Chapter 13 #2
It didn’t sound like ‘nothing’. It sounded a whole lot like something, actually. The barely there hint of misery was unmistakable, setting off alarm bells in my head instantly.
He’d held it back valiantly, I’d give him that much. Smoothed out the edge to his tone just enough to make it easy for anyone else who didn’t know him to gloss over it without a second thought.
“He just... Something felt off when we were texting so I wanted to call and check on him.” I didn’t mean for my voice to dip on that last part, but it did. Just enough for Sully’s eyes to narrow.
“Wilder,” he said slowly. “Since when are we concerning ourselves with our employees’ personal lives?”
I clenched my jaw. “They work for us. We should care.”
Sully snorted. “That’s not what this is.”
I turned toward him fully, irritation boiling hot in my chest. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you don’t get like this over just anybody.” He shook his head, his expression shifting to something I didn’t like. “You’re worried about him in a way that’s got nothing to do with him being one of our employees. Let’s not forget the fact that he’s also nineteen.”
My face burned. “Jesus Christ, Sully. It’s not like that.”
“No?” He lifted a brow. “Then what is it?”
I opened my mouth to defend myself, my tongue becoming tied in the process. The words were stuck, lodged somewhere in my throat while I fumbled for something—anything—to say to turn this conversation around.
The ugly truth was that I didn’t have any fucking answers to give.
Because what the hell was I supposed to say to that?
Admit I cared about Asher more than I should?
I had no business thinking about him in the way that I did, let alone to be this fucking invested in whether he was happy or not on a major holiday. I hated the idea of him sitting alone on Christmas, waiting for someone to reach out and finding his call logs empty.
Where were his brothers?
Where was his family?
Why did he sound so damn isolated?
Sully’s eyes softened for a fraction of a second. “You can’t fix everything, Wilder.”
Those words landed hard. There was no heat to them, no accusations, just a simple and undeniable truth.
One I didn’t want to hear.
This all felt too exposing. Too raw to deal with, having only downed a few shots of whiskey beforehand, which now were doing nothing to push down the buzzing in the back of my skull.
I’d worked hard to keep this part of myself buried.
To make sure it wasn’t obvious how much I favored Asher over the rest of my staff.
How often my gaze lingered for a second too long when he wasn’t looking, or how easy it was for me to find myself naturally gravitating toward wherever he happened to be like I was some compass and he was the magnetic pole I wanted to gravitate to.
Yet somehow, here in this kitchen, my dark secret had been dragged out into the open, laid bare under a glaring light, raw and vulnerable as it was dissected and picked apart piece by piece by a man who had been my mentor for decades.
I needed to deflect, fast, before this got even more out of hand than it already was.
“You’ve been oddly distracted lately. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. I should be asking what’s been going on with you, instead of being grilled about something you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
His expression flickered for a moment, a crack in the usual steady exterior revealing an unreadable emotion in his eyes that was gone too quick before I could latch onto it. “You keeping tabs on me, now?”
“Only after you went into town a few weeks ago and have been acting off since.”
Sully’s jaw clenched.
For a moment, it seemed like he’d deny it, brush it off in order to focus the conversation back on me again.
But instead, he surprised me by taking a slow step back, his expression growing hard. “All right. I think we’ve both had enough of this for tonight. I’m going to let you cool off. We’ll come back and talk when you’re in a better headspace.”
My knee-jerk reaction was to tell him not to bother.
This wasn’t some passing frustration I needed cooling off from. I wasn’t angry, or upset and needed distance between us. I just didn’t want to talk about what happened with Asher—not now, not ever.
Reality wise, what I wanted was for this conversation to end here permanently. For us to wipe our hands clean, bury it back in whatever dark crevice it had somehow crawled out of and pretend it never happened in the first place.
It made no sense for him to rehash things and dig for answers when I had no intention of sharing with anyone outside of the confines of my own damn mind.
Sully could push all he wanted. Trying to bring it up again was only going to end in another argument neither of us wanted to have.
Thankfully, for all his persistence, Sully at least knew when to walk away. “Have a good night, Wilder.”
I rolled my tongue along the back of my teeth, resisting the urge to say something sharp. Instead, what came out was a clipped, “You too.”
He exhaled slowly through his nose but said nothing else, pivoting on his heel and striding out of the kitchen. I watched him disappear down the hallway, heading back to the great room where the rest of our staff still was.
A heavy sigh left me as I sagged back against the kitchen counter.
This night had spiraled faster than I intended, unraveling into something I hadn’t been prepared to deal with and now had no idea how the hell to fix.
Instead of enjoying the last few hours of the holiday like I should have been doing with everyone else, I was here alone, stuck with my own thoughts.
What a fucking mess.
With a slow inhale, I lifted my glass of whiskey up from the counter and brought it up to my lips, tipping it back to drain the rest of it in one smooth pull.
I winced, feeling the burn again.
Morning chores were going to be a bitch to do tomorrow.