Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Lou
I drop the plate back onto the table, and I’m out the door like a shot, running through the gravel parking lot, zig-zagging around haphazardly parked vehicles.
By the time I reach the highway, my ex is long gone.
My shoulders slump.
He’s really back. I had doubts. It could’ve been a cousin or his brother that Dawn saw driving his truck. I wasted my Sunday morning looking for him. I wasted a lot of time looking for him, but that hurts a lot less than the time I wasted with him.
It’s a stab to the back all over again. He’s been in town for at least a few days, and he hasn’t come to Gallo’s to try to make things right.
He stole my time and my money, and somehow I don’t matter to him?
I don’t warrant an excuse or an apology?
I don’t even scare him so much that he’s afraid to come back. It’s like I’m nothing.
I am not nothing.
“What’s wrong?” Clay asks, jogging up to me, concern in his voice.
My fists are clenched at my sides, and I force my hands to relax. “My ex.” I turn, striding back to the bar. What more is there to say? The man I foolishly trusted wasn’t worth it. What a surprise.
Clay follows me inside and behind the bar. “You saw him?” he asks, gently touching my arm.
I give a tight nod because, actually, I have a lot to say, and if I say any of it, I’m going to fall apart—and I cannot fall apart. I have a bar to run.
Clay steps in closer, dropping his voice. “Want me to take care of him?”
That would make me laugh, if I were capable of it, but I don’t even know what that means. Is he going to fight Hayden? That’s ridiculous. Hayden would clean the floor with him. I doubt Clay has ever been in a fist fight. I can’t see him risking his nose getting bloodied. Might ruin a shirt.
When Clay touches my arm again, I shake my head. He withdraws, but the concerned look doesn’t leave his face, and maybe I’m never going to fucking learn because I think he’s genuinely worried about me.
“Why don’t you take the rest of the night off?” he suggests. “Briar and I can handle the bar.”
God, the last thing I want is to be alone with my thoughts in that camper. “I’m fine.”
“A break then. Go sit in the office.”
I force a laugh, “Do I look that bad?” As soon as it’s out, I realize I’m on the verge of tears. Shit. I try blinking them back.
“You look like you need a minute,” he says in a quiet tone. “Take it. You can go upstairs if you want.”
My sniffle dies in mid-air as I stare at him. He’s going to let me be alone in the apartment with his ten million dollars? Does he trust me not to snoop?
Oh, shit, now I feel bad for snooping. Tears are burning at the possibility that this lone wolf of a man might trust me.
“No,” Clay says, distress on his face.
Did he forget about the money? Is he changing his mind? But instead of retracting the offer, he cups my face. I freeze as his thumbs sweep under my eyes.
“Stop it,” he says soothingly but with obvious discomfort. “No crying.”
His hands are so gentle. My vision swims as the tears really start to flow. Why is he being so kind? Shit, I must have reached a new low in pathetic to get this response out of him.
His lips purse together, and he blows a stream of air directly into my face.
I startle, blinking the tears away. “What the fuck”—I whisper—“was that?”
Clay’s mouth opens, but quickly closes, his eyes going wide as his hands drop from my face. Like he just realized what he did.
“Did you try to blow my tears away?” I try to keep the bewildered smile off my face as I blot at my eyes with the backs of my hands, but what the actual hell? “Have you never comforted a crying person before?”
He runs a hand through his hair, looking incredibly unsettled. “No, I guess I haven’t.”
“So your first thought was to blow in my face? Were you raised in a forest by wolves or something?”
“Clearly yes. I so love the outdoors,” he says dryly. But then he adds, “No one in my family cried. Ever.” He glances to the side, probably looking for an escape. A fake grin spreads across his face when his eyes land on something across the bar. “Oh, good. Your friends are here.”
He spins me and marches me out to meet Gina, Benji, and Milo. “Louisa needs moral support and a fifteen-minute break.”
His warm hands disappear from my shoulders, and I don’t need to turn around to know he’s running back to the safety of the bar.
“Clay is terrified of a few tears,” I say when Benji’s puzzled gaze follows his old coworker. But to Gina and Milo, I say, “Hayden drove by the bar.”
Gina wraps me in a hug, and then I’m crushed from behind. The scent of high-quality weed and patchouli-heavy perfume tells me Gina’s mother, Dawn, overheard that.
