Chapter 7
7
KOLIB
“ Y ou idiots better tip well since you’re taking up my entire bar on a Friday night,” Malcolm joked from the opposite side of the butcher block counter.
The boys and I were posted up at the restaurant he managed and was a bartender at, giving him a hard time and enjoying the warm fall evening. My friends and I always tried to see one another as often as we could, and since Hank and Bailey were doing something tomorrow night, we all agreed to meet up tonight to hound Malcolm while he worked.
“Here’s a tip, start showing up to campaign night on time,” Conrad mocked from his barstool. Hank gave Conrad a shove from his stool and laughed.
“Dude, you need to let that go.” Malcolm rolled his eyes at Conrad while he wiped a glass clean. “You know that stress lowers your libido, right?”
“Only you would know that, Malcolm,” Hank chuckled.
“What can I say? I’m a likable guy and I do what I can to make sure that I stay likable.” Malcolm grinned towards us. We all loved the guy, but he wasn’t the type who shied away from loving freely. The last time I checked, his body count was almost double mine.
Not that it mattered.
“Don’t worry, brother, I always tip well,” I added, trying to bring the conversation back to safe grounds. I wasn’t shy talking about sex, but talking about it in a very public setting wasn’t my speed.
“Kolb, how’s that new family treatin’ ya? I’ve heard about them through some of the bartenders here, what’s their name again? Sullivan?” Malcolm wondered after taking a drink order from someone standing behind us. How he managed to take orders, make drinks, manage the bar, and hold a conversation with us I’ll never know. He was one of the smartest guys I knew and the way his brain worked always fascinated me.
“The Sinclairs,” I corrected. “They’re fine. They will be more of Hank’s problem than mine. It’s his team that’s overseeing their security for the foreseeable future.” I had assigned Hank and the men he oversaw to be the team to support the Sinclairs over the next several months because I knew he would do a good job.
“Yeah,” Hank scoffed, “Thanks for that. Susan has already emailed me twice trying to convince me they need around the clock security at their home. The campaign hasn’t even officially kicked off and she’s convinced someone is going to try and kidnap her or her daughter. What’s her name again?”
“Magnolia,” I answered. Her name felt like silk on my tongue and just saying it brought back the image of her standing in front of me and how the top of her head hardly reached my chest. How when she called me ‘Jack,’ I felt my core get a little warmer. I blinked a few times and looked at my friends who were all staring at me. “What?”
“Why’d you say her name like that?” Conrad gave me a look.
“Like what?”
“ Magnolia, ” Hank dropped the pitch of his voice and dragged her name out slowly before laughing hysterically from his stool.
“I didn’t say it like that.” I squinted at him.
“Uh, yeah, dude, you did.” Malcolm chuckled behind the bar, shaking his head at me. His tattooed arms and hands were preoccupied with the glasses he was wiping down before making another drink.
“I just said her name. You asked what her name is, so I told you. That’s it. The Sinclairs are fine people, albeit a little needy, but they’re the largest client we’ve signed so we will do what they ask of us. Can we talk about something else? It’s the weekend and I would rather not have to think about work.” I took a long pull of my beer, finishing my glass and pushing it back towards Malcolm for a refill.
My friends eyed one another before he took the empty glass off the counter and went to refill it. Picking up on my desire to move on, Hank and Conrad turned to talking about whatever basketball game was playing on the TV behind the bar.
I didn’t say her name in any kind of way, did I?
I scrubbed my face with my hand and told myself to shake off the feelings that I could feel creeping in every time I thought about her. The feeling that I hadn’t been able to shake since I nearly ran her over a week ago. Or since I saw her at her house a few days ago.
But she was the daughter of a client, a very important client. And that’s what she would remain as.
Just a client.
I tossed my keys into the bowl that sat just inside my front door and kicked off my shoes before locking it behind me. My friends and I had hung out at the bar for a few hours until Hank had to leave to go pickup Bailey. Conrad and I left with him and waved goodbye to Malcolm who had the closing shift. As I walked into the kitchen, I saw that the clock read eleven forty-five and I was suddenly hit with the exhaustion from the week.
My work kept me busy and a lot of the time I did a good job of not letting it get to me. In the early days of growing Sweetgrass Security, it was just me and a few men I had been able to hire on. I worked fifteen hour days almost daily and rarely had time for anything else. While I was at the point now that I could work a standard forty hour week, the weight of it all still sat heavily on my chest. I took what I did seriously, not just for my clients, but for the people I hired too. If anything went south in the business, it wouldn’t just be my life that was impacted, it would impact the people I employed as well. They were like family to me and I never wanted to do anything to let them down.
Sometimes the weight of it all almost crushes me.
I blew out a breath and headed upstairs to shower and head to bed. Tomorrow was Saturday, which meant I would get up early and take my board out for the first time all week. Skateboarding was something I loved doing as a kid but rarely had time for now. Maybe I would head to the skatepark tomorrow instead of riding around downtown for once. I haven’t hit up the skatepark in a few weeks and the thought of flying through a halfpipe sounded like just what I needed.
