12. Will
Chapter twelve
Will
N eedless to say, I’m not very happy with Jess. In hindsight, every time Bailey has approached us at the farmer’s market, either he addresses Jess first or Jess talks to him—never me. I suppose them getting together shouldn’t be as big a surprise as it was. Fairly certain that this violates some kind of bro code, but as they say, all’s fair in love and war. And fucking guys, we’re the worst. That being said, as much as I want to confront Jess about this… I’m not sure I can without losing my cool. Which is exactly why I can’t do that. If it were me, I’d want to see him flipping a lid over this. Remaining nonchalant will be the only way to hit him where it hurts.
We always have Monday off, and with Lucy still out on leave, he’s been mostly closing while I’ve been opening. I don’t really get a chance to speak to him until Friday. Someone needed to switch shifts and the boss’s daughter always comes and opens on Friday, anyway. I’m more than happy to help, like the nice guy I am. Not only do I prefer closing, but Jess and I will be working together. We really do make a good team.
After the small dinner rush, the store always winds down and we can chat while working. Most of what we do doesn’t require so much thought we can’t multitask. Jess fights the sticker gun once again, since he remains the only one who can make it cooperate, and I’m dealing with the basket of returns. We’ve maybe thirty minutes to close.
“So, how did Sunday go?”
“What?” Jess laughs as if I’m telling a joke instead of asking a question.
“Sunday. You. Bailey. How’d that go?”
And he looks so pleased with himself when he shrugs. “It… went.”
I hum at such an excellent lack of an answer.
“Why do you ask?”
“Seemed like the polite thing to do.”
“I probably should have said something to you.” Jesse pauses and focuses more on the sticker gun than me for a moment. “Do you mind?”
“Not particularly.” When Cas gave me that answer, it drove me up a wall. I can already see it’s having the desired effect on Jess.
“Because you don’t give a damn about me,” Jess says, his voice slightly rising.
“That’s not what I said.”
“You’d care if I fucked Bailey.”
And I look at him as if I haven’t the faintest idea what he means. “You wouldn’t do that,” I say with a shrug.
“I did,” he scoffs.
“Sure, you did,” I chuckle.
“Why wouldn’t I? Because we’re best friends and I know how much you’re obsessed with him? That’s exactly why I went out and fucked him.” He flushes pink with frustration and damn if it isn’t cute on him.
“Honestly, it never even occurred to me that you two were meeting up for sex, which is why I didn’t care. I know you don’t like him . You said you liked me . Guess not. Oh, well.”
Jess lets out a long sigh, visibly deflating. “We didn’t,” he grumbles.
“Didn’t what?” I ask with a wide smile aimed right at him.
“We chatted, mostly. He’s thinking about getting some goats. You know, milk and honey. Asked me if I’d be willing to help out short term since he’s all alone up there on his farm.”
“See? I had no reason to doubt you, and I was right. Has nothing to do with Bailey.”
Jess stays quiet while he finally slams the sticker gun and starts clicking tags. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were going to be helping him?”
“Uh… because I didn’t think you’d mind me sparing ten minutes to assist another small business?”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he grumbles.
“Well, why didn’t you tell me that you made plans with him?”
“To piss you off,” he cackles. “Clearly, that backfired.”
“Oh, Jess.” I set my empty basket down and go over to him. “That’s only because I trust you.”
When I reach him, Jess looks simultaneously relieved and embarrassed. He exhales, but he keeps his eyes cast down to what he’d been doing only a moment ago but has since stopped. I tilt his chin up with a smile and bring him closer for a kiss. His lips part and he wraps his free arm around me. We can’t stand here at the back of the store and make out for the rest of our shift, tempting as it sounds. So I pull away, and Jess laughs to himself before stickering my chest with a price tag.
“Damn. You calling me cheap?” I chuckle.
Jesse shrugs and laughs harder.
I pull him closer to me again. “Say you’re coming to my place after work.”
“Yes.” Jess pecks a kiss on my lips and smiles before going back to stickering.
The door dings as a customer enters, so I head to the front to cover the register. A girl close to my age smiles back when I greet her, then resumes wandering around. She loads up her basket with jam, then comes to the front only moments later.
I’m about to start ringing when she smiles up at me. “Do you happen to know when Cheryl’s opening the sugar shack this year?”