“Come on,” Dawn says when the three of us disentangle. “I’ve got something that will help.”
Getting good and stoned sounds like a brilliant idea right now, so I follow Dawn out the door. Gina tags along, but we lose Benji and Milo somewhere along the way.
We end up by the old picnic table out back, where Rita used to take her smoke breaks.
Dawn rummages through her massive handbag, pulling out a couple of packets of sausages she won while Gina remarks that she seems to be a second-time born-again omnivore.
But it doesn’t take her long to find her little cigarette case filled with joints she expertly rolled sometime earlier.
Gina waits, kicking at rocks as Dawn and I sit on top of the picnic table, passing the joint back and forth in silence. “So what are you going to do?” she finally asks.
I blow the smoke into the sky, well away from Gina. “Ask him where my money is, I suppose.”
“He’s already spent it,” Dawn insists, taking the joint and waving it in the air.
Hayden isn’t what I’d call fiscally responsible, but he also isn’t a wild spender like Travis.
The truth is, Hayden caught me so off guard by running off with my money that half the reason I tried to track him down was out of worry.
That worry dwindled once the shock wore off and the betrayal burned away whatever love I might have had for him.
Now I just want my money. And Hayden on his knees in tears.
“Maybe he’s here to give it back and chickened out when he saw the bar,” I suggest without any confidence. Even Gina looks doubtful at that, and Dawn openly scoffs.
The back door opens, and Benji steps out, followed by Milo, who is scowling. Benji grins as they join us and hands me a drink.
“Clay thought you might need some sugar,” Benji explains.
I take a cautious sip. It’s a cherry Coke, no booze, but at least ten maraschino cherries are crowded around the ice. It can’t solve any of my problems, but it helps.
Gina’s watching me closely as I set the glass on the table next to me. “You two are getting along better.”
I don’t know why my gaze flicks to Milo, but it does. He tilts his head in a look that’s as much disappointment as it is judgment. He’s laundering money through your bar—how could you?
“He’s not all that bad,” I say.
“He only acts like an asshole,” Benji agrees with a nod.
“But in Vegas, he always made sure the new guys understood how to treat everyone in the audience and how to stick to our own boundaries. He’d go over the choreography as many times as he had to without getting frustrated.
And he always helped with the mending or anything else that needed to be done. ”
“He’s very easy on the eyes,” Dawn says before taking a drag on the joint.
Maybe it’s the weed, but we all look at Milo. Benji, Gina, and Dawn probably expect him to say something complimentary about Clay. I’m waiting to see if he’ll expose the money laundering. But Milo’s eyes are out on the lake. Finally, he shrugs and says, “He’s been good to Briar.”
The only pair of eyebrows that don’t shoot up at this are Dawn’s.
“With her schedule,” Milo amends, scowling at us. “Since she’s working at Happy Lake, too.”
Gina’s eyebrows go up a little higher, and she opens her mouth, but Benji touches her hand and shakes his head slightly.
I take the joint from Dawn and throw Milo a lifeline. “He bought me sex toys.”
Dawn tips her head back and laughs loud enough to cover the choked noise Gina makes.
Maybe there’s a bit of a contact high for the three who aren't getting stoned, because the conversation drifts after that, hitting classics like every generation’s bi-awakening movie and what the colors of the sunset would taste like.
Everyone goes with the slow flow of stoned time, and fifteen minutes stretch into an eternity.
Briar comes out to tell Benji and Gina that their takeaway order is ready.
They bid everyone goodnight and head back to Happy Lake, while Briar returns to the bar.
Milo sticks around. He came on his dirt bike, cutting across the highway from one of Happy Lake’s many trails.
Was that deliberate, so he wouldn’t get wrangled into giving Briar a ride back?
Taking a passenger on a trail in the dark is risky.
Then again, maybe he’d risk it just to feel her wrapped around him.
Dawn lies back on the table to stare up at the deep blue slowly chasing the sunset across the sky. Milo glances at her, then moves to stand close to me.
“You know it’s a mistake,” he says.
I don’t need him to explain. He’s picking up the conversation where we left it. Clay. Or, more likely, Briar. He needs to hear what he’s saying to me, echoed back to him. “It always is,” I say with a sigh. “But one day it won’t be.”
