Chapter 16
16
Kieran
I flipped the sign in the shop window to the side reading “Closed” and heaved a sigh as I double-checked the lock on the door. The bell hanging above it had been constantly ringing since we’d opened. I’d had to grudgingly admit to Lila that this wasn’t the worst idea, even though the lie still ate at me.
“Probably feels a little strange to close up so early after your late-night-donut experiment, huh?” Tom was perched in his normal spot at the counter across from Granddad, who’d decided medical advice no longer applied to him. He was keeping his promise to stay seated by the register, though I suspected when I ran off to let out Mrs. Nguyen’s dog, he’d get into the kitchen. Behind him now, the trays, our only storage until the display case was replaced, were empty. The last two crullers had been snapped up by two people on their way to the bar across the street after work. “You might just have to get yourself a life, kid!” Tom’s deep laugh was as familiar to me as the sound of the coffee brewing, and I gave him a wan smile.
“I think I’d like to see that,” Granddad said, folding his arms over his chest and nodding to his best friend. “Tom was never so considerate about overnight guests when the two of us were roommates years ago,” he added with a chuckle.
“Wait. Considerate like he’s quiet or considerate like he’s alone?” Tom smacked the counter at his own joke, and the two laughed at me again. Truthfully, it was good to see Granddad laugh again, even if it was at my expense. “Never mind, Joe. I don’t even need to ask. This kid is alone. But maybe that’s about to change with this new woman in his life…” Tom waggled his eyebrows suggestively, a move that, when delivered by a seventy-six-year-old man with bushy eyebrows and a matching white mustache, was anything but sexy.
“My nightlife aside…” I joined them at the counter. “This rush of people won’t last, but after the break-in and everything with the ticket, it has been nice to get steady business.” I hadn’t heard from Sybil since we went to the lottery office a couple of days earlier, but Stewie had posted the photo he took when I was trying to calm her, and every third customer had mentioned it. Tom and Granddad brought it up enough on their own that their eyes basically had hearts over them. “Don’t worry about me abandoning you to go clubbing anytime soon,” I reassured them.
“I can’t imagine you’d know what to do in a club,” Granddad mused, finishing his coffee.
“Probably ask ’em to turn down the music.” Tom laughed at his admittedly solid dig. “Hopefully your new lady will make sure they turn it back up. You need a bit of bump and grind if you ask me.” Tom did an exaggerated body roll, smacking the back of his old Levi’s, earning a belly laugh from Granddad.
“I really don’t need to hear either of your thoughts on bumping and grinding.” I pulled the cleaning supplies from behind the counter, scanning the tables for trash before starting the process. “Granddad, you want a hand getting upstairs?”
He shook his head and nodded to Tom. “What good’s an old friend if he can’t help you up the stairs?” He clapped Tom on the back and walked to the bathroom off the right side of the shop, leaving Tom and me alone.
I topped off his mug before dumping out the rest of the pot. “You know I’m right. I always am,” he mused, pointing to the empty display case and front door, where the bell had stopped its incessant ringing. “I told you your luck was about to change, after all.” He smacked his flat palm onto the counter, repeating what he’d been saying for days.
“I guess it did,” I said, pulling a broom from the small cabinet near the register. I hated lying to Tom, but the worst of it was over. We hadn’t taken any more photos, so Sybil had nothing left to post. As I swept along the edge of the counter, I thought about her perched there that first night, her legs swinging. She’d been like a breath of fresh air after being stuck inside all day. I’d had lots of days that all ran together during my semesters of med school, and working in the shop had started to blur into a routine that I could do half asleep. Every one was a prelude to more and more of the same. Until that night. Until Sybil breezed into my world and threw everything into chaos and vivid color. Of course, I’d never admit that to Tom or anyone else. It sounded like I believed this whole love story.
“Just can’t believe it,” Tom said for the fifteenth time. “Three hundred and fifty million dollars.” He took a contemplative sip of his coffee. “Don’t that beat all.”
