Chapter 11 Sam
I t didn’t feel awful that his eyes almost fell out of his head when he not-at-all-subtly checked me out. It would have felt better if he’d somehow devolved into a troll or something over the past six years. I looked him over quickly, taking my own inventory, and my nails dug into my palm of their own accord when I took in the addition of his tattoos.
The rest of him just looked so much bigger than I remembered. He still had shaggy blond hair, ocean-blue eyes, and the perfect summer tan, but he was all man-like now and decidedly not an eighteen-year-old boy. I didn’t know exactly what had happened with his baseball career, but just the muscles that were visible through his shirt were ridiculous.
Not that I cared . It was just an observation. He shifted his weight, almost looking uncomfortable, but I didn’t feel the need to be too covert in my assessment after his display.
“Jesse, how’ve you been?” My voice sounded abnormally light, but that’s how I’d practiced it that morning.
This is going swimmingly.
“Fine. Good.” I thought he might continue this super fun back-and-forth, but he seemed to decide against it and cleared his throat. “I’m not sure how much Laur told you about my situation or what exactly you needed my help with, so I just brought my laptop and figured I could be better prepared next time.”
Kind of a big assumption that there will be a next time . But fine, we’d get right to it.
He looked around silently to ask where we should set up shop. It made the most sense for us to go to Zin’s office, but I also remembered vividly the one and only time we were in that office together, and I could feel the pink splotches creep up my neck.
I might spontaneously combust in there .
His hands reached up to rub the back of his neck, and I could feel the same memory playing in his head. Damn it .
“Um, I still need to be up here if there are customers, so... let’s just clear one of these.” I started clumsily taking down Zin’s romance novel display from one of the small round tables, and he went to grab two of the mismatched chairs scattered around the shop before helping with the books. He chuckled softly as he skimmed the titles.
“ Destiny’s Captive and Lord of the Privateers.” I ignored him and continued to stack books on other shelves. “Which one of these is your favorite?” he asked, his tone serious but his face alight with something .
Was he seriously teasing me? Or worse, flirting with me? I simply stared at him blankly, hoping it would put the kibosh on whatever little game he was playing. He cleared his throat again, seeming to take a step back.
“I never noticed they are all shirtless,” he declared, bringing the conversation back from the edge.
What in the actual fuck is he trying to do here?
I pondered possible answers, none clicking with my gut, when I realized I’d been simply staring at him for far too long.
Shit .
“Oh. Romance covers? Yeah, they like their shirtless men,” I agreed, tossing him a book with a half-naked pirate on the cover. “This one’s good. It’s on the house.”
And what are YOU doing?!
My skin prickled with the delight of having shocked him, though. His crystal blue eyes looked up at me from his chair, his hands gripping the stupid pirate book like I’d just thrown him a life preserver.
“Thanks, I’ll get right on it. We can have book club when I’m done.”
And just like that, he’s back on top. I sighed at the loss of my brief victory.
“Right. Anyway. We can get started.”
I pulled my hair up into a ponytail before plopping down in the chair, and I tried not to react to feeling his eyes linger on my neck as he scooted his seat closer to mine. I pulled my energy shield tighter around me, knowing that if I felt the same aura around him I used to, I wouldn’t be able to maintain whatever semblance of professionalism I was managing. Whether that meant I would rip him a new one or climb into his lap was unclear.
“Right. So, um, Lauren said you’d be up for doing some design work for help setting up new software and an appointment booking platform on the website?”
“Yeah. Just tell me what you picture.” His eyes snapped up, and I was quite concerned that my own might fall out of my goddamned head. I wanted to swallow the words back up and start again. Those were some of the last words I ever spoke to him before it all burnt to the ground. I could practically see them hanging in the air above our heads now, threatening to fall and pop whatever precarious, polite little bubble we were in. His eyes remained on me, his gaze dropping to my lips and making me want to shift in my seat.
“In terms of the design. What you picture for the design, I mean.” I spit it out as quickly as I could, wondering if I would ever recover from that moment or if I should just crawl into a hole now.
