Chapter 20
I can’t believe I thought you’d be polite in bed
Zoey
Iwas mentally and physically exhausted when I stepped into Rusty’s Fish Hook. It was a busy Saturday night. Spring meant the deck was open again, and tonight it was packed with people clustered around the patio heaters and the outdoor bar.
I didn’t feel like socializing, but I also didn’t feel like being alone, so I veered off to the indoor bar.
It was quieter, and there were several barstools open.
On the very last one, I spied my morose-looking landlord in a stupidly sexy cardigan, staring into his glass of liquor like it might hold the answers to the universe.
All plans of drinking alone abandoned, I headed in Gage’s direction. “This seat taken?” I asked, gesturing at the empty stool next to him.
He looked up at me, and the sadness in his eyes almost took me out at the knees.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded, slinging my giant bag onto the bar and sliding onto the stool.
He took a closer look at me. “Why do you look like you haven’t slept in days?”
“Because I was up most of last night pursuing twin unrelated rabbit holes, and I think I may have broken my brain. What’s wrong with you?”
“Hey, Zoey. What’ll it be?” Rusty of Rusty’s Fish Hook himself was manning the bar tonight.
“Can I have a really big white wine? Like a wine and a half?”
“I’ll serve it in a margarita glass,” he said.
“I love you, Rusty,” I called after him.
“Care to expound?” Gage asked.
“About my deep and abiding love for Rusty?”
“About your rabbit holes.”
“You first,” I said, tapping a finger on his booze. “What’s this? Scotch?”
“Bourbon.”
“You’re usually a beer man,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, well, tonight I’m a bourbon man.”
I fished my necklace out of my cleavage and flashed the charm at him. “Disco.”
He picked up his glass. “Zoey, honey, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do on a Saturday night than listen to your landlord bitch about things.”
“Not to ruin your image of me but not really. It’s either this or NCIS reruns. I have a weird crush on Jethro Gibbs.”
The corner of his mouth hitched up.
I nudged him with my elbow. “Come on, ol’ buddy, ol’ pal. Tell the girl you freed from a sports bra all about it.”
“Fine. But I go, you go.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he silenced me with a sexy pointed look. “Ugh. Fine. Now disco me, baby.”
“Well, up until yesterday, my biggest problem was an inconvenient attraction to my tenant upstairs.”
“This is way better than Jethro Gibbs reruns,” I decided.
Rusty returned with a margarita glass filled to the brim with wine.
“You’re my favorite person in the world right now,” I told him.
He threw me a salute before disappearing down the bar.
I scooted the glass closer and leaned over to take a noisy slurp. “Ahh! Refreshing. Now back to the problem that eclipsed all your fantasies about my boobs.”
Gage managed a reluctant chuckle. “My sister emotionally blackmailed me into doing something I don’t want to do.”
“How bad is the something? Is it ‘go dress shopping in the city’ bad or ‘give a kidney to an undeserving asshole’ bad?”
“She wants me to represent the driver who hit her and Miller.”
I choked on my wine.
Gage patted me on the back until I stopped coughing into a bar napkin. With tears burning my eyes and a throat on fire, I turned to him. “Why would she ask you to do that?” I rasped.
“Apparently they bonded over the…trauma. Laura is convinced it was just a mistake. But she doesn’t get that it doesn’t fucking matter if it was accidental or intentional. The result is my sister is in a wheelchair and Miller is dead,” he said flatly.
His pain was so palpable I laid my hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry, Gage. What are you going to do? Wait, why am I even asking that? I know what you’re going to do.”
“You do?” He eyed me over the rim of his glass.
“I’m willing to bet twenty bucks that you already said yes.”
“How did you know? Laura doesn’t even know yet.”
I gave his arm a squeeze. “Because there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for family, no matter what it costs you.”
Gage’s eyes narrowed. “You pay a lot of attention to the landlord you’re not interested in.”
“I’m not not interested. I’m just only interested in dirty, sweaty sex,” I said, batting my lashes at him as I leaned in for another mouthful of wine.
“Why is it you’re the only person in the world who could make me smile right now?” he asked.
“I like to think it’s the breasts.”
It was Gage’s turn to cough into his drink. Somehow he managed to make it look sexier than I had. “You’re one of a kind, Zoey Moody.”
“That’s what they tell me. What else is on your handsome brain?”