“I didn’t win it, though,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, that pretty girl you found did.” Tom raised his cup of coffee, obviously waiting for the tea, but I just nodded while sweeping. “Aw, you’re no fun,” he said, downing the rest of his coffee. “I don’t come here for this swill, boy. I need stories.” He set his cup aside. “You decide when you’re going back to school?”
I swept more aggressively. I’d earned scholarships all through college, and that helped, but my student loan debt would probably be my longest-lasting relationship, and I’d be taking out more when I got back to school. I bent to use the dustpan, Tom’s words at my back. “Not yet,” I said. “I’ve got a little time to decide.” When I gave Sybil that total of three hundred thousand, it only included the bills I had yet to pay, not the many that would come after. If I could take care of the medical bills and get the shop back on track, I would be okay with more loans. The school had called earlier that day to confirm I knew the deadline to accept. I didn’t have a lot of time to figure everything out.
“I think what you did—coming home and all, I mean—well, it shows how good a man you are, but your granddad doesn’t want you putting your life on hold,” Tom said, pitching his voice low. “Not for him.”
I nodded as I heard Granddad come out of the bathroom and approach us, his steps still slow and heavy. “It’s not on hold, it’s just…you know. It’s life. It’s family.” I coughed into my hand. “It’s what you do.”
Granddad leaned against the counter by Tom. “Are you still harassing my grandson about his social life?”
“Of course,” Tom said, giving me a knowing look. “Just making sure he doesn’t mess things up with his new lady friend.”
There was a knock at the door, and Tom hustled from his spot to open it for Sybil. “Speak of the lovely devil,” he said as he motioned her toward the counter with a flourish.
Sybil wore jeans that hugged her hips and thighs, and her coat hung open, revealing a shirt that showed off a sliver of the stomach I knew was soft and inviting. “Devil?” Sybil placed her index fingers on either side of her head and curled them into horns. “Who told?”
Tom smacked the counter again, letting out a loud belly laugh. “Damn, I like this one,” he said. “I’m Tom, Kieran’s favorite old man next to Joe.”
When Sybil leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, there I was, suddenly jealous of the attention Tom was getting, a counter between us and me debating hopping it to get to her. “Sybil,” she said.
“His favorite young woman,” Granddad added, taking her hand in both of his.
“You gonna greet your girl or let us have all the fun, kid?” Tom knocked his shoulder against Sybil’s.
“Yeah, Kieran. I might have to pick a new guy,” she said, resting an arm on his shoulder. “You single, Tom?”
“He can’t bake,” I said, setting the broom aside and leaning on the counter. “Aren’t copious amounts of donuts part of your master plan?”
Sybil gently pushed Tom away. “He’s right.” She mirrored my stance, leaning forward on the counter, which brought our faces near each other, close enough that our noses brushed for half a second. “I gotta serve my sweet tooth.” She widened her eyes at me like we were in on a joke, and she leaned in at the same time I leaned in, and though I expected our mouths to collide again, her lips landed on the tip of my nose, grazing toward the left.
We both fumbled as she pulled back. “Hi,” I said again, watching Sybil slide back down the counter. I hadn’t expected to see her tonight, and I definitely hadn’t expected my heart to beat faster when I did. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you, too,” she said in an exasperated tone, her eyebrow cocked. She must have heard it in her voice, because she shot a quick glance at Granddad and Tom and changed her smile. “I wanted to see you,” she said, not very convincingly.
“I think we can take a hint,” Tom said, standing. “Let’s leave these kids to it, Joe. I’ll make sure you don’t tumble down the stairs again.”
“Sybil, it was a pleasure. I’ve known this one a long time,” he said, motioning to me with his thumb. “I think you just might be the one to loosen him up.” He held out his wide palm to shake her hand. “And I’m hoping a bit of your luck will rub off.” They set off for the back of the shop.
Granddad called over his shoulder, “Night, kids.”
“So…” I tucked the broom back into the cupboard and faced Sybil again, using every bit of willpower to keep my eyes on her expression, one filled with relief now that we were alone. “What’s up? I thought we didn’t need to do anything for a while after that picture.”
