Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
brIAR
Liam made it very clear what he thinks of me, so I resent the way he intrudes on my thoughts the next morning while I’m pretending to meditate.
I keep seeing the smug tilt of his chin, the quirk of his mouth when he told me he didn’t care to hear which men had lied to me.
And I keep reliving the half second in the Silver Star tasting room when our faces were an inch apart and I was certain he was going to kiss me—or worse, that I was going to kiss him.
It would have been the biggest mistake of my life, obviously.
Not only did I promise Hannah not to date him, but he’s my new brewer.
I’ll have to see him every single day. Kissing him would be the most foolish mistake I could make.
Well, almost. The ultimate disaster would be sleeping with him. Especially knowing his dating history.
I’ve never been the kind of woman who can sleep with a man and have it mean nothing.
For me, sex has always felt like giving away a piece of myself.
Sometimes only a teaspoon of my heart, sometimes heaping cups of it.
Heck, I don’t even have to sleep with someone.
Sometimes I find myself giving pieces of my heart to near strangers—the mailman who has a limp because his son accidentally ran over his foot, the woman who runs at the same time as me every morning and belts out sad Taylor Swift lyrics.
It’s a personality failing, and I’ve tried to cure it over the past year by retreating into myself. But it hasn’t worked. Obviously. First there was Jonah, whispering all of his sweet promises and lies. Then Sophie and Hannah. Dottie.
And now Liam.
He’s been sweet to me several times over the past couple of days, which only makes this new feeling worse. He’s like a Sour Patch Kid of a person, only inverted. First he’s sweet and then he’s sour. Everyone knows you don’t want to end on sour.
Karma bats me with his paw, which feels metaphorically resonant this morning.
I draw in a deep breath, pushing down the conflicting feelings that kept me awake last night, then slowly let the air ease out.
“Today is a new day,” I tell Karma, who meows and glances at his food bowl. “I am a badass bitch.”
He gives me a glance that seems to say, if you say so. Now, be my food bitch.
My phone buzzes several times from incoming texts, but I ignore it. My stomach is quicksand as I fill Karma’s bowl, getting several paw swipes because I’m not fast enough. Finally, I run out of excuses to avoid the outside world and grab the phone off the floor beside my mat.
I don’t know which person I’m more afraid to hear from, but I’m guessing it’s not going to be great news.
There are two sets of messages. The first is from Melly:
Congrats on the brewery!
Your dad is SO sweet to give you a job like that.
Can’t wait to hear all about it, but I promise I’ll stay away from the scissors. [Laugh emoji]
We all did some dumb shit when we were kids, amiright?
When do you want to meet to discuss?
My skin prickles. I feel like I did as a teenager—a frightened animal cornered by a larger beast.
Unfortunately, my father told me I needed to give her access to the brewery, so I can’t say no.
I reply:
I’m reopening next week. You can come by any day between twelve and ten.
I’m busy next week.
We’re having a New Year’s Eve party.
How quaint! I have plans for New Year’s Eve, obviously, but maybe I can pop by earlier in the evening.
I take a deep breath, hold it, let it out, then respond:
That’s generous of you.
The second set of messages is from a number I don’t recognize.
Hello, Briar. This is Nora.
Sorry if this is out of the blue, but Hannah passed along your contact information.
I’m the brewer/half owner of The Ginger Station, and she thought you might like to connect since you’re assuming ownership of Silver Star.
I’d be happy to help in any way I can.
Karma ambles over, and I give him a pat-down, letting his soft fur soothe me.
The cautious part of me isn’t sure I should give Nora the time of day.
She ignored us for months; what could she want now?
But I also want to pick her brain. The Ginger Station, a brewery that makes only alcoholic and nonalcoholic ginger beers, has been wildly successful.
I fire off a quick response:
Can you meet for lunch tomorrow?
Then, thinking better of it, I add:
Actually, Hannah would murder me if we met up without inviting her. Sophie would be disappointed to miss you too. Can you meet all of us?
We agree to grab lunch at Tea of Fortune the following day, and then I text Hannah, Sophie, and Dottie and fill them in on the plan.
I get to the brewery a half hour before I told Liam to meet me this morning, and the first thing I do is make an addition to the list we started yesterday and tuck it back behind the frame:
Don’t share personal information with your employees. They might get the wrong idea.
