Chapter 15 #2
The familiar sight sends another wave of guilt through me, because there’s no way she’d be this relaxed if she knew where I’d had my mouth an hour ago.
“What, Hannah?” Ollie asks. “What’s the joke? You know I don’t like not knowing.”
“I’ll tell you when you’re eighteen,” Travis says with an easy smile, then nods to me. “How’s it going at the brewery?”
I glance at Hannah, who’s studying the menu. “I think I’ll take the Fifth.”
“Well, thanks for setting us up with Mick, man. He’s pretty good. It was more fun with you, but I get that you’re too busy to make it work.”
I nod. “Yeah. There’s a lot to do. Going to be busy for a while.”
My sister peers up at me. “I seriously hope you’ve been nice to Briar. But not too nice. I know how you feel about lazy dating.”
“What’s lazy dating?” Ollie asks before darting a glance at his father. “Come on, Dad, I don’t have to wait until I’m eighteen for everything. I don’t want to waste my whole life away waiting.”
Travis smiles and tousles his son’s hair. “Sure, but I don’t think you’re going to find it that interesting. What Hannah’s saying is that Liam sometimes dates his coworkers because he doesn’t want to go to the trouble of finding someone he actually likes.”
I lean back in my chair, crossing my arms. “What does hypocrisy feel like? I’ve always wondered.”
Travis gives me the sheepish grin of a man who started fucking my sister while she was, technically, working as his nanny. It’s only because he’s good to her that I let him get away with that.
“It tastes like ice cream,” Hannah says with a grin. “That’s why people indulge so often.”
The server comes by. Ollie’s the first to order, asking for the make-your-own-pizza option and showing the server his design. She pretends to be interested in his complicated drawing. He gets fidgety as the rest of us order our food, probably because Hannah goes last and takes her sweet time.
“Is that box really not for me?” Ollie whispers in a gush, no longer able to hold back.
“Oh, it’s for you, all right,” I say with a grin. “Promise to follow all the directions?”
He casts a sidelong glance at Hannah, his little face dead serious. “You know it’s Hannah who needs help following directions.”
“So definitely work on it with your dad instead of her.”
It’s a kombucha-making kit I got from a friend who runs a small local company. The closest I can get to introducing him to the art of making beer without Travis getting on my case.
“Are you talking about me?” Hannah asks, her eyes sparkling, as the server walks away.
“Yes,” Ollie and I answer at the same time, and then we fist-bump each other again, laughing.
“Dad, can we try the claw machine?” Ollie asks. “I know they’re designed to make people fail, but I think I figured out how to beat the system. I made a diagram.”
He flashes the back of his pizza picture, and sure enough, there’s a diagram of a claw machine.
Ollie’s seven, doing academic work usually reserved for middle schoolers, but he’s not going to beat that claw machine.
No way, no how. From the defeated look on Travis’s face, he knows he’s about to lose twenty bucks to his kid’s mission.
But I’ll give the guy this, he goes with grace.
I pat him on the back as he leaves the booth with Ollie.
“Godspeed.”
Hannah laughs, then whispers conspiratorially, “I called ahead and bribed the host twenty bucks to reposition the animals so Ollie has a better chance.”
“So instead of Travis wasting twenty dollars on a shitty stuffed animal, you’ll have wasted forty.”
“The things you do for love.” Then she tips her head, studying me. “Speaking of, maybe it’s time for you to try dating again. I mean actually dating, not the lazy, getting-laid-by-whoever’s-around approach. It’s been, like, four years since you’ve been serious with anyone.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I lean back on my side of the booth, tension thrumming through me as I run my finger under the band on my wrist. “First, it’s Liam, take this job. Then Liam, stay away from my friend. Now you want to handpick a wife for me? Should I expect a shotgun wedding too?”
She lifts her eyes skyward. “Oh, I fully expect you’re never getting married.”
“Thanks.”
She pauses, considering how far to go, and like usual, decides she might as well go all the way. “That shit with Julia went down ages ago. It wasn’t your fault then, and it’s not your fault now. You don’t need to be alone.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Maybe I want to be alone. When I told Margaret I didn’t want her to leave a toothbrush at my apartment, she threw all of my shit into the beer I brewed. In front of everyone.”