Once the water was running in the shower, I stripped out of my clothes and stepped in. The hot water hit my back as I closed my eyes and tried to let the stress of the week fall off my shoulders. Running a multi-million dollar business had its perks, but it was also a lot of fucking work. Most of my week was spent fielding phone calls, doing personal consults in people’s homes or businesses, or sitting in on meetings with the different department leads. I was always on while I was working, which was part of the reason I valued the time with my friends so much. They let me cut loose, just be , and turn my brain off for once. More like my brothers than my friends, they were some of the most important people in my life, behind my actual family.
As I showered, I ran through all of the events from the week. My schedule had been thrown off because of the last minute meeting with the Sinclairs, making the second half of my week completely insane. As soon as their name popped up in my head, her face came to the front of my mind. Thin and slender with perfectly appled cheeks, her sage green eyes round and wide. She had soft pink lips and dark, shiny hair that fell down her back. It reminded me of expensive silk and I wanted to know what it felt like to run my fingers through it.
Stop. Stop thinking about her like this. I crushed my eyes shut and tried to push the image of her out of my mind. She’s a client, a very important client. You cannot be thinking about her like this . For the second time in one night, I rubbed my face with my hands and tried to shake off the feelings that were bubbling up in my chest. I couldn’t see her as anything more than a client, it would be unprofessional of me to.
Knowing that if I stayed in the shower too much longer, the thoughts of her would come back like a freight train I’d be unable to stop, I turned the water off and stepped out. Quickly drying off, I threw on some shorts and got into bed before my mind could wander.
Magnolia Sinclair was a client and she would stay as just a client.
If that were true though, why was I so hard and why was the way I wanted her starting to feel like more than strictly professional?
My eyes were heavy and I’d been dreaming about a girl with a tiny frame and long, dark hair holding herself up on her hands and knees in front of me when I heard my phone buzzing on my nightstand. I tried to ignore it and let it go to voicemail, hoping to slip back into the pure fantasy that I’d been in while dreaming. But it rang again and when it did, it pulled me out of my dream completely. The image of her faded from my mind as my eyes opened slowly and my hand reached for the phone. It was one fifteen in the morning and the number on the screen wasn’t one I recognized. I slid my finger across the screen to answer it.
“Hello?” my voice was groggy as I was still coming out of sleep.
“J–Jack?” the voice on the other side slurred and came out as a plea. Jack? Who’s Jack? I think someone had the wrong number.
“Who is this?” I looked at the number one more time and sat up in bed.
“Jack,” the voice slurred again. “Jack, I–I don’t know how to get home. I think…I think I’m maybe lost? I can’t be lost, I’ve lived here my whole life!” A fit of giggles came from the other end of the receiver.
“You said I could call if I needed anything, I think I need something, because I’m pretty sure I’m lost. And very drunk. This is all Maragaret’s fault, I didn’t even want to go out tonight. Can you come get me, Jack?” Her words were slurring together and when she called me Jack for the third time, it dawned on me that this wasn’t a wrong number—it was Magnolia. I leaped out of bed and hurried towards my closet to throw on a shirt and grab my shoes. My heart was suddenly racing and it wasn’t because of the dream I’d been having.
“Magnolia? Where are you?” My voice came out more urgent than intended and I tried to take a breath. I could tell she was more than drunk and by what she was telling me, alone on the streets somewhere downtown.
“I…I don’t know. Somewhere on King, I think? I lost Margaret, she was with me but now I don’t know where she is. I think she left and I’m alone.” She stumbled over her words as I frantically hurried down the stairs towards the front door. “Daniel is such an asshole, doesn’t he know what he’s lost? I mean, I’m a Sinclair! I’m the greatest thing that could have ever happened to him. And he just threw me away like last week’s leftovers!” I could hear the hurt in her voice and the way it pitched up told me she was holding back tears. My heart squeezed hearing how hurt she was.
“I know, he’s an asshole,” I tried to soothe her over the line while also trying to mask the anger I felt towards a man I’d never met. How could you be such a complete moron and fumble on a girl like her? Says the man pretending he only sees her as a client as he scrambles around the house at one in the morning to go rescue her. I shake the intrusive thoughts out of my head and take a breath before speaking again.
“Look around Magnolia, where are you? What do you see?” I was already grabbing the keys to my car so that when she told me where she was, I’d be gone.
“I see….I see the water. Ow!” She sees water? That could be any number of places on King Street. Before I could ask her to be more specific, I heard what sounded like her phone falling to the ground and some scuffling.
“Magnolia? Are you okay?” I’m frozen where I stand, yelling into the phone and waiting for her to answer me.
“Jack? Ow, that really hurt. I think, I think I’m bleeding? Oh, that’s not good. That looks really not good.” This girl was all over the place and the thought of her being hurt and alone at 1:00 a.m. in downtown Charleston made me uneasy.
Because she was a client.
Only because she was a client and she was in danger of getting hurt.
“Magnolia, stop. Listen to me. You said you see the water, what else do you see?”
“Maybe I don’t see the water, is that water? Wait a second, hold on…” I waited with baited breath as she stumbled over her words some more, trying to organize her drunken thoughts to tell me where she was.
“I see the old pharmacy building with the big blue sign. Do you know where that is?” Her voice came out low and her words slurred even more the longer we talked. I could just picture her stumbling down King Street trying to figure out how to get home. I jumped in my car and turned on the ignition, ready to get to her as fast as I could.
“I know exactly where that is, don’t move. I’m coming to get you, flower.”