“Uhhh… no, but I’ll ask.”
I lean away from her and call for Jesse. He appears right away from the back of the store, but before I can repeat the question about the boss’s daughter opening the sugar shack for the season, my customer abandons me.
“JC!” She runs right over to Jess and flings her arms around him.
“Andrea. Didn’t know you were back in town.” Oh, and right about now, Jess looks like he wants to crawl into a hole and die.
“Gosh, when he said Jesse, I wasn’t even expecting you. I’ve known you as JC for so long, I almost forgot that’s your name.” She chuckles, but Jess only laughs nervously along with her.
“Do you remember how in high school, you tried getting everyone to start calling you by your middle name?” She pauses for another fit of giggles. “ Cassius, like the boxer .”
What.
The.
Fuck.
Jess says something to her about not really remembering, but he’s close to turning scarlet. I can’t really focus on them, anyway. My head is spinning. There is no way. None. And yet… a lot of it adds up.
Cas regularly talks about caring for his animals and Jess still helps out on the family dairy farm. I’ve mentioned Jess to Cas, but never by name. Cas always calls him my smart best friend— the very same friend Cas thinks I should reconsider dating rather than pursuing anything with him. And whenever I fret about the guy who doesn’t notice me, Cas always assures me that he would notice if he knew me. Jess, by his own admission, has liked me for a very long time, and I never realized. Maybe that’s the real reason why Cas stopped talking to me—he thought for sure I would finally notice what was right in front of me.
I figure Jess has got to be finding guys to hook up with somewhere . So, he finds me by chance, decides now’s the perfect time since he’s always been too chicken shit to make a move, makes me infatuated with this alternate persona, only to dump me… just so he can swoop in and be the one to comfort me. Fuck, that is some evil genius level shit. Because when push came to shove, I ran right to Jess. The person I’ve known the longest.
Cas himself admitted he knows me—just not how well or if he likes me. And yet, he seems to think I’d recognize his voice… almost as if I’ve heard it a lot. People can sound different on the phone but… I would know Jess, wouldn’t I? Or should I say Cassius… which can easily be shortened to Cas? The only part I can’t fully riddle out is Cas coming back, but that also coincides perfectly with Jess pulling back and trying to make me jealous by going out with Bailey. Almost as if he’s testing my resolve or something. What. The. FUCK.
I glance over at Jess again, and he looks nothing short of uncomfortable. One could argue that making out with your coworker and then getting bombarded by someone from high school minutes later is enough to rattle anyone. Or it could be him panicking that I know who he is now, which has been Cas’s fear from the start. Or it could even be me staring unabashedly at him while still reeling from being hit upside the head with this truth sledgehammer. Looking as guilty as he does isn’t helping.
My mind utterly devolves while ringing this lady out. By the time she leaves the store, I reach two conclusions. One: more than likely, if Jess is Cas, he’ll freak out if he suspects that I recognize him. And two: if I confront Cas about this but guess incorrectly, he will get so spooked he may disappear again, anyway. My only option at this point is to say nothing at all and maybe I’ll show my hand when I’m more certain. In the meantime, I’m going to try to get as much info from both of them as possible and go from there.
The door dings again and Jess waves once to his friend, who holds it open for another customer. We’re never this busy at this time of night. Then again, our version of slammed is dusting off the second register. The guy who just came in walks right past the register on his way to the back, but he pauses and smiles at us. It’s Bailey.
“Hey, Jess.” His eyes dart toward me. “Will.”
Not even a hello for me. I see how it is. I smile anyway. “What brings you out this way, Bailey?”
“Oh… you know…”
No, I don’t. Spit it out, man.
“I’ve never seen you shop here.” Jess stands at the end of the register, where he bagged for me while I rang out his friend. Why he’s still here eludes me until I notice the glare he’s throwing.
“I know.” Bailey’s eyes drift momentarily to the floor. “Long overdue to check this place out, but I’m not exactly close by.”
Which is not at all true. The store is on the main road. If Bailey wants to avoid driving past us to get to the only chain grocery store in town, he has to take the back roads going to and from his place. Not that I should even know any of that.
Bailey’s eyes flick up once more and land on me while he gnaws into his lower lip.
Jess notices. That, and how despite nothing being said between us, Bailey and I continue to linger too long on one another: me with a burning hunger to lick the sweetness from his skin and Bailey with apparent na?veté while he regards me.
