Chapter 33 – Beau
BEAU
I shove another piece of strawberry Pop-Tart in my mouth. I meant what I told Brinley. Pop-Tarts are an abomination that don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as pastries. That said, they’re a great foodish object to stress eat when you’re overwhelmed.
I sit back on Brinley’s couch and try to focus on the cooking show in front of me.
A bunch of pastry chefs are running around trying to create a massive cake shaped like a horse, which at the moment looks less like a horse and more like a three-legged cat.
Maybe I would think that was funny if I could get what today is out of my head.
It’s Nate’s birthday.
I wish I didn’t know that, but the date has been burned into my brain since the ninth grade.
I wish I didn’t know that across town, the guys are celebrating the same way we do every year—by watching Gladiator and drinking every time someone says “Rome.” Every year, we all get sloppy drunk by the time Maximus yells “Are you not entertained?” and spend the rest of the night fake sword fighting with umbrellas and broom handles.
This year, for the first time, they’ll be doing it without me.
I wonder if they’ll miss me at all.
Keys jangle at the front door and Brinley walks inside. A surprised smile blooms on her face, and for a second, I’m almost happy.
“Beau! I didn’t expect to see you here.”
I raise my brows. “Do you want me to leave?”
“Of course not!” Brinley says as she slips off her shoes at the door. “We just didn’t make plans for tonight, and it’s Friday, so I assumed you might go out or something.”
“That’s crazy. Who am I going to make plans with?” It’s supposed to come out like a joke. Instead, the words sound heavy.
Brinley’s jaw tightens. “You have people, Beau. You have your mom, and the people at Terrace. You have me.”
Shit, I didn’t mean to make her feel guilty. I plaster on a reassuring smile. “Yeah, I know. Right now, you’re the person I want to see the most in the world.”
She plops down next to me on the couch and snuggles against me. “How was your day?”
“Fine. Caught up on some paperwork for Velvet & Vice. Met with an interior designer to get a proposal for updating the booth fabric.” When I wasn’t wondering whether I should send Nate a present as a peace offering, or if he’d be pissed at me for pushing too hard. “What about you?”
“I actually just got back from the House of Cards,” she says with a forced casualness. I can’t help the way my body stiffens.
“Yeah? What were you doing there?”
She bites her lower lip. “I was actually with Cat and Pippa. They invited me over to explain.”
Bitter jealousy rips through me. It’s great that Brinley’s friends haven’t shut her out, but fuck, I wish I’d had that chance.
The group chat is still actively, conspicuously silent.
Ryan didn’t text me again, and neither did anyone else, no matter how many times I pick up my phone just to check.
Fuck, I’d hand over a year’s worth of Terrace’s profits for an invitation to talk to the guys again.
But I can’t put that on Brinley. It’s not her fault that my betrayal was somehow more unforgivable.
“That’s great, Brin.” I’m a shitty actor, and I know she can hear the forced cheerfulness. Both of us are pretending it’s all fine, even though nothing has ever been further from fine . “How did it go?”
“It went good, I think. They let me tell them I was sorry. They haven’t forgiven me, but they listened. I wasn’t able to stay long, anyway, because they were getting ready for?—”
She cuts herself off, but I know how the sentence was supposed to end.
They were getting ready for Nate’s birthday celebration. The girls were invited to Gladiator night this year. I wonder if Luke will make them wear togas. I wonder how they’ll get out of eating Ryan’s horrific homemade cake.
I wonder if they’ll miss me there at all.
Brinley shifts. She straddles me, her thighs hugging my hips, her torso pressed against mine, her hands cradling my face as she looks at me. “I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I know you wish you were there with Nate.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t bear the gentleness in her gaze, the softness that I don’t deserve.
“It’s okay, Beau. It’s okay to miss them. You don’t have to pretend.”
I shake my head. If I stop pretending, I’ll break. Brinley must read my mind because she brushes her lips lightly against mine. A soft reassurance that she’s here.
“Okay,” she says. “You’re okay. I know.” Then she runs her fingers through my hair. “You really need a haircut.”
Thank god she’s done pushing and willing to change the subject.
“Yeah. I should make an appointment.”
Brinley shifts so she’s no longer straddling me, but her legs are still across my lap. “What are you watching?”
“I think it’s called Cake Team Force or something like that.”
“What the hell is that cake supposed to look like?” she asks in disbelief.
I glance at the screen. The three-legged cat now has a long giraffe neck. “It’s supposed to be a horse, but now I think it’s some kind of Frankensteined zoo monstrosity.”
