Chapter 22 Rachel
Currently Playing: Vienna by Billy Joel
***
Arthur wasn’t an easy man to convince.
I did an entire slideshow, in very large, bold font so he would be able to clearly read everything. I shared examples of small, inexpensive updates that would change the entire aesthetic of the place and definitely bring in new people. I also showed him how much money Layla had brought in sales from her book signing here and testified that if we could host more events, we would bring in more revenue.
None of it mattered, apparently.
“The fact that you did all of this means so much to me, kid.” I could hear the word “no” behind Arthur’s resolve. He wasn’t going to keep it. I knew that in the deep, deep crevices of my brain, and yet I still pushed myself to keep going and not assume the worst.
His sigh, the shake of his head and the way he lifted his hand to his brows, pinching them together, told me everything I needed to know. My plan wasn’t enough to keep it together.
“And I think you could do a really great job with the place.” Arthur let out a deep sigh, patting his leg. “But at the end of the day, I can’t keep up with it. Someone young, motivated like yourself is what this place needs.”
I leaned forward in my chair toward him. “Exactly. I could do it justice. I would never disrespect what you and Cheryl worked so hard to build.”
“Never thought you would, kid. You know this place better than I do, but unless you can come up with the funds to buy it or can speak to the next owner and maybe show him everything you showed me, it’s not possible.”
Except I knew how this was going to go: new owner, whole new building. Renovations all over, with no originality left until this place eventually turned into some cheap coffee shop with a million careless investors backing it. Believe me, if I’d had even a quarter of what the place was worth, the first thing I would have done was make an offer. But the truth was, I was barely making it now. Scraping the barrel to pay assisted living fees, grocery bills for two households, insurance, and a thousand other things. If I could manage to lift one of those expenses off me, then maybe it wouldn’t be as heavy. But they were all essential, and I was not about to leave my apartment to live with my dad. I loved the guy, but your girl needed some space.
“I’ll wait to list till the end of the year, all right? Give you some time to process and maybe find another place to go as a backup in case this one doesn’t work out. I’ll do what I can.” Arthur stood and gave me a brief side hug before walking out the front door.
So, just like most areas of my life, I watched Sip ’n’ Spin crumble away in my mind.
Because that’s what it came down to, right? Nothing good in life was permanent. Everything beautiful had an ending.
Dad’s diagnosis.
Mom leaving us.
My sister following immediately without even a goodbye.
Layla getting married and moving out. It was great for her, and I wanted nothing but happiness for her, and yet it still left a huge hole in my heart.
Now the one place that truly felt like my home was going to be sold to a stranger.
I stood from my chair and reached for my laptop, shutting it down and letting the bright PowerPoint turn into a black mirrored screen. Grabbing my keys and my tote bag, I locked up the front door, turned out the lights, and headed for the back exit. One of these days would be my last here, and when that day came, I knew it was going to be very, very dark.
Was anything in life permanent? Was any one permanent?
My phone rang as the thought crossed my mind. Adam.
I sniffled, knowing if I didn’t hold myself together until I got home, I was going to cry in front of him, and it was going to be incredibly uncomfortable.
Climbing into my car, I forced myself to answer.
“Hey.” I used the best I’m totally fine voice I could muster and straightened my chest up, lifting my chin as if he could see.
“What happened?” he answered, his voice this low baritone that resonated in my chest and sent goose bumps down my spine. “Who upset you?” I could have sworn I heard him grabbing his keys in the background.
For some reason, maybe because I was already on edge from a breakdown, or maybe because Adam had this sense about me, that response made me instantly tear up. My once barely watery eyes turned into flowing waterfalls as I tried to blink away the hurt behind them. I sniffled again before tugging at the sleeve of my sweater and using it almost like a security blanket against my cheek.
Adam paused his raging questions such as give me names, and it was almost like you could hear the cogs in his brain moving, realizing what today meant.
“He’s not keeping it, is he?” The disappointment in his voice matched what I felt in my bones.
“It’s stupid.” I sniffled, all snotty and weepy. “It’s just a store.”
“Not to you.”
Gah, this man. It was going to hurt far, far worse when I eventually lost him.
My head drooped as I pulled my knees close to my seat, trying to ignore the dig of the seatbelt into my thighs. Maybe I was overdramatic. I’d always had pretty big feelings when it came to the things I was closest to. I’d seen my sensitivity as a flaw until I realized it was what made me me. So maybe to some people, this would be a ridiculous thing to cry over, but Adam was right. This loss didn’t feel stupid or dramatic. It dug deep, like a blunt knife in my gut swirling around.