“So, you have questionable taste in women. I used to have questionable taste, too, and now look at me.” She gestures to the claw machine, located in a cramped row of machines right next to the single-occupancy bathroom.
Travis looks like he’s in a war zone, and Ollie has an expression of utmost concentration as he maneuvers the claw one last time before it lowers. It grips the stuffed toy, and Travis’s whole face lights up. “You did it, Ollie!”
I’ll be damned, it lifts the stuffie up, carting it toward the chute that’ll give the tyke his treat. But it falls right before it gets there.
I turn to study my sister. “That’s how things go for me, Han. Always will. No point in fighting fate.”
She gives me a stern look that a little sister has no right to have in her repertoire. It’s being around Ollie that’s done it to her. “And yet, you seem very fond of putting on boxing gloves.”
“I don’t need a woman to be happy.”
She waves a hand through the air like a tennis pro deflecting a ball. “So find a man. Find anyone. I’m sick of you moping around by yourself all the time. It’s not healthy.”
“But I have you, so obviously I never get to be alone.”
This time her smile’s sad and tired. “I love you, you big asshole.”
“I regret to inform you that I love you too.”
“I’m sorry you had to cancel your trip to see Connor and Dad so you could help Briar.”
I’d had tickets to Boston for Christmas weekend, but I couldn’t possibly take that trip. Not now. I would have missed Briar’s family dinner, and I wouldn’t have been around to babysit the beers.
“Don’t tell her I did that,” I interject. “She’ll think it’s her fault I had to cancel.”
“Probably.” She gives the table a knock with her knuckles, asking for luck. “But I’ll make up for it.”
Guilt tickles the back of my throat, because truth be told, I want to stay. “You owe me nothing. You know I like a challenge.”
“Says the man who refuses to look for a real connection because he struck out once.”
I decide to throw her a bone. “I reactivated Tinder before I came over here. You’re welcome.”
She doesn’t seem ecstatic. “Great, now you can bone more strangers. I want you to fall in love. It’s time. It’s probably past time. You’re getting old and set in your ways.” She wags a finger at me. “I’m going to talk to Dottie about you.”
“Why?”
I glance over at Travis and Ollie, and God love the guy, Travis is having a go at the machine now, his expression of anxious concentration both hilarious and touching.
“If anyone can trick you into falling in love, it’s Dottie Hendrickson,” Hannah says, making it sound like a curse.
I think about how I wrapped one of Briar’s hairs around my finger earlier, like a lovesick teenager who needs some well-timed mockery to get his head on straight.
“No thanks,” I say, to myself as much as Hannah. “I’m too busy to fall in love. I’ve got the brewery shit to deal with, and then I’ve got my fight at the end of January. I’ll give the whole love thing a rain check.”
She scrunches her nose in distaste but says, “I’m going to come to your fight.”
“Why? You hate watching my matches.”
“Sure, but if someone beats the shit out of you, I at least want the chance to heckle them.”
“You’re a good sister.”
“I know,” she agrees just as Travis and Ollie come back to the table.
They don’t have any stuffed animals with them, but there’s no defeat on the kid’s face. Travis is the one who looks like someone gut-punched him.
“Your plan didn’t work?” I ask Ollie.
“No,” he says, “but that’s okay. I just have to make a few extra calculations. I’ll try again next time.”
“How about I buy you a stuffed animal, short stuff?” I suggest, but he shakes his head.
“No, thank you. I have lots of stuffed animals. I like defeating the odds. That’s most of the fun.”
“Yes, by all means, let’s make life more difficult for ourselves,” Hannah says, watching me as she speaks.
I lift my glass to her in a toast. “Finally, some sense.”
Sense is something I could use more of, myself. Because part of me wants to believe this means Hannah would be happy if I end up dating Briar. That thought is a lot like that hair wrapping around my finger—seductive at first, then too tight.
Because I’m being an idiot again.
Hannah might want me to date. She might want me to be happy. But she meant it when she told me to stay away from her friend. And Briar’s not just my little sister’s new best friend—she’s my boss, the woman who holds my future in the palm of her hand.
That means I need to keep my distance, because obviously I’m incapable of controlling myself around her when I don’t.