Chapter Two
▲
Sonnet and Muse are also perfectly regular names. Obviously.
(Shut up.) (They’re pretty.) (Leave me alone.)
Poem
I met Fox’s parents about five years ago, back when Gilbert and Belinda Blackwood still owned the bar.
It had been two days since my younger sister’s eighteenth birthday, which meant it had been two days since she and I packed up everything we could fit into the trunk of my used, mildly beat up twenty-year-old Honda Accord and blasted as far away from our parents’ house as we could get.
Goodbye, abuse and terror; hello, freedom.
We, like our older sister before us, ended up in October, Tennessee, about two full tanks of gas away from where our parents live in Indiana.
Unlike our older sister, we didn’t have a plan.
Muse has always been the most responsible of us all, and when she left home, she’d had this place pinned on a map for ages.
She had a job lined up. She had a studio apartment waiting for her.
She had connections and acquaintances. She was settled into the town within a week. Sonnet and me? Not so much.
We thought we could come down here and count on Muse, like we had so many times before. Of course we didn’t need a silly plan. Muse was our plan.
And then we got here, and we saw Muse’s tiny studio. Saw that she was in no way set up to take on two grown adults who had no money, no foresight, and no idea what they were doing next.
So we lied.
We told her we had jobs set up and that we were staying at the local bed-and-breakfast until we found a place to rent.
We told her we had plenty of money, plenty of food, and plenty of anything else we could possibly need.
Her shoulders had dropped, losing the tension they’d held since she opened her door to us, and I’d known we were doing the right thing.
Muse got out of a terrible situation, found a cute little town, and set up a life for herself. We couldn’t slam into it and ruin everything she’d worked so hard for, not when we hadn’t done any work at all. It wasn’t fair.
So we watched a movie with her that night, then we bid her a happy farewell, went out to my car, and drove it to the Blackwood Brew parking lot. It was the only one in the area with security lights at the time, which made us feel safer, even with the amount of moderately drunk people around.
I covered our windows with blankets, quadruple checked that the doors were locked, and spent the night pretending to sleep so that Sonnet wouldn’t know how freaked out I was.
This failed spectacularly when, at around 3:00 AM, a loud knock on our window had both of us screaming, having neither been asleep at all.
I guess we’d both been freaked out and on edge, faking sleep so the other wouldn’t worry.
Ridiculous, looking back, for us to think we’d be sleeping soundly.
Of course we were freaked out. We were sleeping in my car in a strange new town in the parking lot of a bar we knew nothing about.
And—what we didn’t know then—in a town this small, a stranger’s car is something people notice.
We basically drove to the most crowded place in town and screamed, We’re not from here!
Belinda, once we stopped screaming, had kindly and patiently cajoled us into peeking out of our blanket curtains to see that she was only a sweet local woman, not a serial killer bent on making us their next victims. Twenty minutes of conversation through the window later, we somehow wound up inside the building sitting at the bar while Gilbert made us hot chocolates and Belinda reopened the kitchen, refusing to believe that we’d already eaten and insisting that a couple of cheeseburgers wouldn’t be amiss.
We learned pretty quickly that nobody argues with Belinda.
We also learned pretty quickly that Gilbert could get a story out of a rock.
“So we had to sleep in our car because we couldn’t bother Muse like that, you know?
We’re real sorry for trespassing. We just didn’t have anywhere else to go,” Sonnet concluded our sad tale after approximately thirty minutes in the man’s presence.
I’d watched on, mystified. He’d barely said three words to either of us.
How had he wrangled all of that out of her?
Magic. Clearly. The only answer.
I’ve been on the receiving end of that magic more than once in the past five years.
It’s how I got my job here at Blackwood Brew.
Gilbert, with barely more than a look, got me to confess that, despite what I was telling Muse, I didn’t actually have any job lined up or a single clue what I could even do.
I hadn’t gone to college, too scared to leave Sonnet on her own with our parents.
I hadn’t ever had a job for the same reason.
All the money I’d ever earned was from mowing our neighbors’ lawns and picking up their mail when they were out of town.
I wasn’t sure I even had any marketable skills.
Gilbert disagreed. He said anyone with two hands and two feet can do something, even if they have to learn.
And so I’d learned. How to get the really sticky stuff off of bar tables. How to count change fast. How to smack a wayward hand from an overly familiar guest. You know, all the basics of working in a bar.
It took me a while. I wasn’t good at math and I was even less good at sticking up for myself, but eventually I got there.
I was one of Gil and Belinda’s best workers, learning how to barback after I got the hang of serving.
I was working my way up quite nicely, getting raises as I went to support myself and Sonnet, who’d gotten a job as a personal assistant to the Mayor, of all people.
It had all the makings of a proper life glow-up montage.
Until Fox swooped in and ruined it.
He’d been off having a quarter-life crisis or something, riding a motorcycle around the country like some kind of vagrant.
When he got back to find me all cozied up to his parents, he did not approve.
He approved even less of the friendship that had been blooming between his sister, Almond, and I, or the way I’d been slotted into family game nights, taking what was apparently his rightful place.
Fox didn’t like a lot of things when it came to me.
Turned out, I didn’t like a lot of things when it came to him, either.
Not much has changed in the three years since he’s been home.
I’ve had to deal with his constant bad attitude—as if it’s my fault that his family loves me so much?
—and his frankly unprofessional behavior when it comes to interacting with me in the workplace.
Meanwhile, he’s gotten to experience the joy that is me messing with him in any way that I possibly can, because when Gil taught me to stick up for myself, he really taught me.
Old Poem would’ve quietly backed off, leaving Fox to regain his family without my “interferance” as he calls it.
New Poem, though? New Poem thinks Fox is a moron who should know that his family has enough love in them to give a little to someone new without it taking anything away from him.
I mean, seriously. Gilbert and Belinda have enough love in them that they could take in a hundred strays and still have plenty of love for him. And he should know that.
If he wants to act like a fool, though, I’ll treat him like a fool. Particularly if it means that I get a front-row seat to his parents giving him a good ole fashioned rebuke.
Heck, I’ll even make popcorn for it.