Adam let me cry for a moment before asking, “Can I…help?”
But what could he even do? If anyone was going to convince Art not to sell, it would be me, and I’d fallen flat in an instant. No one we knew was a billionaire who could drop that kind of money spontaneously.
I sniffed. “You can’t help. No one can help. All I can do is drown in my misery with Billy Joel and ice cream.”
And that was exactly what I planned to do. I had an in case of emergency Ben and Jerry’s sitting in my freezer calling my name. Time to put a record on and wash away my sorrows on my living room floor with a pint of cookie dough ice cream.
“Are you headed home now?”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to—”
“I’ll see you in thirty.”
A snort left me. My chest was already feeling lighter. “You do have magical hands, Adam, but I don’t think that would help right now.”
Lies. It would help. Well, temporarily.
I was pretty sure he mumbled something along the lines of “little perv” before speaking clearly. “I just meant to be there like…”
“As a bestie?”
“Please don’t say it like that.”
I smiled to myself and peeled out of the parking lot. “You’ll catch on to it soon, I promise.”
By the time I got home, Adam was already there, leaning against my doorway with his broad shoulders taking up a majority of the frame. He wore that gray shirt with his nephews’ soccer logo on it that I loved so much. It was cute how he never really said out loud how much he cared for them but showed it in tiny actions like that. Well, between that and him tattooing their names in their baby handwriting across his bicep.
I pulled out my keys and twirled them between my fingers, trying desperately to not look like a part of me was crumbling, but there was no point, really. The way that Adam’s shoulders dropped, how he sent me this sympathetic scowl, showed that he knew exactly what I was feeling.
Adam lifted one arm up and jerked his chin at me. Like I was going to pass up on that offer. I took long strides to reach him, then dipped under his arm and cuddled into his chest as he reached for my keys to unlock the door. With his arm around me, we walked into my apartment. His hold on me felt like it was the only thing holding me up, and maybe it was.
“Do you want to explain it all?” he asked when we got settled on the couch, my feet in his lap and an ice cream pint in mine.
“He’s going to list it at the end of the year. Arthur said he would try to convince the new owners to keep me on, but chances aren’t likely since they’ll probably want to bring more modern stores to match the rest of downtown.” I took my fancy spoon, one that was pretty small and had floral details on it—I saved it for special occasions—and dug into my pint. “But isn’t that the art of that place? The fact that it’s not like anywhere else? That you step in there and it’s as if you took a trip back in time? It’s incredible. I mean, to take that and toss it all away to sell fifteen-dollar cups of coffee makes me sick.”
Adam’s hand landed on my ankle, his thumb gently rubbing back and forth over my skin, heating me from the outside in. “Have you looked at working at another record store?”
I could. Philly was big. There had to be another place that would hire me with my experience but…
“No.” I forced my focus onto the ice cream in my lap. “It has to be that one.”
He fell silent for a moment. The only sounds were my spoon scraping the paper container and his thumb still rubbing against my ankle, sometimes giving it a light squeeze.
“Why?”
My heart began racing, my pulse picking up speed under my skin. Telling Adam why I had to work there would leave me bare, raw, open to any hits I might take when he left. Even Layla didn’t know, or my dad, technically, since he couldn’t remember.
I looked over at Adam. Kind, patient, yet broody Adam, who had never once lied to me. Never tricked me or played me. Never said a word that hurt me. If there was someone I could trust with this information, it would be him.
My arms stretched to set my barely touched ice cream on my coffee table as I walked to my now office. Instantly reaching what I was searching for, I grabbed a bag and walked back to the living room where Adam looked at me, puzzled.
“This is why.” I dropped the bag in his lap and took a seat next to him, our legs brushing against one another.
Adam’s brows scrunched, the lines in his forehead appearing as his lips twisted. He turned the bag full of broken vinyl back and forth, eyeing it curiously.
“It’s David Bowie’s Prettiest Star album. Pretty rare and an absolute beauty.” I sighed at the memory of when I opened it. “Dad got it for me when I was in high school, paid a fortune for it at Sip ’n’ Spin. The original owner said he actually had two copies. He gave it to me for Christmas, and I cried for probably a week.”
I wanted to laugh when I thought back on how I wore the thing out each day.
“It’s not like David Bowie was my favorite artist at the time, it just…it was the principal, you know? That even though he could barely pay the bills, he set aside that money so he could buy that, knowing how important it was to me.”
Adam eyed the smashed remnants of the record and twisted the bag to face me. “How did it break?”
