Chapter 29
TWENTY-NINE
Emmett
“Delivery,” Davis announces as he opens my office door, carrying a box under his arm. “Think these were supposed to come to you.”
“Oh cool, yeah, thanks.” I take the box from him and drop it onto my desk, tearing away the tape holding it together. Inclining my head toward the door I ask him, “Will you go ahead and shut that on your way out?”
He blows out a breath, furrowing his brow, and he steps closer. Reaching past me, he grabs the paper coffee cup off of my desk and sniffs at the lid, pulling his head back with a grimace. “Fuck me. Gonna add some coffee to that Irish, Hoss?”
“You drink on the clock,” I snap.
“Only difference is everyone knows when I do it,” he chuckles.
“I’m not pretendin’ it’s something else and locking myself in my office at,” he pulls his wrist up to check his watch, “nine AM. I’ll make ya a deal: you grab a stick of gum and a water bottle before someone else smells that shit, and if you wanna drink about somethin’, we can go out after we’re done here. ”
“Fine.”
“Good. Montgomery’s gonna be here in ten, so get fixed up and get in there.”
“Do I really need to be there?” I ask. “I— have a headache.”
“Well, lemme think on that for a sec. Owner of the company,” he says, pointing to himself.
Moving to point toward the hallway, aiming for Dad’s office, he adds, “Owner of the company, and…hold on for a sec here, I think there might be one more—” he points to me now, “that’s right, owner of the damn company. Yeah, man, we all gotta be there.”
He leaves with a friendly whack of his palm against my back and I shut the door behind him, watching the time tick down on my watch until Nash is due to arrive.
When ten minutes pass, I step out of my office and carefully move down the hallway to do probably the most gutless thing I’ve ever done in my life.
I hide in the goddamn bathroom.
·
This bar smells like piss.
The sound of pool cues knocking against billiard balls fills the room, accompanied by loud conversation and the occasional cheer from a section of people watching the game on a small TV.
Most of the people in here are older, maybe in their forties or fifties, and they look like they’re more than likely here more often than they are home.
“This isn’t your usual haunt,” I comment.
“Lynn would tell your old man on us.”
Davis and I grab a couple of drinks at the bar before we settle into a booth tucked into the back of the room, dimly lit from above with a flickering ceiling light that hangs over our heads, rusted over in a few spots.
I sip on my beer, straight from the can, while Davis squeezes a slice of lime into the tequila sitting in front of him, tossing the wedge into the glass once it’s spent.
I expect an interrogation or a scolding or…anything. Nothing comes. We sit wordlessly as long as it takes us to down two drinks each, occasionally glancing over at one another. Davis clearly expects me to say something first just as much as I’m expecting him to.
“I ain’t your dad,” he finally says, squeezing another slice of lime into his third tequila. “I’m not gonna sit here and ask you about your secret pain or the details of your tortured soul or any of that shit.”
“Good,” I tell him. “I don’t want you to.”
“But…”
“Davis.”
“I just wanna make sure we don’t need to be worried about ya, is all,” he shrugs.
I lift my beer to my mouth, pouring the rest of it down my throat, and I set the emptied can onto the table in front of me. “The less people there are worrying about me, the better off I’ll be.”
“Alright then,” he nods, raising his glass to me. “I’ll leave that job to your old man.”
After another beer, I decide to switch to something stronger, settling on a cheap rum that burns like acid on its way down my throat. I ignore the burn, letting myself get used to it in order to let the alcohol do what I want it to; it doesn’t have to taste good, it just has to work.
We down round after round until the room sways back and forth in my vision and Davis rests his elbow on the table, leaning forward to rest his head on his hand while he slams his empty glass onto the wooden table top.
“I was dating a guy,” I blurt into my glass. “Or I guess it wasn’t really dating. I was sleeping with a guy.”
“Well that’s new,” he says, leaning back against the cushion of the booth. “So, this a bi thing, or a figured-out-you’re-gay thing?”
I can see the wheels turning in his head, and his fingers move in front of him like he’s doing some sort of mental math or something; maybe trying to follow a timeline of my love life or tallying the women that we’ve indirectly shared with each other over the years.
“I still like women, too.” Pulling my glass to my lips, I down the second half of my drink. “I’m bi.”
“Well shit,” he says, nodding his head. “That’s cool, whatever knocks your socks off.”
