Chapter 12
Sabrina
Grey disappears for most of the rest of the week, which is a good thing.
The intensity in his expression when he was poking for information about Addison and making it very clear that he remembers every word I told him in Hawaii has me off-balance.
And the two-gallon jar brewing a batch of kombucha on the desk is an ever-present reminder that he’s changing things.
Zen says he’s off doing responsible business owner things. The managers from the other two locations seem to think I want to know everything he’s doing, so I’m getting regular communication from both that confirms Zen’s story.
In Elk Knee, it’s simple. The crew had already quit and found new jobs, and the manager is doing the barest obligatory duties to help get the building for sale while working his new job too.
In Tiara Falls though, apparently Grey’s been working to help the soon-to-be-displaced crew there all find new jobs, and he’s providing severance packages for them until they do.
That’s a little above and beyond if you ask me.
Which you didn’t.
And it makes me like-dislike him a little more.
He does so many good things, but here?
Why does he have to change my building?
I can help him find another building in town if he wants to run a kombucha brewery.
But the one time I casually mentioned it to Zen, they snorted, muttered good luck with that , and climbed up on a stepstool to tinker around the piles of things on top of the fridge and take inventory of all of this powdered cheese .
“What happened with Grey and Chandler?” I finally ask Zen just before my shift is over on Thursday.
They’re warming up by the day, but I get the blank-faced, you don’t get that answer from me look. “Who says something happened?”
“My gut.”
“Same gut that led to your friend’s wedding disaster?”
“Low blow, Zen. Low blow.”
They shrug and go about their business.
I spend the rest of the day texting with Laney about how much more time Emma needs to herself before I get to check in on her. I tried sending Emma a text directly, but I couldn’t make myself type the words and hit send.
If I don’t message her, if I pretend she’s still on her runaway-moon and that I’m giving her space, if I tell myself she’ll ping me when she’s ready to talk, I can almost convince myself that this new normal will be okay.
Jitter and I visit Mom at the salon, and she hugs me and tells me everything will work out.
We go visit Grandpa and he shakes his head and says change is the only inevitable thing in life.
So I spend Thursday night with all three of the triplets at Silver Horn, getting just tipsy enough that one of them drives me home.
And Friday morning, I wake up hungover and antsy and still processing the new gossip I got from the triplets before the martinis took over.
Worse?
It’s only like 4 in the morning.
But I want coffee. And to do something .
Keeping myself in the kitchen and away from people all week at work has been seriously draining. I miss the gossip . I miss the community. I miss feeling like I’m in the middle of everything.
But I don’t trust myself to not misuse information, and I was rudely blunt to Addison the other day.
This is not me at my best.
I deserve to feel like shit this morning.
My car is still downtown, so I pour myself an extra-large tumbler of black coffee, bundle up, and head out with Jitter to walk to work with flurries swirling all around us.
Yep.
Snowing today.
Café should be slow.
Empty, even.
Good day for starting to face the inevitable, which is that I’m going to have to clear out my stuff from the only job I’ve ever had and the only place I’ve ever wanted to work.
But when Jitter and I arrive, the lights are on.
And the kitchen isn’t empty.
For the first time since the food fight, I’m face-to-face and alone with Greyson Cartwright.
My Duke in tarnished armor.
He looks just as surprised to see me as I am to see him, but I have the advantage of my nearly-empty coffee tumbler, so I fake taking a drink as I pass him at the prep table to hang my coat up. “Morning, boss-man. You’re in early. Didn’t see your car out there.”
When he doesn’t answer, I look over my shoulder at him.
He’s staring.
Not at my ass.
But at my head.
My head? My hair?
I brush a hand through it, feeling cold moisture mixed with the texture of my curls. “Do I have something?—”
“Snow,” he says shortly, and then he ducks his head and goes back to the prep table.
My heart does a slow crawl through my stomach and down to my thighs.
Building plans. Design plans.
All of the changes he wants to make to Bean & Nugget.
Can’t hide anymore.
This is it .
This is what he wants to do to my home.
I swallow thickly and move to stand next to him, looking down at the large sheets. Jack would geek out over the technical aspects, but I’m looking for a broad overview.
And I get it.
There’s a front-view illustration of the building, and I can see the rock outcropping at the back corner, and the edge of what’s clearly the art gallery next door, but where our old-fashioned Bean & Nugget block typeface sign over the picture windows should be, the signage is in a cursive font, spelling out The Hive , with a gigantic bumblebee hung at the corner of the building.
I point to the picture windows, which aren’t windows, but aren’t not windows. “What’s that?”
He pauses before he answers, and I can feel the weight of his gaze shifting to me. “Plexiglass beehives.”
“Chandler hates bees.”
“Does he?”
I open my mouth, then close it again.
Grey knows.
There’s no way on Earth he doesn’t know Chandler hates bees. And that’s not almost thirty years of studying human interactions telling me Grey knows Chandler hates bees.
That sarcastic, biting Does he? clearly says that this is not new information.
“We were maybe twelve or thirteen when he found a tree in a local park that was swimming with bees. He decided he wanted honey, so he started banging on it, and the next thing we knew, he was covered with them. Stung probably a dozen times. No anaphylactic reaction or anything. Not allergic. Just stung a lot. One of the stings got infected and he had to go on antibiotics that he did have an adverse reaction to.”
Grey grunts.
If I were the type of person to read into a grunt, I’d think that grunt said so he’s always been an asshole .
Grey loves bees.
It’s not just his magic beeswax-biodegradable-plastic self-sealing cereal bags.
The triplets told me last night that Grey used his first profits off of his patent to start building his own research lab with a tight friend from college.
He has a solid reputation as a certified bee genius in certain circles.
Works with universities and government organizations sometimes.
