Chapter 10 Ryan
True to her word, June makes sure we never discuss anything personal all morning. She barely looks me in the eye. After scarfing her breakfast down and draining two cups of coffee, she fetches a pencil and notepad and taps the lead against the paper in a Morse code that says Let’s get this over with and then get out.
I’m not quite ready to comply yet, though. Instead, I feel like seeing how much I can learn about June without her realizing I’ve squeezed personal information from her. “Tell me about Darlin’ Donuts,” I say, and she narrows her eyes at me. I raise my hands in surrender. “It’s just a business question.”
June is skeptical as she searches my face for the hole in my lie. She can’t find it, though, so she gives in and spends the next twenty minutes talking nonstop. It’s ridiculously hard not to smile and give myself away as I watch her talk about her bakery.
Her eyes light up, and she smiles when she recounts to me the day they bought the shop and how it was filled with dead mice and rotting holes in the walls. Her brother, Jake, is an architect and helped her redesign the building, fitting it for a new industrial kitchen and shop front with seating. She goes on and on about how they designed the bakery to look both vintage and modern, mixing bright pastel pinks, yellows, and turquoise with thick, intricate crown molding.
I listen and nod approvingly through the entire monologue, acting surprised when she tells me they have a peg wall behind the counter that spells out D.D. where they hang each of their signature donuts every day to showcase their flavors. I smile as if I didn’t already know about it. As if I don’t also know that her booths are tufted in a blue-green velvet and the floor is speckled marble. I have to act surprised so she doesn’t find out I’ve been secretly following the bakery’s Instagram account ever since Logan accidentally informed me about Darlin’ Donuts a few years ago.
I don’t actually follow her account or like or comment on any photos, so she has no way of knowing that I’ve been keeping up with her. But every night when I fall into bed, the first thing I do is type @DarlinDonuts into the Instagram search bar and stare at whatever photo she’s posted that day, hoping to see a glimpse of her face in every reflection.
I don’t tell her any of this for two reasons: (1) I don’t want her to hit me with a restraining order because she suddenly thinks I’m her stalker; and (2) it sounds an awful lot like I’ve been pining away for her since high school—but honestly . . . I have been a little bit. But I’ve also been busy and content in my life, working so hard that I barely have time to think about anyone or anything but the career ladder I’ve been climbing. You don’t become the world’s youngest three-star Michelin chef by sitting on your ass and dreaming of a woman far away. You think of her while you’re working instead.
But it’s really been in the last few years that I’ve thought about June more than normal. Logan and Stacy visited me in Chicago, and Logan let the news of the bakery slip. Stacy kicked him under the table, and that was when I was first tipped off about the “no talking about June” policy. I didn’t press it in the moment. But I did manage to get the name of her bakery before Logan left, and I then proceeded to think about June every day for the next three years.
Actually, yeah, I do sound like a stalker. Great.
But the thing is, June has become a comfort to me from far away. An enigma. A figment of my imagination and someone that I’ve let myself dream of reuniting with for so long that I’ve been afraid to actually see her again. The more time that passed without me coming to visit, the more I talked myself out of ever seeing her again. I couldn’t imagine there being a scenario where the real June measured up to the one I had created in my mind.
Except, here she is. And she’s worlds better than the June of my fantasies. She’s beautiful and spunky, and yet soft as butter behind all those sharp thorns.
In the middle of her business talk, she accidentally tells me about the time Justin Timberlake came into the bakery and how she was so nervous she spilled an entire tray of donuts onto the floor. This leads to her telling me about how sometimes she drinks too much coffee and it makes her hands jittery. Which leads to the story about the time she tried to cut her own bangs after drinking three cups of coffee, creating a new system in her family for identifying a date in time known as BBB and ABB (Before Bad Bangs and After Bad Bangs). And how the only thing that could calm her down after seeing her jagged bangs in the mirror was a trip to Taco Bell because fast-food tacos always make her feel better.
June realizes that she’s been talking about her life and promptly seals her mouth up, leveling me with laser eyes because I tricked her again. And that’s that. No more personal talk. We spend the rest of the morning fine-tuning what we want to make for the rehearsal dinner, and then she kicks me out an hour later with barely a second look.
After I’m back at the hotel, I work out in the gym to clear my head of June, and when that doesn’t work, I take an ice-cold shower. When I’m out, I wrap a towel around my waist and check my phone. I have three text messages in a new group chat.
STACY: Hi guys! Friends dinner tonight at our place for old time’s sake?
LOGAN: I don’t know why Stacy added the question mark. It’s not an option. This is a mandatory friends dinner. Be here at 7:00 or be removed from the wedding party.
UNKNOWN NUMBER: Is that a promise? I’m kinda getting tired of doing all of Stacy’s bidding anyway:)
And just like that, I have June’s phone number.
I immediately save it in my phone and then get ready to shoot off my reply when another text comes through.
JUNE BUG: But for real, I’ll be there. But I plan on eating all of Ryan’s dessert so he doesn’t get any.
I pull up out front of Stacy’s house and notice June’s Jeep already in the driveway. I take a deep breath because I feel something close to butterflies in my stomach, though I refuse to call them that because it’s got to be the most emasculating feeling to claim.
I get out and slam my rental car’s door a little too hard. I can’t help it, though. As hard as I’m trying to play it cool, all my actions are coming out aggressive and choppy. I’m a tightly wound rubber band, and I’m ready to snap.
After pulling a bottle of wine from the back seat, I walk up the nicely manicured sidewalk and ring the doorbell on Stacy’s little cookie-cutter cottage. There’s a welcome mat that says Love lives here. I read it while I wait for the door to open and throw up a little in my mouth. Somehow, I know that if June and I were a couple, she would shoot me dead in my tracks before she ever let me close to a house with a welcome mat like that.
“Ryan!” says Logan with an odd smile when the door opens. His eyes are wide, and his lips are tight like he’s trying to tell me something. Someone teach this man the art of discretion. “Come on in. Everyone is in the kitchen.” He says that about 75 percent too loud as I pass by him.
I glance back at Logan with a look of suspicion—suspicion that he might have lost his mind in all this wedding planning—and then I head for the kitchen.
I hear June’s voice before I see her, and a big wild smile pulls at my mouth. My feet move a little faster, and when I realize I’m showing the same level of excitement as a puppy going somewhere new, I make myself slow the hell down. I round the corner into the kitchen, and my smile falls.
There’s a random dude standing near June. He’s staring at her even though June is giving all her attention to Stacy, who is stirring a pot on the stove. Dude’s got dark-brown hair and a jawline that could be used for measuring perfect right angles, and I immediately decide his brain is the size of a pea. I set the wine bottle down on the counter so firmly I’m surprised it doesn’t break. I’m a grumpy toddler, angry and breaking things because I was promised a cookie and I’ve been given a piece of broccoli instead.
Everyone startles at the sound and whirls their heads toward me.
I smirk and say, “Hi,” but I’m only looking at June.
Her green eyes briefly take me in from head to toe before she seems to remember something and latches onto the guy beside her. She weaves her arm through his and then around his waist to tuck herself in closer to him, turning a coy smile to me. “Glad you could make it, Ryan. This is Carter.”
I don’t look at Carter because he’s irrelevant to me. I’m fixed on June, and her eyes are glittering at me—taunting. And then it hits me. I know what’s happening here. She’s bringing back the oldest play in the book. My play that I ran too many times to count. She’s intentionally breaking the rules and bringing a date to our foursome friends dinner. So now I’m the odd man out. It’s retaliation at its finest.
I smile, letting the original sting I felt roll right off my back. June is striking back. She’s trying to get under my skin.
You know why? Because she likes me.