“We don’t,” she said. She sank her teeth into the corner of her lower lip in a way that made me want to kiss away the pain of that bite, before I reminded myself this woman was off-limits, and for good reason. “I realized I never got your phone number,” she said, looking around the shop.
“Oh, okay.” I accepted her phone and typed in my number. “That’s all you needed?”
“I was just in the area.” She tapped her fingers on the counter the way she’d done the night we met. “Can’t a girl stop in to see her fake boyfriend on the fly?” She accepted the phone back and tapped out a text to me. “Now you have mine so we can exchange flirty texts,” she said. She looked like she wanted to say something, nervous energy rolling off her in waves as I walked around her to lock the front door and flip the sign to “Closed.”
“I’m not really a flirty text guy,” I said, straightening behind the counter.
“You know,” she said, tapping something out on her phone, “that doesn’t surprise me.”
My phone buzzed, and her text flashed across my screen. I’ll show you how I like it done.
The text sent my mind in a very specific direction, but I put the phone back in my pocket, ignoring her suggestion. “I’m just closing up, and then I was going to head home for the night. Was there anything else you needed?” Lila would have thrown something at me and told me that was rude, but I didn’t know the rules here, and time and again I’d let myself get distracted when Sybil was nearby. I’d recognized the pattern, so now I could interrupt it.
“There is something else,” she said, ducking her head. In my brief experiences with this woman, I had no idea how to interpret her body language. It could have meant she wanted a cup of coffee, that she’d inadvertently stolen all the money from the cash register, or that she wanted a second crack at hooking up in the office. As tempting as that last option was, the second seemed more likely. “There wasn’t anything after that photo, and I meant to get in touch with you earlier today, but I didn’t have your number and then the day got away from me…”
“What is it?”
Her words spilled out fast, like water from a tap. “Channel Thirteen wants to have us on to talk about what happened, you know, tell our story, and I thought it would be good press and a good way to convince everyone it was real, so I agreed.”
“On live TV?”
“Yeah,” she said, “but we can figure out what we’ll say in advance. It’ll be fine!” Her blue T-shirt stretched across her breasts and read “Yes, there are Black people in Iowa” in blocky letters, and she smiled sheepishly. “I probably should have asked you first,” she said. “I hoped you’d be fine with it since it would be a good chance to promote the shop.”
I sighed because she was right. We could never afford a TV commercial, or any ads really, and it would be good exposure, but I hated everything about going on TV to prove this lie was real. We’d have to spend time figuring out what we were going to say and how to say it, and I had no free time to dedicate to this. “When is it? Next week?” I could figure out a way to squeeze in some preparation time with her.
“Um.” She looked down at her nails and then sank her teeth into her lower lip again before meeting my eyes. “Tomorrow morning,” she said with eyebrows raised. “But not until nine, so we have time to prepare.”
I looked at the clock on the wall over the door. I’d hoped to use the free hours to do laundry and stare at the letter from school outlining the process to come back. But now this. “That’s fourteen hours away.” I studied Sybil, whose expression was hopeful. It felt like something practiced, like she’d spent most of her life doing things like this and having people give in to what she wanted because her smile was so sweet. The fact that my first instinct was to do the same annoyed me. “We know next to nothing about each other.”
“I know…” She tucked a curl behind her ear, the glittery pink of her fingernails catching the overhead lighting. “I really did mean to get here earlier to run it by you. I just thought it would be helpful for the shop. And it’s not like we’d need to know everything about each other. They’re not going to quiz us.”
“They’re going to interview us.” I heard the annoyance in my voice and sighed, running my fingers through my hair. She was right about it being good for the shop, and she was still looking at me with that sweet expression. “Fine.”
“It might be fun,” she exclaimed.
Lying on live TV with no time to prepare was not my idea of fun. It sounded as far away from fun as I could imagine and as far away from my normal life as I could imagine. Somehow Sybil kept talking me into things that should have been second nature for me to refuse. But I took in the way she bounced with excitement, and, just for a moment, wondered if far away from normal wouldn’t be so bad.