Chapter 3
Chapter three
Clay
Life has become one irritating minor disaster after another, rolling slowly at the pace of this godforsaken backwater. My newest disaster’s footsteps echo, loud and angry, long after she storms out of the bar I do not own.
So I have a face to go with the name. Louisa Gallo.
I am fucked. I bluffed my way through that, but shit.
Two weeks ago, when I took down the tacky skull with obscenely long horns that hung over the kitchen door, I found a will inside, belonging to Rita Gallo, naming Louisa Gallo as her sole beneficiary.
I checked the dates on the will with a record of local obits, and the will was signed a few weeks before Rita Gallo died in a car crash.
Unless there was another will, Travis never owned the bar he sold me.
Of course, when I went to find Travis, he’d disappeared. I’d na?vely hoped that this Louisa Gallo had sold the bar to him sometime in the six or so years since Rita’s passing, but apparently not.
She was simply out of town.
Her cousin is an asshole. I knew that going in, but I needed a place to launder money as badly as Travis needed cash.
He’d been cagey, urged me to move quickly, and because it suited my purposes, I did.
And now I’m stuck with a woman who resembles a tatted, faded pin-up—all sultry curves yet sharper than a knife.
The reactions of some of the locals make sense now. Raised eyebrows and amused laughs, followed by a “guess we’ll see” after they discovered I bought the dive bar.
I follow Louisa downstairs, locking the apartment door and checking the office, the bar, the restrooms, and finally the parking lot.
She’s gone.
Good. I don’t want Louisa Gallo poking around upstairs and finding the money under the bed.
Shit, she’s going to notice the bar taking in higher-than-usual cash sales. I’m not sure I can keep her from looking at the books. Trying to stop her would only raise suspicions.
I scrub my hand over my face and go to the bar to pour myself another shot of bourbon.
I could walk away. The money I spent on this place is loose change considering the ten million under the bed.
I don’t need it. I could head south and buy another dive bar.
Buy a strip club, a laundromat, or whatever. Start over.
But I’ve made this place mine. Having Benji and Briar close is comforting in a way I don’t want to examine.
And while I never thought I’d feel safe in a small town, I do here.
To a point, anyway. Havenwood and surrounds are still a rural backwater, but there’s a faded rainbow flag behind the bar that was here when I bought it, and a sign at the front door informing the patrons that fascism and fascist symbols—certain red hats in particular—are not welcome inside.
The few times the sign didn’t deter bigots, the locals all went silent and stared until the shitheads left.
I might not be so lucky in another small town.
Besides, I’m only staying through the end of August. Surely I can survive two months of sharing the bar with Louisa.
She won’t contest my ownership. I’m good at reading people—something I can thank my shitty father’s volatile moods for—and Louisa Gallo was easier to read than a sweating Tristan Hunting holding a pair of threes. She suspects her deed might be a fake.
Everything about her screams she’s about to become a problem. There were bags under her eyeliner-smudged eyes, but those deep brown depths sparked fire, and she was as thorny as the rose tattoo climbing up her left arm and peeking out of the collar of that tight black t-shirt.
The way she stood there, rolling that cherry over her plump red lip so slowly and intentionally, was meant to get under my skin.
I ignored it, but I can’t ignore the red of her lips.
The shade isn’t a fire engine red, or a stop sign red.
Those reds are a warning. The shade on her lips is the danger itself.
It’s the poison, the slow drowning death of a soul-sucking beauty. Darker. Richer.
I toy with my shot of bourbon, then reach for the jar of cherries she left out.
I drop one into the glass, and the liquor flows over the rim.
It’s a mistake. I don’t need this. But I lift the glass to my lips and drain it, crushing the cherry in my teeth.
It’s cloyingly sweet over the smoky vanilla notes of the bourbon.
And now I know how she would’ve tasted.
I put our dirty glasses in the dishwasher, thoroughly disgusted with myself but unable to stop thinking about the taste lingering on my tongue.
I only suggested we fuck to get a reaction out of her.
There was no chance of her saying yes, and to be honest, sex is enjoyable but largely boring.
