Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
GRANGER
Now
Bobby fucking Merritt.
I could barely believe my own lying eyes, but it was unquestionably him.
He was older—well, weren’t we all?—and a fair bit pudgier around the middle.
Some of us had spent a fortune on a top-of-the-line Peloton to prevent that.
And he was, bizarrely, dressed like he’d been on his way mud bogging or shooting at cans when he’d collided with this Pride parade, and nobody had been able to untangle the wreckage.
And he was holding the goose that had attacked me on a leash.
Bobby Merritt hadn’t made sense to me twenty-something years ago, and he made even less sense now.
He obviously didn’t recognize me—or maybe he was distracted by the goose—because as he reached out a hand to help me up from where I’d landed on my ass after the goose attack, the first words out of his mouth were, “Well now, that’s quite a tumble you took there. You wanna watch your step!”
Part of me was impressed that even after all these years Bobby had remembered the first thing they taught you in law school—never admit to anything, even when you’re clearly in the wrong and your feral goose just attacked someone.
But most of my brain was taken up with trying to figure out the hows and whys of Bobby Merritt being in Goose Run in the first place, and acting for all the world like he belonged here.
“Bobby?” The word came unbidden as I gripped his hand and pulled myself to my feet.
He froze as recognition flashed across his face, and just for a second I could have sworn he was actually happy to see me. Then his expression hardened. “Granger? What the hell are you doin’ here?”
“What am I doing here? I could ask you the same thing.”
Bobby raised his eyebrows. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m running a festival.”
And with that he tucked his violent goose under his arm and stalked away before I could say anything else—which was probably lucky because there was no guarantee I wouldn’t have come out with something like “Where the hell did you go?” or “Are you ever going to forgive me?” or, worst of all, “Did you really love me?” and Miranda was already watching me far too keenly.
Right on cue she asked, “Who was that?”
“Bobby Merritt. He’s…”
My one regret. An unforgiving asshole. A ghost.
“A guy I went to law school with.”
“Bobby’s a lawyer?” Wilder asked, his mouth dropping open.
I shrugged. “He was. I don’t know what he’s doing in Goose Run, though.”
“What’s he doing in Goose Run?” Chase asked, giving a disbelieving snort. “Dude, Bobby is Goose Run.”
“He’s the mayor,” Wilder said. “Plus he owns half the place. Well, three-quarters now, probably. He’s been here forever.”
I wondered if I’d hit my head when I’d hit the ground. “What?”
Cash nodded.
“We like Bobby,” Chase said, a hint of warning in his tone. “He’s a good dude.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “He always was.”
I was still wrapping my head around the idea that Bobby was the mayor of Goose Run. How was that even possible? He’d never even heard of the place before I’d brought him here the night after we finished the bar exam, and these guys were talking about him like he was a fixture of the town.
What the hell had happened after that night in the cabin?
I watched him as he walked through the crowd. He stopped to talk to every second person, it seemed like, and they all looked happy to see him—although I noted they kept their distance from that fucking goose—so Bobby was obviously popular. But mayor?
I’d tried to find Bobby once or twice over the years, but I’d never been able to turn up any trace of him.
Not that I’d looked too hard. A casual scroll through social media, or a glance at the Virginia Bar Association webpage to see if he popped up, that kind of thing.
It was just idle curiosity. That was what I told myself, anyway.
And it had never occurred to me to look in Goose Run. Why would it?
I glanced over in Bobby’s direction just in time to catch him looking back at me. And even after too many years and too many regrets, when my gaze locked with his, I had to fight the urge to follow him wherever he chose to lead me.
After my startling run-in with Bobby and what was apparently his goose, Miranda insisted I come back to the cabin with her and Emily.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You girls should be enjoying the festival and hanging out with your new friends, not going back to the cabin so early. Besides, I’m heading back to Richmond.”
“I don’t think you’re okay to drive right now, Uncle Granger,” Miranda said and held out her hand for my keys.
I proved her right by not arguing.
“We’ll make you some lunch,” she said, and Emily nodded as we headed away from the festivities and back toward the car.
“It’s fine,” Miranda said. “Right, Em?”
“It’s totally cool,” Emily said. “I need to change my shoes anyway. I think I stood in goose poo.”