And suddenly in early December, with no warning, he sold all of his research to a completely unknown company and signed off on an agreement to not do bee research for anyone but them for the next ten years.
Decker found a small corner of the internet where the bee-obsessed hang out, and he said there’s speculation that it was a sabotage job.
That Grey and his former business/research partner haven’t spoken other than through their lawyers ever since.
I tend to believe you only get a third of the story off the internet. And I know I’m missing pieces of the story.
But the man I met in Hawaii? The man who wanted to do good in the world despite indicating that he, too, was having a bad day? The man who made me feel like I was worthy of basic human affection on what was one of the worst nights of my life?
The man who was a friend when I needed one the most?
I want to believe he’s still inside this zipped-up man who only makes noncommittal grunts when I say Chandler’s name.
“Why were you in Hawaii?” I ask him.
Those blue eyes shift until he’s looking at me straight on. “To crash a wedding and destroy a man’s reputation.”
I swallow.
Hard.
“What did he do to you?” I whisper.
His eyes flick away.
“I’ll believe you, whatever you say. And I know it was bad. I know it had to have been bad.” I point to the picture of The Hive . “This is—this is next-level perfection. He’s a selfish ass. He deserves this. But there are so many people who will be collateral damage if you do this here.”
He still doesn’t look at me, and that’s when I notice the bags under his eyes and the droop in his shoulders. The dishes at the sink that suggest someone ate here already this morning. The slight scent of bacon lingering in the air.
He hasn’t slept.
That’s why I haven’t seen him.
If he’s needed to be here, he’s come at night.
When I’m not here.
“Please—” I start.
“I hear Mr. Twizzlers and his body shop business could move to a different spot in town if Ms. Red Robin spilled all the dirt she has on him.”
I gasp.
I actually gasp .
Mr. Twizzlers was my code name for Kurtis, our local chiropractor, and yes, I said he had a body shop business on Main Street.
Fine.
That one was probably easy.
But Ms. Red Robin was my code name for myself.
The only time I used it was when I told him about the time I hid all of the flyers for the annual rodeo because I was mad that Addison was going to be crowned Rodeo Princess.
And I changed all of those details. Something about an art festival and the Crochet King.
“Zen found all of the rodeo posters in a cubby under the desk,” Grey adds like he’s reading my mind.
“I looked it up. Your friend Addison was crowned Rodeo Princess the same year as the flyers. You said you didn’t tell me anything about her, but this paints a picture that suggests she’s Ms. Taco Bell who might or might not have used blackmail to be crowned Ms. Crochet King at an art festival. ”
“Oh, god,” I squeak. I’m not hungover anymore, but I wish I was. “That’s—that’s?—”
“Genius?”
“ Diabolical .”
One corner of his mouth lifts, and god help me, I want to kiss it.
I want to climb him, wrap my arms and legs around him, and kiss that corner of his mouth.
He can expose me.
He can tell everyone what he’s figured out, and he can probably put more pieces of gossip together.
And I want to kiss him for it.
“You can make the chiropractor move and re-open your café there,” he says quietly. “Then we both get what we want.”
He doesn’t promise to keep all of my secrets as his own.
He also doesn’t offer up anything else he might’ve figured out and pieced together.
He’s dangerous. And he definitely hates Chandler.
“Are you blackmailing me?” I ask. “Buying my compliance with your knowledge?”
He meets my gaze again, and this time, there’s zero mistaking what I’m reading in there.
It’s worse than blackmail.
Worse than tearing apart my café.
Worse than his anger and irritation with me.
It’s forgiveness .
I blink and try to make myself believe it’s something else, but I can’t.
Not when he opens his stupid sexy mouth again. “I’m not mad at you.”
Fuck . “You should be.”
“I get it. I would’ve ghosted me too.”
“I was an asshole.”
“You were brutally honest until the very end, and you did what you thought you needed to do to protect both of us.”
“Stop making excuses for me.” Keep making excuses for me.
His gaze doesn’t waver, but something shifts in his eyes.
Recognition.
Like he gets why I want him to be mad at me. Like he understands that it’s easier to keep people at arms’ length and only let them so far in.
Laney and Emma? My mom? Grandpa?
They’re in .
Emma not talking to me is horrific. I’m hiding from facing it, but it is. It’s bad on a losing my grandma level, and it reminds me of every relationship I’ve ever seen go south.
Which is a lot of relationships.
I’m feeling that thing with Emma that I’ve shielded myself from, and having Grey forgive me right now almost makes me feel like Emma’s forgiven me.
Like I’m still worthy of being someone’s friend.
Or more.
Like it could be okay, even knowing the pain that’s come from my friendship with Emma being up in the air.
“Who told you that you have to be perfect?” All of his intense focus is trained on me, his eyes flicking over my face like he’s taking stock of how every teeny tiny muscle is reacting to the question.
“Me,” I whisper. “Perfect is?—”
“Safest.”
“ Yes .” I blink and pull back. “No. No . Laney’s the perfect one. The safe one. I’m the gossip. I don’t have to do anything right. I just have to know?—”
“How to use it all right,” he finishes for me.
Nailing it.
Again.
He shifts, and I realize he’s been moving this whole time without me noticing it.
And now he has me trapped between his two long, solid arms, my back to the prep table, him leaning into my bubble, and oh my latte, this .
“My parents blamed me for existing for my entire life,” he says quietly, no hiding, no blinking, no hesitation.
“I was the accident. The highest-maintenance. The one who wasn’t supposed to disrupt their lives.
So I made myself as small as I could be.
But fuck that. We get to exist. We get to make mistakes.
We get to be wrong. Even when we know we’re being wrong.
We’re human . And right now, I want to make another very big mistake with you. ”