Then Bailey’s right back to focusing on Jess with a smile. “Anyway, it’s nice seeing you. I’m going to…” He points to the back of the store.
I really want to believe Bailey meant the plural version of you. Likely because I still want to think he’s got some interest in me, but I can’t gauge him to save my life. Last week, he’s flirting with me and we’re eye-fucking; today, not even a greeting and he can barely say a word to me. Whenever Jess is around, Bailey treats me like a ghost. His eyes still instinctively shift to my presence, but he almost never acknowledges me. I don’t get it.
Why Jess? Why pursue him and pretend to be shy around me? And yeah, sweet as it is, I’m sure it’s a routine. There’s nothing bashful about the guy who held my gaze last Sunday while sucking his finger. Fuck, and thinking about that gets me hard at the register. Thank fuck for the apron that’s part of our uniform.
Bailey comes back with a huge bag of garlic bulbs, which he promptly sets on the counter.
“Vampires?” I tease.
Jess, for whatever reason, still hasn’t left the bagging area and snorts at my joke.
Bailey laughs along, but his heart’s not in it. More the kind you do when you know people are laughing at you and not with you, but you’re too socially awkward to ignore the cue of laughing along even when it’s at your expense. He swipes his card before I can even say the total. “No… um… garlic and honey… never mind,” he mumbles.
Now, I don’t know who once told this precious ray of sunshine to shut up about his special interests, but I want to knock their teeth in. So I try not to let my agitation be misinterpreted. “If you’re making dinner, don’t get too detailed. We’ve got another five minutes to close and we’re both starving.”
Bailey has that nervous trill to his laugh again, but when I smile at him, he shifts and launches headfirst into an excited prattle the same as before. “No, you can ferment the garlic in honey as a remedy. Lots of people use it like cough syrup. Honey is naturally antibacterial.”
“Interesting,” I say, trying to sound genuine. “Sounds better than mellified man, but that’s not real. Is it?”
“The fuck is that?” Jesse asks.
Maybe I’ve made the conversation too morbid, but instead of recoiling at my contribution, Bailey’s mouth twitches slightly before he smiles again.
“An ancient cure-all made by mummifying a cadaver in honey for a century. There’s still debate whether the ritual sacrifice existed or if the historical records are fictitious,” Bailey says to Jess despite keeping his eyes on me.
Bailey seems intrigued by my general knowledge again, but I cheated this time. Since he responded so well the first time, I’ve been reading everything and anything honey related to impress the world’s sweetest beekeeper.
Jess clears his throat at the end of the register, and Bailey finally tears his eyes away and looks over. “Town makes us charge for paper.”
“I can carry it. Thanks.” And Bailey pulls the mesh bag toward him before shoving his wallet back into his pockets. “See you guys Sunday.”
The minute Bailey leaves, Jess checks the clock and locks the door behind him. Officially our last customer of the day. I pull the drawer out of the register and carry the whole thing to the small office. Jess can finish in there, and I’ll do everything else out here. Keys still in hand, Jess opens the office door, and I set my drawer on the desk. And then he’s all over me.
His lips immediately seek mine, begging me for attention. Jess sighs against my mouth while his fingers dig into my back to force me even closer. With each returned kiss, he leans more into me until his cock brushes mine through our jeans.
“We’ll be at my house in thirty minutes or less,” I snicker.
“Too long.” Jess grabs my belt buckle and his hand’s in my pants in an instant. He certainly knows how to be persuasive.
When I don’t fight his suggestion but shift my clothes away instead, he’s nothing but rushed movements. First whipping his cock out, then stroking ours together so the entire length of his shaft rubs against mine. A soft pant escapes while his lips hover against mine, but he’s focusing less on my mouth and more on my eyes. When I drift away, Jess calls me back.
“Look at me.” My gaze locking on to him pulls a moan from his depths. “I don’t want you looking anywhere else.”
Fuck, if making him jealous gets this result, I’m doing it all the time. “What if someone looks at me?” I tease further.
“I’ll make sure he can’t again.” Not the sexiest sentence, unless said like a breathy promise while on the brink of coming.
Instantly, I’m reminded of what Cas told me earlier this week about shoving anyone between me and him off a bridge. That thought, of someone matching my obsession with their own darkness, gets me to come.