“Right.”
He at least had the decency to camouflage his shock by biting the inside of his cheek, but the shift in the air was tangible.
Awesome. Way to keep control of the situation.
“Anyway, you know I took over at Garrett’s Hardware a little over a year ago?”
I nodded like that made complete sense, but I knew I looked confused. I knew his dad had a heart attack, so I guess it made sense that he needed to take over. But he went to college on a baseball scholarship and studied... I couldn’t remember.
Good. Unimportant. I filed those questions in a drawer labeled “Things I Don’t Need to Know About Jesse Garrett.”
“I never really planned to be in the hardware store business, but this is where I am, and well, Dad needed to step back, so I thought I could at least try to do it my way. Or something.” He shrugged, his voice flat.
That drawer of questions was trying to open, but I locked it in my mind.
“We needed to expand our reach beyond resident remodels here in Emberwood, so I started offering delivery to job sites in four surrounding towns within a ten-mile radius. That turned out to be a bigger sales bump than I thought—it seems contractors forget tools and run out of supplies kind of regularly. So, I tried to come up with ways to get even more tradespeople to use the service.”
“That’s actually a really smart idea,” I murmured. My mind was already turning, wondering how I could adapt that idea to the shop.
He leaned in and grazed my shoulder with his own. “I do have those sometimes.”
His breath ghosted down my neck and froze me in place. I may have been able to block out his energy, but his physical scent was the same. I’d once snuck into his and Lauren’s bathroom to see what kind of soap he used. It was called something dumb like “oak and amber,” which meant nothing, but it was woodsy and slightly sweet, and it sent a wave of nostalgia through the synapses in my brain.
“Sorry,” he muttered. He’d replaced the gap between us immediately upon me having some sort of fit like a Victorian damsel. Teasing had always been his go-to form of communication with me, but I didn’t think it would still be that way.
It isn’t . It isn’t the same, and he should be sorry.
But fuck it all, nothing in my brain felt angry. I forced the generic smile of professionalism to click back into place. The only option I had was to pretend it never happened.
“So. How does this connect with graphic design?” I leaned away from him and rested my cheek on my fist, desperately trying to project casual indifference.
“Oh, right. I would have gotten there, eventually.” He grinned, and I tried to glare so that he’d stop. “Patience, Sam.”
I rolled my eyes, annoyed with his ability to recover so much faster than me at this clusterfuck of awkwardness.
“Anyway, the contractors and trades I was working with were mostly dudes, and I wanted a way to get our name out there without having to spend a ton on advertising, so I figured if I gave out some shirts that the guys could wear on the job site that had the store name, word might spread faster. I started with just shirts with our logo, but then I kind of ventured into... other things?” He raised his eyebrows in what I thought was a sheepish expression.
“Okay? What kinds of things?”
“Like... t-shirts with some mildly suggestive sayings.”
I narrowed my gaze. “Like...?”
He rubbed his hand over his face and let out something between a sigh and a laugh. “Do you promise not to punch me?”
I only tilted my head. “I’m a big girl. I think I can handle your t-shirts.”
His look said, you asked for it . He reached down to the bag he’d carried in and pulled out several shirts. He held up the first one, and it read OUR TOOLS ARE HANDLED AT GARRETT’S HARDWARE in black block lettering. The next ones read MY TOOL COMES QUICK WITH GARRETT’S HARDWARE DELIVERY and ALL MY TOOL NEEDS ARE MET AT GARRETT’S HARDWARE .
I read over them slowly before letting a genuine laugh escape. I didn’t want to bolster his ego, but the shirts were genius.
“Okay, then. I understand what you mean now.” That professional ice was thinning just a bit, and I didn't know if I cared enough to re-freeze it.
“I know they’re stupid, but I got more new delivery customers in the two months after sending out these shirts with orders than I did in the eight months prior. So, there’s something there, even if they’re ridiculous.” He shrugged at me with apparently nothing else to say on the matter. “But this is where you come in.”
“I’m somewhat intrigued.” It wasn’t even a lie. This was the sort of project I loved.
