Chapter 18
Sabrina
Work is awful.
I hate it, and I hate hating work. Even on the hardest days when things break and customers are cranky and food trucks don’t come in on time and I burn myself with coffee or a hot pan, I generally love my job and still wouldn’t trade it for the world.
But since Chandler finally showed his face this morning, nothing’s the same.
Grey’s moody and quiet through finishing his puzzle.
When he’s done, he leaves it on the table with one piece missing in the middle.
Zen barely says a word. Willa murmurs to me that Chandler needs to eat a bag of dicks. Cedar kicks me out of the kitchen, and he’s so furious that I don’t argue, even though it means I fake my way through being cheerful while running the counter with Willa during the lunch rush.
At least two dozen people ask me if I’m okay. I lie and put on a perky face and say that I’m great.
More ask me if I’ve heard from Emma.
My shift takes forever to end, and when it does, I pick up Jitter and the two of us head to one of my favorite summer spots for those rare moments when I want to be alone.
I crunch over the short path from the two-car parking lot to the gazebo that overlooks both downtown and the lake and train station, and then I have to clear snow off of the picnic table inside to get a place to sit.
Good sign that no one else has been here. Also a good sign that everyone else will stay away.
Jitter’s in heaven. He can lay in snow forever.
I know I won’t make it more than half an hour—not when it’s this cold and I’m sitting still—but I need to recenter myself.
When I hear a car on the road behind me, my shoulders twitch. When it stops and a door shuts, I get ready to pretend I’m already freezing and bolt.
Except Jitter beats me to it, and the only thing he’s doing is woofing once in absolute glee and darting off to greet his new favorite person.
“Go away,” I say.
Grey ignores me, carefully navigating the trail I cut with my snowshoes and still sinking into the path halfway up his calves while Jitter hovers near him. When he reaches the gazebo, he lifts a Bean & Nugget coffee tumbler. “Peace offering.”
“Are you giving up on turning my café inside out?”
He sighs and sets the tumbler on the picnic table bench between us.
I smell vanilla and cinnamon.
That’s low.
That’s very low.
“We could build something better together,” he says without looking at me.
“You realize how insulting that sounds to someone who’s incredibly proud of how hard she’s worked to make it what it is today?”
“Didn’t mean it that way.”
I know what this is. This is him trying to find common ground. It is a peace offering.
And I’m grateful.
But it still hurts. Bean & Nugget might not be perfect, but it’s where I belong. With coffee and Grandma’s scone recipe and the history and the community and everything we can keep doing in the future.
“I’m sorry Chandler took your puzzle piece. And your scone.”
“Not your fault. And I got another scone. You might’ve been there.”
This sucks. It just does.
“What are you even doing here?” I ask.
“Café got a call from a concerned citizen who said you were headed this way and shouldn’t be alone.”
I slide a look at him.
“Zen took the call. Couldn’t even begin to tell you what they sounded like.”
The coffee aroma is teasing me.
I’m usually a straight black coffee person. Dessert coffee—anything all doctored up—is reserved for special occasions and bad days.
Today is definitely a bad day.
So I give in to temptation and pick up the mug, sniff it— definitely cinnamon and vanilla—and I sip, and I get everything .
This is good.
Better than good.
It’s sweet and creamy and just the right spicy. A little piece of joy in a dark, dreary, ugly day when the sun still had the nerve to shine.
Dammit . “Can we pretend we’re in Hawaii and you’re Duke again for just five minutes?”
His blue eyes make a slow perusal of the landscape around us, then settle back on me with more warmth than I’m expecting.
My thighs clench. And not because it’s cold.
More because all he had to do was look away, and then look back, and I swear he’s everything he was in Hawaii.
He inclines his head while Jitter keeps wagging his tail and pushing his head into Grey’s hand. “As the lady wishes.”
I sip my latte again, then I point to the far end of Main Street. “See the big log cabin?”
“City Hall?”
“It was a general store that sold mining supplies and food back in the eighteen hundreds. When the gold rush dried up here, they built around it. If you get a tour, Vicki will point out the original walls. They’re around the county clerk’s office now.
So anyone who wants to get married has to get their license in our original general store. ”
He slides me a look like he wants to ask if I’m talking about marriage for any particular reason, but all that comes out of his mouth is, “Fascinating.”