The drive back to the cabin was silent. I spent most of it staring out the window while my brain did the neurological equivalent of a computer’s spinning circle of death. And it was just circling around one thing: Bobby Merritt.
When we pulled up back at the cabin, I thought about asking Miranda for the keys, but she and Emily were already darting inside. I followed them with a sigh. I knew Miranda well enough to know that a barrage of questions was coming.
Instead, the moment I stepped inside, it wasn’t a question that she hit me with. It was a can of White Claw, right in the chest.
“Actually,” I said, setting it down on the little table by the door, “I’ll just make a coffee and be on my way.”
Miranda narrowed her eyes at me. She picked up the can, popped it open, and shoved it back at me.
“Drink, Uncle Granger. Because if I know anything about our family, it’s that you have to get them this close to blackout drunk so that they’ll express the actual human emotions they’ve been suppressing. ”
“Hey! Unfair!” I said. It was true, but she didn’t have to call me out like that.
“Drink,” she said. “And talk.”
“Maybe I don’t have any suppressed emotions, did you think of that?”
“Hi,” Miranda said to Emily. “My name’s Granger Emerson Kelley.
I’m half a century old and I’ve been married and divorced three times.
I can’t even commit to getting a cat, and I lose my shit if the junior associates in my office tie their ties in half Windsors instead of full Windsors, but I don’t have any deep-seated emotional issues at all. ”
She ended on a high-pitched nasally sound that really shared no resemblance to my voice at all, but the rest of it? Spot on.
I drank. And when she handed me a second can, I drank that too.
Ditto the third.
And then the questions started.
“Soooo, you and the mayor, huh?”
There was no point pretending there was nothing there. I took a seat on the leather couch. “College experimentation.” I snorted. “As much as I hate to agree with your mother, sometimes that’s all it is.”
“Sometimes it isn’t,” Emily said. White Claws made her bold.
“Bisexuality’s a thing,” Miranda said.
Emily nodded her agreement.
I sighed. “Not with my father.”
“Ew,” said Emily.
“That came out wrong,” I said and held up my can in part explanation, part apology. “Anyway, it was just a college thing. There weren’t any feelings.” There had been way too many fucking feelings, actually, which was when it had all gotten too messy. “I was just surprised to see him again. Here.”
“If there weren’t any feelings, then why did that guy look like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to kiss you or set his goose on you?” Miranda asked. “Should I start guessing?”
“There’s nothing to guess. We fooled around some, and we lost touch after law school.” I took another drink to wash away the taste of the lie.
Miranda held up a finger. “Wait. After law school? You said it was a college thing. How long were you fooling around for exactly?”
I’d always admired Miranda’s perceptiveness, but I could have done without it right about now. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s ancient history.”
“I call bullshit,” Miranda said. “If that goose hadn’t already knocked you on your ass, seeing Bobby would have. So spill.”
Emily quietly placed another can on the coffee table in front of me, and I didn’t hesitate to open it.
Miranda was watching me closely, and maybe it was the White Claw, or maybe it was that seeing Bobby had brought all those memories flooding back, but suddenly lying seemed too hard. I took another drink.
“Bobby never quite fit in at Lassiter, even though he did his damnedest,” I said.
“He wasn’t old money like the rest of the fraternity, you know?
Hell, he wasn’t even new money. He barely had a pair of nickels to rub together in the whole time I knew him.
And he had too much… personality, or attitude maybe, to ever really be able to blend in.
” I closed my eyes for a moment, as though that might ease the pang in my chest. “His attitude was what attracted me to him in the first place, I guess. He seemed like a guy who’d be willing to take a risk.
And he was smart as hell and he made me laugh.
I don’t know when that tipped over into something else, but I decided to take a chance and see if he was interested. He was.”
God, I could still remember the way my heart had nearly beat out of my chest the first time I’d kissed him.
We’d been in the basement at Alpha Tau, just the two of us, and Bobby had just said something outrageous, and when I’d stopped laughing, I found him watching me intently, dark eyes gleaming.
And just like that, the atmosphere between us had changed, crackling with anticipation, and when I’d stepped forward and pulled him into a kiss, he hadn’t resisted.
He should have. Because one of us should have, but I hadn’t been able to do it.
Even thinking about it now, my heart fluttered and my stomach twisted.
“So what happened?” Emily asked.