“So, my request is really three things. One, I want a new logo that’s not so 1980s. I still want it to be prominent that it’s a family-owned business, but it just needs, I don’t know...”
“To still show that it’s an established company, but also like you didn’t make the logo on the first edition of Print Shop.”
He laughed at that, and it made me wonder if their logo really had been made that way.
“Exactly. That would be excellent. The second thing is that I want these sayings that I already have to look a little more professionally designed versus just black letters on a white shirt. Nothing too detailed. It should be a work shirt, just like it was put together by someone who knows what they’re doing.” I pointed at myself, and he just nodded. “And last, I want to make at least one shirt option for women. I’ve met some female electricians and contractors, and I want to expand my business the same way with them. I was thinking I DON’T NEED YOUR TOOL. I’VE GOT MY OWN FROM GARRETT’S HARDWARE . ”
I found myself laughing again, and a hesitant grin spread across Jesse’s face. “I like it. Honestly, it’s really good.”
“Yeah? Thanks. It’s, uh, kind of cool having someone to bounce ideas off of that doesn’t think I’m ‘tarnishing the Garrett brand.’”
His voice deepened into an amusing impression of his father, but I could tell he was a little bothered by it. I tried to think about how it would feel if Zin openly disapproved of something I tried to do at the shop, and I realized Jesse was probably more than just a little bothered.
“Hey—” I started, feeling the need to reassure him he was doing a good job.
He just raised his brows at me, and I chickened out. That was a more serious turn than I had planned on taking, and it shook me that he so easily made me forget my goal of detached and aloof .
“I...I can work with that and come up with some mock-ups to see if we’re on the same page. It’ll take me like a week?” I steered right back on course; glad I had said nothing else. But his eyes glinted with what might have been disappointment.
“That works. I’ll bring lunch next week, same day, same time?”
“Oh, um, that’s not... or I can email them to—”
“Sam. You have to eat, and so do I. It’s fine. Plus, we need to discuss the book.” He waved the romance novel at me tauntingly. My eyes rolled, hard, but he’d lightened the mood.
“Sure, right. Whatever works.” I shook my head in disbelief that I was agreeing to this. “But I haven’t read that one—just heard positive things. So, you’ll just have to give me a book report instead.” That was an abject lie. I’d devoured that novel at an age when it was not appropriate.
He stared at me with half-squinted eyes for a moment.
“If I didn’t know better, Sam Marsh, I would swear you were lying to me to get out of discussing the literary merits of... Pirates of Desire . But that’s fine because I’m going to give you the most detailed book report you can imagine. You might want to pop some popcorn.”
“Oh, good god,” I groaned, face falling in my hands.
“Love the enthusiasm. It’s a date.” My head snapped back to attention. “So now walk me through what kind of stuff you're hoping to update so I know how to help.”
What an asshole . Just throwing that stupid date comment in there before a legitimate work question.
I scowled at him but gave a bullet-pointed version of the inventory clusterfuck that was my aunt’s notebook system, my want for the website to have some sort of sales platform, online booking, and questions about creating a community mailer.
“Okay, yeah, I can help with all that stuff. I’ll start with the program I use for inventory–it’s connected to our payment platform, so anything we scan and sell comes automatically out of the inventory list.”
“Wait. Are you telling me I’ll be able to take credit cards without using that gods-forsaken carbon paper machine?”
He just huffed a laugh in disbelief. I got it. This store was like a relic of ancient retail lore. “Yes, that is what I’m saying. You’ll need just a basic computer, nothing super expensive.”
“Yeah, Zin ordered the one I told her to get. It should be here this weekend to replace the dinosaur.” I gestured to what was maybe the very first home computer ever sold that sat behind the counter.
“Great,” he said, standing. “Well, I’ll get out of your way, but I think this is going to be good, Sam. I...”
You what... I thought, holding my breath.
Instead of finishing that thought, he cleared his throat. Again.
“Thanks for the help. I’ll see you next week.”
The bell jingled in what I was certain was a mocking tone, and then he was gone.