30. Chapter 30
thirty
M ax forced himself off the couch and made his way to his dining table where he’d left his laptop untouched the day before. On any other day, he’d have already dealt with a million problems, but after the text he’d received from Willow the night before telling him to open without her, he’d been having trouble finding the energy for even his usual routine.
His email had been going off all morning while he lay on the couch, ignoring it, and watching sports highlights he’d fallen behind on. It was about noon when he finally got up and dealt with it before it got out of control.
The first ten emails were mindless, about things that weren’t urgent, so he skipped them and scrolled until he saw the name that he’d been seething over for the past twenty-four hours .
Fucking Jer.
He’d sent out a mass email that morning apologizing for his mistake that caused the delay. Max quickly read through the responses, all positive “we all make mistakes” bullshit, and he couldn’t take it anymore. Rather than replying, he started a new email addressed to only Jer.
He could feel the tension in his shoulders and knew this was probably a bad time to be corresponding with that fool, but he couldn’t take it anymore. Jer was the reason everything had gone to shit. Willow was partly to blame, since she’d hired him, but he refused any further communication with her, so he couldn’t very well take his anger out on her.
He started, stopped, deleted, and rewrote the few sentences repeatedly, trying to sound as calm as possible. He wanted so badly to write “Don’t fuck this up again!” but he knew that wouldn’t be okay. In the end, it wasn’t too mean. He’d just made it clear that, going forward, Jer would answer to him, and he expected Jer to check in twice daily, starting tomorrow, to ensure they would open on time.
A few minutes went by before he got a reply.
He opened it, read through quickly, then sat back in his chair, shocked.
Jer had quit .
And he’d done a terrible job at it. All he wrote was, “I will never work for you. Buh bye!”
Max rolled his eyes. The guy couldn’t even quit properly.
He opened his spreadsheet and was sifting through the other candidates he’d gone through weeks earlier when the doorbell rang. Before he could even get up, it rang again.
Then again.
“Okay,” he yelled. “I’m fucking coming.”
He’d barely got the door open when Cara pushed it the rest of the way and forced herself in.
“What the hell, Max?”
He stared at the back of her head, dumbfounded. “What the hell, Cara?”
She spun on him, looked him up and down, then frowned. “Where’s Willow?”
“How should I know?” he asked, slamming the door behind her. “You’re her roommate.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I went by the pub on my way home this morning, and neither of you were there, and when I got home, she was gone, poof, vanished.”
Max narrowed his eyes at her. “On your way home this morning?”
She stopped dead in her tracks, blinked twice. “I thought maybe she’d moved in with you or something. What the hell happened? ”
Max shook his head and went back to the table. “Her ridiculous protégé destroyed all the beer and forced us to move the grand opening back. Willow decided she’d rather be with those toxic assholes in Churchill than with—than here, so she left.”
Cara’s shoulders sank. She moved to the chair opposite him as her face took on a pained expression.
“Stop,” he said, looking back down at the spreadsheet.
She sagged back in the chair. “Do you know when she’ll be back?”
Max shrugged. “Maybe never.”
“I’m sorry, Max. You must be so—”
“I’m not so anything.”
“But I thought you guys were, like, together. Weren’t you?”
All the Willow memories came pouring out. The first time she’d made him laugh over the phone, her pretty flushed face every time they kissed. How she looked spread across their desk.
Fuck, even the ripped-up pen box.
He shook it off and narrowed his eyes at her, taking the focus off of himself. “Do you really want to have a heart-to-heart about our love lives, Cara?”
She schooled her features and fell silent.
“Where have you been lately?” he asked. “You haven’t been coming around. I never hear from you, and you didn’t even know your roommate was missing.”
She shook her head a little, looked to the side out the window.
“You’re back with that fucking Cooper. I know you are.”
Her shoulders slumped.
Max let out a humourless laugh. “It’s no wonder you and Willow got along so well.”
“I know you don’t like him—”
“I don’t like the way he treats you. I don’t like the way you let him. And I don’t like his fucking mullet.”
“I love him.”
And that was exactly the fucking problem. Same with Willow. They were both letting their feelings guide their decisions instead of basic logic.
“So?”
“So, I can’t just pretend that I don’t have feelings,” she said, her own temper flaring. He knew Cara well enough to know that as bad as his temper was, it was no match for hers.
“Of course you can,” he said, forcing his tone to even out. “And you absolutely should.”
Silence fell over them, and Max was thankful his words were sinking in. Maybe she was finally getting it now and realizing that feeling love was the most surefire way to get trampled all over .
“Is that what you did to Willow?”
Max’s gaze flicked to hers. “She was engaged to someone else,” he said.
“But then she wasn’t, and then you fell in love with her, and you still iced her out, didn’t you?”
Max opened his mouth to speak, but Cara beat him to it.
“And that’s why she left, and that’s going to be the reason she never comes back.”
Max shook his head. “You’re wrong. I told her how I felt, and I asked her to stay, and she left.”
What the fuck did she expect him to do? Fall to the floor, latch onto her ankles, and beg her to never leave him?
“I don’t have time for any of this,” he said, turning his focus back to his spreadsheet. “I have a brewery to run, and now that Willow and Jer are gone, I can do it properly. Everything is the way it always should have been.”
He had a responsibility to the other people working for him, to Luis, who’d moved his whole family for the job, and Adam, who’d invested to get the place up and running.
That was something he could control, something that he could, with enough work, make happen. Getting Willow to make a fucking decision wasn’t something he could fix .
He’d banged his head off the wall enough when it came to her. It was time to move on.
Cara slowly stood from across the table.
“I don’t blame Willow for leaving,” she said, her eyes filling with tears that he knew were a mix of anger and sadness. But mostly anger.
Max ignored her feelings and shrugged. “It’s probably for the best.”
Her eyes flared, and she seethed. Literally seethed. “You can be such an asshole sometimes,” she said, then marched across the room, out the front door, and slammed it behind her.
He got up immediately, followed her steps, and locked the door. He didn’t want to see another person for the rest of the day.