Chapter Seven
“If I get hit by a stray dart, you’re paying my ER bill,” Grant told Tony as he sat down at a table that felt dangerously close to the dartboard.
They’d just gotten to Curly’s a few minutes ago, but Grant was already annoyed.
The place was what he called “holiday crowded.” As college kids came home with freshly minted IDs, they all rushed to investigate the elusive local bar scene.
They treated it like a secret society they’d been dying to join, while he couldn’t wait for January so he could sit wherever he wanted again.
Tony glowered. “Did you want to stand by the bar?”
“With your bad back? Never.” Grant dropped into one of the chairs with a heavy sigh. The weight of the day was finally crashing down on his shoulders, and he was exhausted. He shouldn’t have agreed to this.
“Pipsqueak!” Tony hopped up from his chair and wrapped Piper in a brotherly hug. He was the unofficial fifth Underwood kid, after all. Tony rocked Piper back and forth until she tapped his shoulder for mercy. He released her, all smiles. “How’d you get in? You’re not old enough to be here.”
“I am!” Piper laughed.
Tony shook his head. “Nope, because you’re definitely too young to drive, so there’s no way you’re old enough to be here.”
Piper playfully slugged his shoulder. “You owe me a drink.”
“Actually, Austin owes everyone drinks,” Grant reminded her, “for being himself.”
“You were serious about that?” Austin asked.
“As serious as that time Dad found your weed stash in the tree house and I convinced him a squirrel must have brought it in.” Grant didn’t know if Austin would still be worried about that particular indiscretion being found out, but he had a filing cabinet’s worth of blackmail on standby.
“Fuck you,” Austin muttered, but got up from the table.
“Thank you!” Tony shouted after him, then looked at Grant doubtfully. “You convinced Big Tim that a fucking squirrel smuggled a dime bag into the tree house?”
“One of us is a really good actor.”
Austin came back with three beers and a clear drink with a lime wedge and a straw.
“What is that?” Grant asked.
“A vodka soda. Too many carbs and calories in beer.”
“No one’s ever been accused of having a vodka soda gut,” Tony concurred. Grant kicked him under the table. He didn’t need or want to watch his best friend flirt with his brother.
Tony kicked him back.
“So, what’s it like being on set?”
Grant rolled his eyes and tried to share a look with Piper, but she had leaned forward like she was actually interested in Austin’s answer. Had the world turned upside down?
“The days are really long, and they usually start very, very early in the morning,” Austin began.
“Excuse us.” A timid female voice from behind Grant made him jump. “Are you Austin Underwood? From Kaleidoscope Falls?”
“I am.”
Grant took a big swallow of his beer so he wouldn’t comment on how Austin had dropped his voice and puffed out his chest.
“We are such big fans,” one of the two young women—because they couldn’t be more than a year older than Piper—said breathlessly. “Could we possibly get a picture?”
“Of course!” Austin stood up, and the duo attached themselves to him like magnets. “Grant, do you mind?”
Grant begrudgingly took pictures with two cell phones. His brother was disgustingly photogenic.
Austin did the fawning fan thing, chatting politely, soaking up adoration like a sponge, until Piper loudly interjected, “Hey, Taylor. Hey, Cameron.”
“Oh my god! Piper! We didn’t see you there!” one of them said.
“Should we sit down and catch up?” said the other, more to her friend than to Piper.
“Nope. Sorry. No chairs.” Piper didn’t sound broken up at all.
“Wait. Underwood… Is he your brother?”
“Unfortunately,” Grant murmured.
“Oh my god, I never put that together! Like, we knew Piper had a brother, but we thought it was just Grant.”
Piper and Grant looked at each other with the same straight-faced, dead-behind-the-eyes expression.
“It was so nice to meet you both. Thank you for watching the show,” Austin said and gave awkward hugs to them both.
“Did you know them?” Tony asked when they were alone again.
“They were in the grade ahead of me,” Piper explained. “We had pre-calc together. And PE. And Spanish.”
The parade of fans didn’t stop. Word rippled through the bar that there was a celebrity among the mere mortals, and no one seemed to want to miss their chance to meet an honest-to-goodness star.
Every time they managed to get a semblance of a conversation going at their table, they were interrupted by another gawker.
It took every molecule of Midwest Nice floating in Grant’s bloodstream not to explode.
“I need another beer,” he said to Austin after the latest fan wandered off.
“Then go get one,” Austin replied, draining his vodka soda until the ice cubes rattled in the bottom.
“Someone’s a little squirrely.”
Austin rolled his eyes and pushed back from the table. “Fine. I will get the drinks.”