“Mom was able to handle the diagnosis at first, she stayed with him while she worked and they got enough disability money from him to make ends meet. But as time moved on, Dad got worse. Paying the same bill twice, ordering things he didn’t need but thought he did, falling for random scams. One time he even was fully convinced someone was trying to break in at night and bought a crazy expensive alarm system. Mom got sick of it and eventually gave up. She left just like my sister did. She ran off to California, and Dad became solely my responsibility. She served him papers, and I was forced to witness.”
“The day she actually left, we got into a big fight. I told her she was incredibly selfish.” I scoffed a laugh. “I think I actually used every cuss word out there. She knew I was right. Knew it was wrong to leave a twenty-year-old in charge of her early onset dementia father, but she couldn’t face the truth. She got so mad at me she reached for the first thing she could find.” I reached over to tap on the broken record pieces. “And shattered it against the wall. Leaving in dramatic style, as always.”
Probably where I got my sense of drama from. She was also probably the reason I stored up treasures and liked to shop anytime I felt a pinch of stress. But if those were the only traits I’d gotten from the evil wench, then I would say I made it out okay.
Adam nodded, his fingers twisting the edges of the Ziploc bag. “So you figured that, by working there, searching all the new inventory, you could…”
“Find the other copy of it. Yeah.” I let out a humorless laugh. “Now that I say it out loud, that’s ridiculous. After so long, I kind of gave up. I have been through all of the inventory probably five times, and there’s no hint of it being there. I fell in love with working there and then…just left that dream to die. Gosh, it really is stupid.”
But at the time, it felt right. It felt like the only option for me, considering there was no way I could finish college. And if I was going to work a cashier job, it might as well be somewhere where I could possibly find the twin of my most valued possession.
“It’s not.” He shook his head. “Not even a little bit. It shows how much you care for the people around you. There is nothing ridiculous or stupid about that.”
A tear dropped to my cheek, and I immediately wiped it away. I hadn’t even realized I was beginning to tear up. If it was a valuable record, I would have let it go, but it was more so what it meant. My dad worked hard every day so I could have a happy and healthy life. Now it was my turn to do the same for him.
I shrugged, avoiding his gaze. “Doesn’t matter anyway. He’s going to sell, and I’ll have to go work an office job. Or maybe I could go work with you?”
My imagination ran to the thought of following Adam like a lost puppy, doing whatever lifesaving things he did. He’d get so annoyed with me. The smallest smile lifted at my lips.
Adam let out a laugh. A real barking laugh that bounced off my apartment walls and left him with this giant smile that I wanted to frame and put on my nightstand. He needed to do that more. I wanted to make him do it more.
“Yeah. Stick you in my pocket all day.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder, and he rested a friendly arm around my waist. “You’d always have music playing and snacks to eat.”
“Sounds better than my normal days.”
My laugh turned into a sigh. “Adam, seriously, what am I gonna do?”
“You’re not going to worry about it. You’re going to…have faith.”
Faith was one of those things I’d never been able to fully understand. Faith meant giving up control, and that wasn’t a luxury I could afford.
“How is a girl supposed to have faith when everything around her is falling?”
The only steady thing in my life was sitting next to me, rubbing slow, gentle circles on my hip. And even he would have to go one day. He’d eventually find a girl to wife up. One who didn’t like the whole girl best friend thing. I couldn’t even blame her. And I would be entirely alone. Again.
His throat rumbled. “That’s why it’s called faith. It’s…peace that makes no sense. Fly-fight-win.”
“What does that mean?” I tilted my head up at him, leaving our faces only inches apart. Instincts had my eyes dropping to his lips, the full, very soft lips that I remembered vivid details about and may or may not have had some lucid dreams of.
If he noticed me checking him out, he didn’t say anything. “It’s pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Adapt and overcome, and before you know it, everything just becomes…easier.”
I hummed, the vibrations running through his shoulder. “None of this feels easy.”
He nodded, the motion rocking me slightly as his hand raised higher on my back. It was a perfectly friendly caress, but that didn’t stop my heart from picking up pace. My libido apparently didn’t understand that friends weren’t supposed to get their engine revved by other friends. It was out of control.
“I get that. But you have good people around you to help.”
That made me smile ever so slightly. I lifted my head from his shoulder, looking into those forest green eyes. “Like you?”
This time, his eyes dropped to my mouth, and for a brief moment, I thought he might just lean in. But he didn’t. He simply cleared his throat and pulled back enough to get a full view of my face. “Yeah, like me.”