Chapter 17
RHETT
Idon’t usually come to The Bar on a busy Friday night.
But after telling Cash what I had told my mom, and him putting together that Colt and I have something going on, he thought dragging me out for a few beers and shots was the best thing for his “heartbroken brother.”
I find a spot at the far end of the bar, away from the pool tables, and Halle clocks me the second I walk in. Her expression is quizzical, but she smoothes it before coming over with a beer, which she places in front of me and moves off without comment.
Great, so he told her something too.
Is that what I should expect? That, slowly, the entire town will know?
Doesn’t matter how progressive the world is getting, there will always be people who don’t understand or approve of it.
Will I have to constantly read the expressions of others before approaching them?
Will I have an aura around me that screams gay?
I’ve heard of “gay-dar.” Is that something I should worry about now?
I pencil those anxieties away for another time.
Because most people will look at me right now and only notice the greenish-purple shiner that surrounds my eye. But, fuck it, I just drink my beer and try to let the noise of the room do the work of emptying my head.
I’m working on my second beer when I hear my name.
I look around and notice it’s just someone a few stools down, talking to a girl next to her, not paying attention to who else is in earshot. She’s leaning over the bar, clearly drunk, yelling at her friend.
“—obsessed. I’m telling you. It’s been weeks. Every single day, it’s Rhett this and Colt that and did you see what Rhett did. I can’t even. She literally has a folder, Sarah. On her phone. Screenshots of everything.”
I set my beer down very slowly.
“A folder?” the other girl asks.
“A whole folder—pictures, texts. I don’t even know what half of it is, but she showed me some of it last week, and I was like, Molly, this is…this is not normal. You need to…”
I turn my head.
The girl talking is Jessica Pruitt. I’ve known her since third grade. She and Molly have been inseparable since middle school, and right now she’s three sheets to the wind, talking to Sarah Coleman about her best friend, and she has absolutely no idea who is sitting two stools to her left.
I watch her for a moment—let her keep going.
“—the texts thing. She thinks I don’t know, but I saw her setting them up once on this other phone—this little burner thing she had—and when I asked her about it, she got so weird and cagey and I just…
I don’t know. It felt wrong, you know? Like, it’s one thing to be upset about a breakup, but this is… ”
It was Molly.
All summer. Every text. Every time I felt watched and exposed and unraveled, it was Molly, with a burner phone and a folder full of screenshots, sitting in the dark, manufacturing the doubt she needed to keep me second-guessing everything and everyone around me.
She watched us.
She was there that night.
She knows what happened, and she’s been holding it over both of us since.
I think about Colt showing me that text. I think about what I said to him. I think about the punch I threw and the look on his face when he said I fucking quit and drove away.
I pick up my beer, finish it, then set the bottle down.
“Jess.”
Jessica Pruitt turns mid-sentence and looks at me, and I watch the exact moment she realizes who she’s been sitting next to. The color drains out of her face so fast it’s almost impressive.
“Rhett…” She says it like she’s hoping she’s wrong about what she just said in my presence. But she’s not wrong. “I didn’t—I wasn’t—”
“Where is she?”
A beat. “She’s…she’s here. She came in about an hour ago. She’s with—”
I’m already off the stool.
I find Molly in the back corner, the place she always gravitates toward in loud rooms. She’s with a girl from her school, both of them leaning over a phone screen, laughing at something.
She looks easy and unbothered and pretty in the way she always has, and for a moment, I just stand at the edge of the room and look at her, cataloging all of the things I now know.
She feels me looking before she sees me, her eyes finding me as her face transforms into a complicated expression. A flash of guilt covered fast by something more constructed.
She says something to the girl beside her who glances at me before taking her drink and finding somewhere else to be.
Smart girl.
I cross the room, stopping when I’m close enough that she has to tilt her face up to look at me, but far enough that she can’t back up without hitting the wall.
“Rhett. Your eye—”
“Don’t.”
She swallows. “I don’t know what you—”
“Molly, I know about the phone.”
The color leaves her face the same way it left Jessica’s, because she knows exactly which phone I mean.
“I don’t—”
“The burner.” I hold her eyes and don’t let her look away. “I know you were in the woods. I know what you saw and I know what you’ve been doing with it. It was you, Molly.”
She says nothing. Her jaw is tight, her eyes bright, and I can see the calculation happening behind them, wondering what I can prove and what exactly I’m going to do about it.
Something shifts in her expression. The guilt is still there, but something else rises up alongside it.
“You want to talk about what I did?” Her voice cracks but she holds it.
“You led me on for three months, Rhett. Three months of me wondering what was wrong with me. Why you wouldn’t touch me.
Why every time I got close to you it felt like you were somewhere else entirely.
Do you know what that does to a person? Thinking you’re not enough?
Thinking maybe he’s with someone else, maybe there’s another girl, maybe I’m just—” She stops.
Breathes. “I deserved to know the truth.”
“You deserved the truth,” I say. “You didn’t deserve to go digging through my private life with a burner phone and a folder full of surveillance.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.” The hurt in her voice is real—I can hear that it’s real.
“You wouldn’t talk to me; you wouldn’t touch me.
I thought if I could just figure out what was wrong, if it was another girl, then at least I’d understand.
And then I saw the way you looked at him…
” Her jaw tightens. “At Colt. At the bonfire. And I thought…I thought I was imagining it, so I kept watching. Because I needed to know if I was crazy or if I was right.”