Tuesday morning passes quickly, moments bleeding together, powered along by adrenaline and enough processed sugar that my mother would get a pimple just by looking at it.
Liam comes into Uncle John’s office with me in the afternoon to sign the contract but makes no effort to read through it before scrawling his messy signature, which makes my pulse pound.
I study the ugly swirls on the paper for half a minute, feeling a wrenching sensation inside of me that I don’t fully understand, especially since I looked over the agreement.
It all seems fine and aboveboard. Even so, he should know what he’s agreeing to.
We head back to the brewery in silence, but when our hands glance off each other, I could swear he brushes his thumb across the back of my hand. I steal a glance at him, but maybe I imagined the whole thing, because he’s staring pointedly ahead, his gaze on the horizon.
Later that afternoon, another couple of tourists try to enter the brewery, one of them nearly breaking the locked front door in a misguided attempt to open it. Liam collapses a huge cardboard box and writes CLOSED on it in red Sharpie, adding beneath it:
Enter at your own risk.
“Do you think they’ll still try to get in?” I ask.
He gives me a crooked smile. “Everyone likes a challenge.”
It’s the last thing he says to me all day, but then again, he keeps busy. A few of his friends from the boxing gym come in to help him keg the amber ale, and they’re more talkative than he is.
I keep busy too, making arrangements. I work out a schedule with Dottie, who will be coming in with Otis later this week to train the five part-time workers he found for the tasting room.
Tinder is apparently the recruiting tool everyone should be using to hire employees, because that’s how he found them all.
I give Sophie a call too, to talk through my vision for the barrel room.
My plan to hold upscale chef dinners there is risky, considering my budget is less than shoestring, but I’m determined to make it happen.
I’ve already made a few exploratory calls around town to see if anyone’s interested in partnering with me, and I found a New American restaurant a few blocks away that wants in on the idea.
Sophie and I spend an hour picking out décor for the barrel room, finding cheap materials that I can order for overnight delivery, and a possible set of inexpensive but stylish furniture.
Before I go home for the night, I check the list behind my father’s photo. Liam has added something to it—
Don’t act like an asshole. People might get the right idea.
It makes me smile, but only for a millisecond, because he’s probably just humoring me.
Either way, it would be foolish to ask him about it.
It’s important to keep things professional from now on, something he clearly signaled to me last night.
I suppose I have a lot of work to do given I nearly puked on him, then nearly kissed him, and then gushed about my silly hopes.
I don’t have any right to be angry with him. I know that. It’s only…
I felt this kinship growing between us like a wild vine. A connection, new but strong. And it’s like he picked up a giant pair of pruning shears and sliced it in half.
I can practically hear my mother sighing. Oh, Briar, you’re so overdramatic. It’s exhausting.
“Oh, shut up, Mom,” I murmur out loud, which only makes me feel more overdramatic.
When I come in the next morning, Liam’s already there, sitting at a table in the tasting room with a notebook in front of him and the pencil I gave him. His hair is damp, suggesting he’s freshly showered.
“Something’s off,” he says. “Might be the yeast Bubba had wasn’t good. I have to repitch the beer with fresh yeast. We’ll lose a day, maybe more.”
I swear under my breath.
He smiles and then swipes a hand over his mouth as if to wipe it away. “Better than losing the whole batch. Let’s hope it works.”
It’s starting to feel like this whole enterprise is built on a wish and a dream. Instead of solid construction materials, we’re working with sugar spears and gumdrops, and it’s all going to collapse around us.
“This is crazy,” I mutter and lower into the seat across from him.
“It is,” he agrees. “It’s either going to blow people’s minds, or it’ll be fucking terrible. Either way, it’ll be interesting.” He spreads his legs wider, his knee brushing mine under the table. We’re both wearing thick pants, but I feel his touch, spiderwebbing across my skin.
I yank back abruptly.
“Yeah, thanks,” I mumble.
He rises from his chair and his chin tilts up, as if he’s forming some kind of resolution. “We have to figure out what I’ll be working on next. There’s space for one more beer, and Bubba’s brown beer is going to be ready to keg in a couple of days.”
My impulse is to smile and tell him I’ll let him make the call, but I don’t want to revert to our friendly, casual dynamic. Not after what happened the other night. I straighten in my chair and say, “I suppose you have some ideas.”
“Naturally. But you’re the boss.”