“Was that necessary?” Tony asked once Austin was out of earshot.
“I need a break from the fawn fest.” Grant tilted his beer glass to see if there was anything left once the suds had settled. “It’s just a TV show. He’s a regular person whose job happens to be pretending to be other people.”
“You’re not even a little proud?”
“This isn’t about pride.”
“Sure it’s not.” Tony turned his full attention to Piper. “How’s school, Pipsqueak?”
Piper shrugged. “School is school.”
Tony looked between Grant and Piper. “Is this genetic, or did your parents not teach you how to have conversations?”
“I’m just a little, I don’t know, burned out, I guess,” Piper tried.
Tony nodded. “What’s your major again?”
“Education.” She searched for more beer among her suds. “Just like Mom and Lorelai.”
She said it like it was a fate equal to death. Before Grant could press her on her inflection, Tony moved the conversation to safer, more fertile ground.
“How’s softball?”
Piper was off to the races. Tony occasionally lobbed her a question, but she talked over herself trying to get out everything she wanted to say. It was adorable, and Grant swelled with pride.
Why couldn’t he feel the same way about Austin?
Moments like this were when Grant most deeply regretted having an emotionally intelligent best friend. Because yeah, Grant probably should have been proud of Austin. But when it came to his little brother’s career, “pride” wasn’t the word that came to mind.
Frivolous. Make-believe. Selfish.
It was the last one that stuck in Grant’s teeth like stale popcorn. Maybe that was at the heart of this constant, simmering animosity between them. How selfish Austin had been when he chose a path for himself and pursued it like…like…
Like Grant might have done, if he’d ever had a choice.
“Where’s Austin?” Piper suddenly said, interrupting Grant’s spiral.
Grant frowned. Where was Austin? How long had he been gone? He twisted in his chair, scanning the room for his lost sibling. He didn’t see him, but he also couldn’t get a clear sight line to the bar. Grant pushed back his chair.
“I’m going to make sure he didn’t get kidnapped by his adoring public.”
“Ah, so you do care about him,” Tony said, a touch too smug for Grant’s liking.
“No. I just want my beer.”
Curly’s had gotten even more crowded since they’d arrived. Had anyone ever heard of a fire code? Finally, the crowd parted and he spied Austin.
Then he saw the real reason Austin was taking his damn time.
He was talking to a woman. She had thick, curly hair that seemed to be some shade of brown in the dim, neon-tinted light of the bar and long, graceful fingers that were wrapped around a sweating glass full of clear liquid and ice. A fellow vodka soda drinker?
“How long does it take to get a couple of beers?” he asked, squeezing into a space next to Austin that wasn’t quite big enough for him. Starr was at the other end of the bar, and he couldn’t tell if she’d seen him or not.
Oh well. She’d make her way back eventually.
Grant drummed his fingers on the bar and looked at the woman Austin had been talking to, curious about who’d warranted his undivided attention.
Everything stopped: the noise of the bar, his heart, his ability to breathe.
Years melted away and he was back at the movie theater, secretly stealing glances at Ivy, memorizing the slope of her nose and the curves of her ears, so damn confused by the crush on his neighbor that it kept him from sleeping.
The last time they’d been in the same zip code, breathing the same air, was the night he’d fucked everything up.
He flexed his right hand to ease the sudden pang of sensation.
He’d watched her grow up in Christmas cards, scrutinized her face as it gradually changed, but no candid photos on his parents’ fridge could have prepared him for seeing Ivy in person.
If nineteen-year-old Grant had known how gorgeous she’d grow up to be, he’d have curled into a ball and died.
He blinked, and the room came rushing back to him.
Ivy was looking at him with a carefully blank expression.
It was a kick in the shins that her face didn’t light up, but it was a lot better than the pure disdain he deserved.
He could work with blank. He just needed to play it calm, cool, and collected.
“Hey, Ivy.”
Smooth. Really smooth.
Austin looked between them. “Do you two know each other?”
He couldn’t be serious. It was Ivy.
“Yes, and so do you.”
Austin went from confused to, somehow, more confused. “I do?”
How the fuck had Ivy ever been interested in the most obtuse person in the world?
“That’s Ivy,” Grant said, and when Austin continued to stare at him, added, “Weaver. You were in the same class for thirteen years. We grew up next door. That Ivy.”
Austin’s eyebrows shot up in recognition, and Ivy looked like she wanted a hole to open up in the floor and swallow her. A sharp ache settled in Grant’s chest.
“Holy shit. You grew up,” his absolutely clueless brother said.
This had to be the worst kind of cosmic joke.