“You were right, and I’m sorry for that.
I’m sorry I let it go on as long as it did.
That was wrong and I know it. But being hurt doesn’t make what you did okay.
You stalked me. You watched me. You sent threatening texts to me and to him from a phone you bought specifically to hide what you were doing.
You don’t get to stand here and tell me you’re owed something after that. ”
“I just wanted you to love me.”
“I know.” I hold her eyes. “And I couldn’t. That’s on me. But what you did after—”
“You were going to hide it forever!” Her voice sharpens. “You were going to keep lying to me, to your family, to everyone. You needed someone to—”
“You weren’t going to expose me out of some noble intention, so don’t give me that shit. You were angry and hurt and you wanted a weapon—that’s what this was.” My voice is raised now.
“Rhett ” She looks at the two guys watching us and drops her voice. “Keep your voice down.”
“Why?” I look at her steadily. “It’s a small town.
Everyone talks, right? That’s what you were counting on.
” I let that sit for a second. “Here’s what’s going to happen.
You’re going to delete every photo, every screenshot, every text thread, tonight.
The burner phone goes too. And you’re going to leave me and anyone connected to me completely alone. ”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then I start talking. I will tell everyone the fact that you spent your summer stalking your ex-boyfriend and sending anonymous threats instead of moving on.” My voice is carrying just enough that the guys at the next table have stopped pretending not to listen.
“I will talk about it here, in this bar, and then I talk about it everywhere else in this town until everyone in Cedarbrook knows exactly what you did.”
Her face has gone white. “You wouldn’t.”
“It’s a small town.” I lean in slightly, dropping my voice to something that only she can hear.
“You came after a Thornwood, Molly, with the intention of using what you found to control me. We have been in this county for four generations. My grandfather shook hands with every mayor this town has had since before your parents were born. You want to talk about who this town will believe?” I straighten up.
“Toss the phone. Tonight. And think very carefully about whether any version of this ends well for you if you don’t. ”
“I loved you,” she says, her voice breaking slightly on it. “I just…I wanted you to—”
“You didn’t love me. You loved the idea of me—the ranch and the name and the picture it made. That’s not the same thing and somewhere deep down, you know that.” I straighten up. “Toss the phone, Molly. Tonight.”
She stares at me. Her eyes are bright, her jaw tight, and she looks like a woman who came into this conversation holding something and is realizing, piece by piece, that her hands are empty.
“Okay,” she says finally.
“Okay,” I say back. Then I turn and walk away from Molly for the last time.
Halle is at the bar when I get back to my stool. She sets a fresh beer in front of me and leans against the counter with her arms crossed, looking at me with that expression again.
“Feel better?” she asks.
“Working on it.”
She nods, then starts to move away. I stop her.
“Colt. You heard from him?”
“He’s fine.”
“Where is he?”
She picks up a glass and starts polishing it, which means she’s buying herself a second to decide how much to say. “He went to see a friend—couple towns over.”
“What friend?”
A pause. “Randy.”
She says the name and goes back to polishing the glass and I sit there with the name settling and the beer going untouched in front of me.
Randy.
I don’t know a Randy in Colt’s life; I’ve never heard him mention a Randy. And Halle said it with that particular evenness that means she’s watching to see what I do with it—her eyes on the glass in her hands but her attention completely on me.
He left. He quit and he left and he’s two towns over with someone named Randy and I’m sitting here, in The Bar, with a black eye and the cold clarity of a conversation I should have had months ago, and something is happening in my chest that is hot and specific and has nothing to do with the cold anger I just used on Molly.
This is different.
This is jealousy, and it’s doing things to my ability to think clearly.
“When’s he back?” I ask.
Halle sets the glass down, looking directly at me for the first time in this conversation. “I don’t know,” she says. “He didn’t say.”
I nod, pick up my beer, and take a drink.
She moves off down the bar.
Cash drops onto the stool beside me, signaling Halle for a beer, and looks around the bar before he looks at me and clocks my expression. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
“You look like someone kicked your dog.” He leans on the bar. “Halle, what’s his problem?”
Halle sets his beer down without looking at either of us. “Ask him.”
I sigh. “Colt’s two towns over with some asshole named Randy.”
Cash goes still for a second, then looks at Halle. Halle looks back at him, then Cash looks back at me.
“What?” I ask.
Cash picks up his beer, takes a drink, then sets it back down before scratching the back of his neck. Cash is thinking long and hard about his words, which is not something Cash ever does naturally and therefore means that whatever comes next is going to piss me off.
“Randy? As in Rowdy Randy?”
Halle has suddenly found something very interesting to look at on the other end of the bar.
“I don’t know who the fuck this Randy person is, but he’s going to get his shit rocked once I see him.”
“Oh.” Cash chuckles. “Yeah. He’s a…problem. The two dated a few years back. Not a great sign if he’s with…him.” He glances over at me. “You know…after everything.”
I sit there for exactly thirty seconds.
Then I put cash on the bar, finish my beer in two long pulls, and walk out to my truck.
Two towns over.
I know exactly what I’m doing. I know it’s irrational. I know I have no claim, and I know I’m the reason he left in the first place. I know all of that and I’m getting in my truck anyway because I’m done being the man who knows the right thing and does the cowardly thing instead.
I’m going to go get what I want.
And god help Randy.