“My socks were definitely knocked,” I slur, and Davis’s eyebrows shoot up while he laughs so goddamn hard that I think the lamp hanging above us by a thread might come crashing down and kill us both.
“Hold on, so you did like that one kid then!” He shouts, slamming his palm down on the table, which rattles all of our empty glasses. “I fuckin’ knew it.”
“Which kid?”
“That one you wouldn’t shut the fuck up about,” he laughs. “What was that, seventh, eighth grade? I told Colt you were either into the kid or gonna kill him. Maybe both.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Well yeah, you didn’t have to listen to it all the fuckin’ time.
” He throws a mocking tone into his voice, crossing his arms over his chest and tilting his head side to side while he speaks.
“’Uncle Davis, guess what he did today,’ ‘Uncle Davis, his hair is so stupid,’ ‘Uncle Davis, I hate him,’ ‘Uncle Davis, he’s the worst.’”
I let out a loud laugh, covering my mouth with my hand. “So the same things I said about—” I stop myself from speaking just before Nash’s name slips past my lips and sends Davis on the war path. “I need a refill, you want one?”
“Ah, why the hell not,” he shrugs. He stands from the table and drops a hand on my shoulder as we walk toward the bar. “Then I’m gonna kick your ass at pool.”
“You taught me how to play, dumbass.”
His brow arches in challenge. “Who said I taught you well?”
We throw back a couple of shooters at the bar before ordering another round of drinks, which we take with us to the pool table.
Davis lines up his cue to break the rack and he throws me a smirk. “So were you the big spoon or the little spoon?”
“Shut the fuck up,” I cackle, landing a smack to the back of his head. “I was both.”
“Ah, me too,” he admits as he takes his shot. “Wear Sophia like a fuckin’ backpack sometimes.” Butting the end of his pool cue against my hip, he adds, “His damn loss, alright?”
We dive into our game, only stopping occasionally to get fresh drinks or to loudly (and obnoxiously) belt out AC/DC’s Back In Black and Heart’s Barracuda when they pour out of the old speaker system next to us, clumsily using our cues to act as guitars and microphones.
It doesn’t matter that everyone is staring at us or talking about us or even that a couple of people have their phones out to record us.
My relationship with Davis is a weird one and it doesn’t make sense to a lot of people; he’s somewhere between my big brother, my uncle, and my second dad, and he slips seamlessly into whichever role he needs to depending on what we’re doing or what the mood is.
When I was a kid and I broke my arm on a jungle gym, he met Dad and I at the emergency room and paced around like a nervous mother hen, harassing the staff until I got a cast and some ibuprofen.
When I called him shortly after I turned seventeen and told him that I had gotten a ticket for underage drinking at a house party, he slipped into big brother mode and snuck me back into the house, telling me to ‘keep that fuckin’ mouth shut about it’ if I ever wanted to leave the house again.
‘What your old man don’t know can’t hurt ya.
’ He made the whole thing disappear for me, and Dad never found out about any of it.
Tonight, he’s somewhere in between brother and uncle. I catch glimpses of ‘second dad’ when his eyes shift a little as I order another drink, but he sets that role aside and joins me instead, meeting me shot for shot.
After going to the bar for one final drink, I bring it back to the pool table and down it in one go. Slamming the emptied glass down onto the table, I pull my keys from my pocket and hand them over to Davis – as if he’s in any better shape than I am to be in charge of the car keys.
“Your place?”
He nods. “Come on.”
·
I don’t get much sleep, mostly thanks to the nonstop spinning of the room. The high that I was on last night is gone when I wake up, replaced instead with a hangover and a deep pit of...something.
Slipping my phone from the pocket of the slacks that I’ve been wearing since yesterday, I swipe the screen open and look at my call log.
It’s been three days since the last time that I called Nash.
He hasn’t called back, hasn’t texted, probably hasn’t so much as thought about me since I walked out of his house.
He’s probably moved on to someone new by now.
I shove the phone back into my pocket with a groan and press my face into the cushions of the couch.
Something hard drops onto my back moments later. “Breakfast order,” Davis rasps as he walks past the couch, sounding just as hungover as I am.
“How much did we drink?” I ask with another groan.
“The entire fuckin’ bottom shelf, I think.”
I reach behind me to grab Davis’s phone from my back and I pretend to scroll through the menu on the screen before dropping it onto the coffee table in front of me. “I’m surprised your girlfriend isn’t here.”