go!”
Setting the phone back down onto its cradle, I leaned forward to rest my head in my hands.
As if my love life couldn’t get any sadder, my poor sister was taking it upon herself to try and set me up herself.
She had no faith in me to find someone to bring to her wedding and had resorted to paying to find me a date.
Although, I couldn’t exactly blame her. We were both late bloomers when it came to our love lives—mine for completely different circumstances than her just being picky as hell.
She’d eventually found a really nice guy that treated her well and wasn’t about shoving her into the housewife box the second he put a ring on her finger.
Lila was a career driven person through and through, much like I was.
We both found solace in what we did for a living, and changing lives, even on a micro scale, was fulfilling.
Though, now that we were both in our thirties, it was getting harder to watch everyone else around me move on with their lives while I was still stuck.
I loved my career, don’t get me wrong. But sharing my life with someone else was also a need that had gone unfulfilled for a long, long time.
That last person that I’d ever wanted—or rather, envisioned—a future with had left Ellington Heights and never looked back.
I’d love to say that my teenage heartbreak had been left in the dust but even now, a damn decade and a half later, it still ate me up sometimes when I was lying awake in bed staring at the water stain on my ceiling.
By now, the world had since moved on and it was my turn to do the same. Even if that meant complying with a damn matchmaker.
Sighing, I lifted myself up from my chair and headed out to the front of the shop.
There was a man standing in the waiting area with his back turned toward the counter, his arms crossed over his chest while he stared out the dingy window that I’d yet to get a rag and a Windex to since spring hit.
He wore an expensive looking suit that hugged his body perfectly in that old money kind of way. His dark blond hair was just long enough to touch the top of his broad shoulders, thick and silky looking, even in the natural light spilling in from the window in front of him.
“Can I help you?” I asked, leaning against the counter.
He wasn’t the kind of guy who usually frequented my shop.
Any of the city-slickers who blew through here were more prone to sticking to the chain shops a town over from this one, finding their ritzy reputation worth more of taking a risk than one like mine that barely had any kind of online presence outside of a Google overview.
When he turned away from the window to look over his shoulder at me, his eyes widened.
He was handsome—an angular jaw that was dusted with stubble, blue eyes that I could spot even from here, and full lips that curled back as his mouth opened.
“Brandon?”
My brow rose. “That would be me.” Usually people weren’t too inclined to use my first name, seeing as how it was my last that was stitched onto the patch on the front of my uniform. “Can I help you?”
He let out a soft laugh, shaking his head. “Wow. I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
Weirdly enough, this man looked familiar. The problem was that I couldn’t quite place my finger as to why.
“Well, considering I own this shop, I would hope that people would be expecting to see me here.”
His mouth opened again and then closed, his eyes softening. “You did it.”
Did what?
“Shit,” he muttered, rubbing a hand over his face. “Sorry. I don’t know why—Avery. McAllister.”
Av—? I shot back from the counter.
Holy shit.
There was no way.
My eyes pinballed over him again, taking him in once more.
He looked so different, but not in a bad way.
He was grown up, more mature, since that last time I’d seen him back when we were teenagers.
He looked like a man now. Gone was the scraggly seventeen year old that was permanently impressed into my mind and with it replaced him with this version.
“Oh,” was all I could manage to say.
Avery’s face pinched slightly as he dropped his hand. “Sorry, that must be really weird. I hope I’m not interrupting your day. You probably don’t even remember—”
“I remember you.” The words came tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop them.
Fuck, how could I forget? This man had been my best friend for nearly a decade. He was the first person I came out to when we were fifteen and the first guy I’d ever had a crush on long before I even knew I was gay.
How the hell could I forget Avery McAllister?
He looked relieved at my words. “You do? Good, good... it’s been a while.”
All I could do was nod at that, my words failing me.
Avery being back in town was nothing that I could’ve ever predicted. When he left for boarding school at seventeen, we’d kept in contact through letters for a while but that had soon dried up once we’d both graduated school respectively.