Chapter 30
BOOKER
“You’re gonna polish a hole in that.”
Seth’s voice startled me back to reality—the bar, the glass in my hand, and the way I’d been polishing it for... who knew how long.
I hadn’t even heard him come in.
“Hey,” I said.
I’d really, really meant it to sound enthusiastic, but it’d come out like I was greeting my executioner. Given that there was a non-zero chance Seth would kill me if Miles left, maybe I was.
That was on Seth, though. Me as the primary incentive for Miles—or anyone—to stay in Otter Bay had always been a plan doomed to failure.
I just wasn’t all that.
“Wow.” Seth pulled out a bar stool and sat down. “Wanna talk about it?”
“Not really.”
Talking about it wasn’t going to change anything. Miles was being offered his dream job—I knew he’d be offered it, who wouldn’t want him working in their library—and I couldn’t compete with it. Nothing anyone said was going to make a difference to that, least of all anything I said to Seth.
“Sorry, I phrased that like it was a question,” Seth said, putting both of his elbows on the bar and resting his chin in his hands. “You can occupy your hands by making me a mimosa while you tell me what’s up.”
“It’s…” I glanced at the clock, surprised to find the hour hand had crept almost a twelfth of the way around the face since the last time I looked. “Not even noon.”
“Mimosas are a breakfast food,” Seth countered.
“Brunch,” I argued, but I was already reaching into the fridge under the bar for the orange juice and prosecco. Arguing with Seth was a losing battle.
“Brunch is just an extension of breakfast,” Seth said. “And you’ve used up your quota of avoiding the subject. Is this about Alex? Because I think you should show up at the wedding with the world’s cutest librarian and show him that you’ve moved on to someone a whole lot better for you.”
I took the deepest breath my lungs would allow and let it out in one short huff, grabbing a tall glass and scooping ice into it. “Do you want a cherry in this?”
“Obviously,” Seth said. “So it’s not about Alex, or at least it’s not primarily about Alex. Which only leaves the bar, or Miles.”
I glanced at Seth. He’d inevitably wheedle it out of me, but I wondered if he’d be able to tell by… the set of my shoulders, or the twitch of my mouth, or something.
“But this is the wrong quality of misery for it to be about the bar. If it was about the bar, you’d be mad or grim, because whatever the problem was it’d be unjustified or accidental. This is just sad. So it’s Miles. What did you do?”
“I’m not sure it’s fair to assume this is on me,” I said, picking three cherries out of the jar in the fridge.
“Well the fact that you’re bribing me with extra cherries is suggestive,” Seth said as I poured orange juice over them, topping it off with a couple of mouthfuls of prosecco.
As expected, Seth said nothing about the ratio when I pushed the glass across the bar and started putting things away.
“No umbrella?” he asked.
I snorted. I’d had rainbow umbrellas for Pride this year—so many that by the end of the month I’d started putting them in glasses of water—but I’d run out, finally, in mid-August. The people of Otter Bay loved their little umbrellas, and the rainbow ones had been a hit.
Seth had worn one behind his ear every time I’d seen him in June.
“Not until Halloween,” I said. I already had my eye on jack o’ lantern and spider web umbrellas for the season.
“What happened with Miles?” Seth asked.
I sighed, despite not meaning to. I wasn’t going to get around this, and I’d run out of distraction ideas.
“He got a job offer,” I said.
Seth’s eyebrows made a break for his hairline as he sipped his drink.
I wiped down the bar while I waited for him to swallow.
“What job? Where?”
“UChicago. Academic librarian. He called it a dream job.”
I had no reason to doubt Miles when he said that. He’d hated working in a public library when he’d first arrived in Otter Bay. Then, he’d had to pull out all stops to save the damn thing. Public librarianship hadn’t exactly made a great impression on him.
Seth—miracle of miracles—didn’t say anything. He stared at me with his mouth hanging a quarter-inch open, thumb stroking the side of his glass.
I found a tap to polish that conveniently allowed me to turn a quarter away from him.
“He can’t,” Seth said. “His contract—”
“You’re not going to stop him,” I interrupted, turning back to Seth. “I’m serious. Dream job. You’re not going to stop him from taking his dream job.”
“But… is this finalized? Has he signed anything? Because with the budget increase we can definitely offer a raise—should offer a raise, really, given how ridiculously we were underpaying to begin with, and—”
“It’s not about the money,” I interrupted again. I was sure of that. Miles wasn’t mercenary at all. I got the impression that, if he could, he would’ve worked for free. He loved being a librarian, and he was good at it.
He deserved the dream job.
“Well of course it’s not, or he wouldn’t have come here in the first place,” Seth said. “We can—”
“Offer him a job at a prestigious university? A job he’s specifically qualified for, the one he wants to do?” I asked, brow raised as I glanced at Seth.
The way his shoulders slumped might have been satisfying if I’d been winning an argument I actually wanted to win. As it was, it only made me feel worse.
Seth turned his glass around on the bar.