“The statue of Ol’ Snaggletooth in front of City Hall was put up in the 1980’s.
Legend has it that he was the first man to find gold here in the Tooth, but if you go on the tour at the mine, there—” I point in the opposite direction, to the old wooden building rising out of the mountainside above the lake “—they’ll tell you that we have the largest mine to never actually find any gold, and that Snaggletooth was likely a scam artist. But he gets credit for the railroad coming through here. ”
“What was his real name?”
“You’ll have to take a tour of both the mine and the railroad depot by the lake to find out all of the different people who are suspected to have been Snaggletooth himself.
And some people will tell you that the real Snaggletooth was a shop owner in town who had a tooth with the same snaggle shape as the creek if you look at it from the top of Bobcat Peak behind us. ”
“So you come by having nicknames for everyone here naturally.”
“Exactly.”
“Ms. Donut came in yesterday, didn’t she?”
I pause. What did I— oh . And who— oh again.
I try to hide my heating face behind a casual sip of coffee, but I don’t think he’s buying my attempt at a non-committal hmm .
He grins, and dammit , he’s still adorable when he grins.
“Stop talking about that,” I order. “You’re Duke. You’ve never been here. I’m giving you the grand tour.”
He leans back, draping his arm across the tabletop behind us in one of those moves. “Apologies. Please continue.”
As if I can just continue when I’m wondering if he likes me as much as I don’t want to like him.
“That building? The A-frame on Main Street just two blocks down from City Hall? That’s the salon where my mom has worked my entire life.
The building next to it, the one with the blue roof, is an ice cream shop where I had my first kiss.
The building on the other side, the brown one, is a gift shop that once caused the biggest drama the Tooth has seen in years by selling taxidermy chipmunks that weren’t ethically and humanely sourced. ”
He frowns. “The GrippaPeen guy’s dad is a taxidermist.”
“Yep. The gift shop didn’t take them off sale, but ownership changed within a year, and the new people did.”
“That sounds like it could be a warning to your new boss about behaving himself.”
My ass is getting cold. Jitter’s keeping Grey warm instead of me.
And mention of my new boss makes my face have a reaction that I can’t suppress.
“Speaking of, have I told you that my cousin is a complete and total thunder-twat who sold my family’s café to a guy who can be the world’s biggest prick but I get it .
I understand a lot of his issues and I don’t blame him for how he feels. ”
Grey ducks his head and sucks in a heavy breath.
I mean it though.
I don’t blame him. I haven’t blamed him.
But if I’m talking to Duke, then I’m going to talk to Duke .
Not Grey. “I have to find a solution to a problem of saving my café while letting my new boss get the peace he deserves in the next twelve days or else I’m facing the very real possibility that I’ll lose something that means the world to me.
And the best person to help me find the right solution for justice is angry with me right now, and even if she wasn’t, I will never say that platycuntapus’s name to her.
She deserves time to mourn and recover and find her new normal.
Not questions about how to make him pay for what he did. ”
Jitter whines and sets his head on Grey’s knee. Such a good dog.
I don’t even have to look at the man to know he’s struggling with this too. My dog’s telling me.
And the fact that my dog hates it when Grey’s upset hurts too.
The only other person Jitter loves this much is Theo, which I’ve never quite understood, but I think I’m getting it now.
Jitter has a finely-tuned people have hurt you and I want to love you meter.
I study Grey, making sure he’s not gripping anything for support or getting that distant look in his eyes like he did Sunday night when I thought he was going to pass out in his doorway.
He seems fine though.
As fine as I assume he can be in this position, anyway.
“You don’t think you can find a compromise for your boss,” he says.
“I think it hurts to watch your life’s purpose go up in smoke through no fault of your own.”
He looks away. “That is its own particular brand of torture.”
I know he knows. He told me as much Sunday night. We both know he’s doing the same to me that his partner did to him, except I still get it .
“What did Chandler do to you?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
I wonder if Emma knows.
As if it matters. I won’t bring her into this. I can barely bring myself to ask Theo what would hurt Chandler the most for fear he’d ask her, no matter how much I tell him not to.
I hunch forward and cradle my coffee in my hands, which are getting colder by the minute, even inside my gloves.
“Are you staying here in the Tooth?” I ask. “Is that the long-term plan?”
“I don’t know.”