She shudders. “You should go on the show. Then I wouldn’t have to look at this…creature.”
“I’m a chef, not a baker.”
“Same difference.”
“Absolutely untrue. That’s like comparing a physicist and a chemist, or a vet and a human doctor. Technically, there’s overlap, but I could never do what they do.”
“Sure you could! You make amazing bread.”
I snort. “I can make a simple peasant bread. But if you ask me to make a complicated French pastry or, god forbid, a wedding cake? It would be a fucking disaster.”
Brinley considers. “How about a box brownie mix?”
“Perfect. Much more my speed.”
We watch as the bakers present their creation to a baffled Alton Brown, and I inhale the scent of Brinley’s shampoo. In this moment, I’m more settled and content than I’ve felt all day. I was going to wait until tomorrow to tell Brinley the good news, but I might as well do it now.
“I think I solved your landlord problem,” I say.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I bought the building.”
Brinley stiffens in my arms. “Why would you do that?”
“So you don’t have to worry about your lease. Nobody can push you out for writing Peppermint articles or anything else. It’s handled.”
She pulls back, looking up at me with furrowed brows. “You didn’t even ask me. You just dropped a few million on the building, just like that.”
“It’s fine, Brinley. I have the money, and my business advisor confirmed that it’s a good investment, even if you decided to leave the space for any reason. It was actually easier to buy than I thought. Whit wants to retire, and he accepted our first offer.”
“I don’t care about the money!” She pulls away from me, standing up and crossing her arms. “I care that you decided what happens to my business without you asking me. That’s not protection, Beau—it’s control.”
I shake my head. This isn’t how I thought things would go. I was trying to take a problem off Brinley’s plate, since she’s already facing so much. “I swear, Brin, I’m not trying to control your business. I was trying to do what was best for you.”
“How did you know it was best for me?” she snaps. “Do you think I would ever do something that would affect Terrace or Velvet & Vice without talking to you first? Would I ever interfere in your businesses?”
“No. You wouldn’t.” It would never even occur to her. She knows how important it is for me to feel in control of my restaurants.
“I built the Copper Cup by myself. It’s the thing I’m the most proud of, and now my boyfriend owns the walls around it. Now, it’s just another Beau Bishop project.”
“That’s not true. It’s still your business, Brin. I’m just?—”
“The man who owns it.” She sighs. “I don’t know if I can stay in the building if you own it.”
The room feels like it’s tilting underneath me. Trying to save Brinley’s business might have cost me our relationship—the only relationship I have left. “If it’s about the rent, we can work that out.”
“It’s not about the money. It’s about you unilaterally deciding what’s best for me.” She uncrosses her arms and looks down. She looks less angry than sad now. “I know you had good intentions, but—I think I need some space.”
My chest aches. Brinley is the only thing holding me together, and now she’s stepping back. Without her, I’m unmoored.
She must see the devastation in my face because she touches my hair again, a soft brush of fingers. “You don’t have to go home,” she murmurs. “Just let me sleep on it alone, okay?”
I nod. “Okay.”
There’s no way for me to fix this right now. I can’t undo buying her building, not tonight. She needs time to let the rift between us close—or just keep growing and growing.
I stare at the TV as the baking program changes to some show about rival winery owners.
It doesn’t matter, because I don’t take any of it in.
I just listen to the small sounds of Brinley going through her nighttime routine—brushing her teeth, washing her face, climbing into bed.
I know without seeing that she’ll read a book for a while, then drift off.
Hours pass, and I don’t move from the couch except to turn off the overhead lights. I should go home and sleep in my own bed, but I can’t bear to go back there. Not when I know all my friends are upstairs, celebrating without me.
Sometime after midnight, the cooking shows change to infomercials and I turn the TV off.
I’m not tired enough to drift off to sleep, though.
Instead, I pull out my phone to torture myself with my mostly empty inbox.
Only one email catches my attention—a Google alert summary for my name.
Apparently, dozens of articles have mentioned my name in the past twenty-four hours.
It’s obvious why. Brinley’s final post on the Toronto Tea has gone viral, being shared and reshared on every kind of social media platform.
It’s not a total surprise. She told me that she wrote it, but I was too busy wallowing in my own anguish to actually read it.
Since I’m not sleeping anyway, I open my browser and find the page.
I read the article more than once. It’s nothing that I don’t already know. I lived through the whole ugly ordeal, and I’ve either guessed or been told Brinley’s feelings about it.
That doesn’t make it any less impressive. She wrote her real story under her real name, and I couldn’t be prouder.
She was braver with one blog post than I’ve been in five years of silence.