I’ve tried everything I’m interested in trying, and slept with every sort of person I’m interested in sleeping with.
There’s no excitement, no wonder, no intensity.
Fucking Louisa Gallo would be no different.
But the way those lush lips parted as she wrapped her small hand over my finger, the little zing of our first touch, the fire in her eyes…
I can’t deny that it affected me.
Or it was the after effects of making Kristen Donnelly come multiple times over the course of an hour while denying my own needs, and I should go remedy that before my new business partner decides to break back in through another window.
A loud banging at the front door jolts me out of whatever fog I’m under.
“Clay! I need your help! Open up!”
Benji.
There’s no one else it could be. I cross the bar and unlock the door. “What?” I say, my tone more snappish than intended.
Benji grins at me, oblivious. “I’m getting married today—”
“God, why? You’re already married.”
“Doing it again,” he says brightly. “Can you help me tailor Milo’s suit? You’re better at it than I am.”
I glance behind him, and sure enough, the lumberjack is sitting in the driver’s seat of the rusty old truck he shares with Benji’s wife. The three of them must have finally sorted out their mess.
I’ve got months’ worth of accounting to go over, numbers to wiggle. Benji isn’t my friend, and his wife is a stranger. But I’m irritated. Twitchy. I don’t want to sit down at her desk and look at numbers in that stuffy little office, and there’s nothing else to do.
“Do you have a sewing machine?” I’m bored but I’m not hand sewing shit.
“No.” He frowns. Then looks thoughtful. “Wait, I think I can get one. Can you be at Gina’s in half an hour? And you’re invited to the wedding, too.”
“I’ll help with the suit,” I say grudgingly, “but I’m not closing the bar for a wedding.”
I hate weddings. Why on earth anyone would want to attach their fate to another human legally is beyond me.
People use each other. Sometimes it’s mutually beneficial—I smile at Kristen Donnelly as she walks by with another woman, and the smile she returns is polite and distant, precisely what I want from her now that our business is concluded—but most of the time, it’s not.
Years go by. One partner slowly strips the other of everything, who allows it in the name of love.
Or the person they married can no longer give them what they wanted, so they simply take everything.
Benji and Gina look happy. They’re swaying to music in the middle of the dancefloor set up under the marquee, smiling at each other in the warm glow cast by hundreds of vintage string lights and oblivious to the world around them.
There’s something so genuine and down-to-earth about both of them.
They might escape the fate that awaits everyone else down the aisle.
Good for them.
Did Grace smile at Tristan on the dance floor the day of their wedding? Did she look into his eyes and believe the lies he told her at the altar? Grace was intelligent, perceptive—how did he fool her?
I wasn’t invited to the lavish, private wedding. I hadn’t even known she’d been married until her obituary.
Grace fit into that world of sparkling wealth in a way I couldn’t. At social events, she moved through the circling sharks with ease, networking with a shining smile and a tinkling laugh, charming all the predators.
She’d always been good at blending in, at doing what was expected of her, so she’d slide under our father’s radar. She was five years my senior, the product of my father’s disastrous first marriage, but she was always my protector, my confidant. The only one in the world I ever truly trusted.
“It’s a game. Play it well enough, and Daddy Dearest will leave you alone.
” She’d told me once, after finding me outside the service entrance at the Hartley-Winthrop wedding, swigging from a pilfered bottle of Taittinger after I’d suffered yet another public lecture on how much of a disappointment I was.
“Stop sulking in the shadows and make it a challenge. He wants us to be the perfect family, to show off our accomplishments to his friends and impress prospective business partners, so let him. Meanwhile, you and I will have a little race. The first person to get a business card off a man in a Brunello Cucinelli suit wins.”
I’d scoffed, but she was right. Turning everything into a little game I played by myself made it not only tolerable but enjoyable.
It took control away from my father and gave it to me.
And I was winning the game, until my control slipped and hubris got in the way.
But when my father disowned me, I walked away from that world.
From Grace, too, because she was part of that world.
Because I was scared she’d be disappointed in me. And it was easier to leave.
I should have tried. I would have recognized Tristan for what he was. I could have kept her safe. Been there for her through the treatments. At the end.