He snorts in disbelief.
“If you never try, you’ll miss out.”
“Do you really believe that?”
Do I? I think I’m just making excuses. I shrug. My body is loose and warm in the best way. A thin little breeze lifts a few stray hairs from around my face, and I close my eyes to the gentle caress. “Well, he can’t empty my savings, anyway.”
“What about Gallo’s?”
A chill runs through me. “Maybe losing my bar wouldn’t be the worst thing.
” When I open my eyes again, Milo’s staring at me, slack-jawed, and the weight of that admission presses down on me.
Gallo’s is my home. Rita fought her ex for it, Loretta held it while her world fell apart, and Marcella made it what it was despite the odds being against her.
And me?
I’m barely holding my own, and life hasn’t thrown me anywhere near as big a curveball as it did them. Maybe I don’t deserve their legacy.
Milo doesn’t say anything, but after a moment, he shakes his head, mumbles something under his breath, which I take for a goodbye or goodnight, and walks back towards the bar.
“That man is a mess,” Dawn remarks once he’s gone. “I’m eternally grateful that Gina married the hot stripper instead.”
I glance at her. Gina’s mother is lying with her hands behind her head, bathed in the fading golden light of the sunset, her eyes closed. “Benji is good for her,” I say.
Dawn smiles up at the sky. “You’ll find someone good for you, too.”
Considering the curse, that’s not reassuring.
Silence wraps around us. I rest my chin in my upturned palm, my elbow propped on my thigh, and stare at my bar. “I miss her.”
Dawn sits up and places her thin hand between my shoulder blades.
She doesn’t need to ask who I’m talking about.
“Me too,” she says with a deep, bone-weary sigh I’ve seldom heard from her.
“Rita was the best. Not afraid of a goddamn thing. Stared down bears and drunk men alike. Slapped the sheriff once when he threatened to shut down the bar. Told him she’d make sure his wife found out about the twenty-year-old side piece in Duluth if he did. ”
The stories people tell about Rita could fill a book. I’ve heard them a million times, sometimes from my aunt’s mouth too, when she was still alive, but there’s something familiar and comforting about hearing her friends talk about her now that she’s gone.
Dawn carries on with the greatest hits while I reach for my cherry Coke.
The ice has melted, watering it down, and my thoughts meander to the man who sent the drink out to me, who blew in my face to stop my tears, and has bought me groceries, sex toys, and a new phone, but still believes he has nothing to offer me.
He’s already done a lot more for me than Hayden ever did.
Someone walks around the corner of the bar, and I frown. It’s Reed, making a beeline for the dumpster.
“Go home,” I yell at him.
He startles, waves at us, then runs that hand through his hair, looks around like he’s just realized where he is, and walks back the way he came.
“He’s up to something,” I mutter. Is he looking for something? Something Travis left behind?
The back door opens, and this time Clay steps out, full trash bag in hand.
We watch him walk over to the dumpster, lift the lid, and toss the bag in. I don’t expect him to walk over to us, but I’m not surprised when he does.
“Evening, Dawn,” he says with a nod. “Deirdre’s looking for you.”
Dawn slips off the table with a murmured shit, then walks toward the parking lot, a little wobbly, where Deirdre is talking to a couple of locals.
“That was a long fifteen-minute break,” Clay says, eying me critically.
He’s the bossy asshole who sent me out here, so if that fifteen minutes turned into an hour, it’s his fault.
“My boss is a dickhead,” I say, leaning back and looking up at the sky. Maybe I’ll stay out here until the mosquitoes come out to drain me dry. The sky is too pretty to waste. I can practically taste the lemon sorbet. It’s more blueberry now.
His feet tangle with mine as he leans on the table. I have the briefest sensation of falling back as he looms over me, but it’s just the weed in my system. Dawn always has the best stuff.
The falling sensation reverses abruptly as he picks me up. An oof escapes my lips as he tosses me over his shoulder.
“Your boss is you,” he says, one hand resting across my ass, the other banded over my thighs. I’m probably imagining it, but I swear the light stubble of his cheek scrapes against the skin of my leg below the hem of my shorts just before his lips press a whisper of a kiss on my thigh.
“Dawn has the best weed,” I say, propping my chin in my hand and my elbow against his back as he carries me into the bar.