“What makes you think there’s something else?”
“You already made the decision to represent the driver, which means you’re already working out a strategy for the case. There’s something else that has you drowning that handsome face in bourbon.”
He sipped his drink and stared straight ahead for a beat. “You ever run across a message enough times you start to wonder if you’re supposed to listen?”
I scoffed. “Uh, yeah. Why do you think I don’t do relationships? You can only have so many people in your life tell you that you’re too much or too hard to love before you have to start taking it seriously.”
He put his drink down and leveled me with a look. “Who told you you’re too hard to love?”
I laughed. “Well, my parents for starters. When your own parents find it too difficult to love you, you know you’re the problem.”
It was strange to think that now there was a reason, a label for what had been wrong all these years. Not that it changed anything.
“The more I hear about your parents, the less I like them,” he said.
“They’re really not that bad. They did the best they could.
It’s just their best wasn’t very good.” I helped myself to more wine.
“You know, I used to be like everyone else. I wanted to have someone look past all my flaws to the special, unseen beauty that everyone else missed. I wanted to have that person who made me think anything was possible. Who could prop me up when I got shaky, who would even out my deficiencies, maybe even find them charming. But not everyone gets to have that. Some of us are just a little too messy for normal.”
“You’re really hard on yourself. You ever consider knocking it the hell off?”
I shook my head. “You grew up with two sets of parents who loved you. They probably thought you were a special gift from the universe. I was nothing but a burden to mine. They still complain to me about how much I cried when I was a baby. Like I was trying to ruin their lives when I was a newborn. I was an unplanned ‘surprise’ that derailed all their perfect plans with my perfect sister. They couldn’t go to Europe for the summer because I failed math and needed to go to summer school.
I got suspended for a week in high school for punching a boy who put his hand up Hazel’s skirt.
I failed a college course because I forgot to drop it. Zoey Moody: ruining lives since birth.”
He turned on his stool to face me. “You didn’t deserve to feel like a burden.”
I shrugged. “Eh, well, it evened out. I was pretty hard on them during my teenage years.”
“A parent’s job is to support their kid, not keep a profit and loss statement.”
“That is such a you thing to say.”
“I’m just glad you didn’t ask for my sperm count.”
“Uh, has someone else asked you for your sperm count today?”
“I had a first date,” he announced. “First and last.”
“No spark?”
He shook his head. “I feel like I went on a date with myself.” He filled me in on his brief yet spectacular failure of a date. “Between Jill, Valerie, and Laura, I feel like the universe is beating me over the head with a brick.”
“About what?” I asked, resting my chin on my hand.
“I’m very goal-oriented.”
“Nooo. You don’t say.”
“Don’t disparage me while we’re discoing.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ll hold my insults until the end.”
His brow furrowed. “I’m starting to think that maybe there’s a problem with my priorities.”
“In what way?”
“Everything I do is to get me a step closer to the next goal. I prioritize success over everything. But what if I’m missing out on what’s really important?
Valerie said if she’d just taken ten minutes to play with her girls, she wouldn’t have been on the road.
Laura wouldn’t have been there at all if she’d slept in like Miller wanted, but she wanted to squeeze in an extra training run.
I would have made the same decision. Accomplish, check off, move on. ”
“I can see how that would get in your head.”
He looked at me with suspicion. “Isn’t this where you tell me how superior your choices are?”
“Mine?” I barked out a laugh. “Gage, I’m a certifiable dumpster fire.”
“I prefer human disaster.”
“I’m serious. Yesterday, this thing happened, and then today, some more things happened, and it’s like now I’m so hopeful but sad and pissed off and also scared.”
“That’s a lot of feelings about this mysterious thing that happened. Are you going to explain?”
“I…I don’t know how to talk about it intelligently yet.”
“I’m looking for a conversation, not a dissertation, Zo. And don’t even try to think about getting out of it, because I just laid my soul bare for you. So you’re legally obligated to share now.”
“Pretty sure that’s not how the law works.”
“I’m the lawyer here. You’re just going to have to trust me.”
“I got weird news. And I don’t know what to do about it, and it’s kind of messing with my head,” I admitted.
He sat, waiting and watching.
When I didn’t continue, he reached out, and for a split second, I thought he was going to gather me in his arms and kiss the bejeezus out of me. Instead, he tapped the disco ball charm on my necklace.