“It’s not finalized,” I admitted. I didn’t want Miles getting in any trouble, and I hadn’t read his contract.
I would. I’d get him out of it, even. If he wanted to go, I wasn’t about to let a contract stop him.
“The… HR rep, I guess, is coming back tomorrow. Miles doesn’t seem sure she’ll offer him the job, but I’m sure. Look what he accomplished here.”
“He’s good at what he does. Better than he thinks he is,” Seth agreed. “I just thought… I mean, the way he looks at you. I wouldn’t have thought he’d leave for money, but I would’ve thought he’d stay for you.”
I snorted. “You’ve got a rose-tinted impression of me.”
“You have a… what’s the opposite of rose-tinted?” Seth asked, taking out his phone.
I waited. After a few taps and a moment’s pause, he wrinkled his nose.
“Lime green?” he asked. The phone, I assumed, since he wouldn’t have been asking me a question about color. “Well, that’s not gonna make sense because lime green is a pretty color. You have like, eclipse glasses on when it comes to yourself. You don’t see how incredible you are.”
My lips twitched despite everything. If nothing else, I knew Seth loved me.
Like I’d said a hundred times, I had enough. I was surrounded by people who loved me, who I loved.
More than that, I’d gotten to love Miles. That wasn’t nothing, and it wasn’t wasted. It’d been a privilege to know him.
“Have you told him?” Seth asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“That I’m sure he’ll get the job?” I frowned, unsure I had.
Maybe I ought to have been more supportive.
I wished now that I hadn’t left the way I had, I’d just been so overwhelmed by the feeling of the world crumbling under my feet that I’d stumbled through making an excuse to leave. I didn’t even remember now what it was.
“That you’re in love with him,” Seth corrected.
Something in my chest plummeted to somewhere around my knees and the sudden rush of blood to my head left me deaf and dizzy for a few heartbeats.
“I’m n—”
“Don’t,” Seth interrupted, pointing at the center of my chest, “lie to me. C’mon, you’re smarter than that.”
I swallowed.
I should’ve known Seth would know.
I hadn’t done a great job of hiding it, once I’d known Miles was okay with people knowing. I probably hadn’t done a great job before then. I hadn’t wanted to.
And Seth had always had an uncanny ability to read my mind.
I’d always figured that was because my older brother was his soulmate.
We weren’t the same people, Mark and me, but we were similar enough that knowing him meant, for someone as good with people as Seth was, knowing a lot more about me than might otherwise have been obvious.
Like the way I was when I was in love. Even though he’d never seen it before.
“The stage lost absolutely nothing when you bought a bar,” Seth said, tone kinder than the words might’ve implied alone. “You’re not fooling anyone. You’re definitely not fooling me.”
“No one ever does,” I said wryly, casting around for something to do with my hands that Seth wouldn’t call out as exactly that. I settled on grabbing the cloth again to clean the taps.
The way Seth’s eyes followed me told me I was transparent as the glass he was drinking out of. “So you didn’t tell him,” he spoke up, pausing to sip his drink.
“No,” I admitted, not meeting his eyes. The taps were already clean, but that didn’t stop me wiping imaginary grime off them. “My feelings aren’t his problem.”
Seth’s glass hit the bar with a thump. I risked glancing at him out of the corner of my eye and found his mouth hanging open.
I turned my attention back to the taps to give him a moment to recover.
“Booker,” he said, voice much firmer than before.
“I… first of all, your feelings aren’t a problem.
You’re not putting a burden on someone by telling them how you feel, and if they behave like you are, well, they’re an asshole.
Miles isn’t an asshole so this is a moot point.
Being loved is a gift. Especially being loved by you.
There are people in this town who’d give a limb for someone like you to love them the way you so obviously do Miles. ”
“You’ve said.” Or at least, he’d said words to that effect. The limb thing was, as far as I remembered, new.
“Because it’s true. Contrary to the rumors, I don’t actually say things recreationally.
I’m saying this because I love you and I want you to be happy and I love Miles, too, actually, and I want him to be happy and frankly if I could wrap you in a bow and hand you over to him as a bribe to stay, I would. ”
I took a breath to say not much of a bribe, but that’d just lead us down the path of Seth telling me I was, that I was worth having, that anyone would be lucky, etcetera.
Which was nice of him to say, but I was tired of hearing it.
The fact was, I wasn’t. At least, I wasn’t worth more than a once in a life time dream job opportunity. I wasn’t worth more than his career, which he clearly cared about. I couldn’t put any obstacle between Miles and the thing he wanted most in the world.
I couldn’t stand the thought of him staying because he wasn’t an asshole. Because he’d hear me say I loved him and want to cling to that because people had treated him badly before, at the cost of his dream.
If I loved him—and I did, I loved him with my whole heart, so much it was threatening to crack in two—then I’d let him go. Wasn’t that what Sting said?
Seth finished his drink while I wiped down the bar, pretending I’d found something stubborn on the edge of it so I could focus on that and not on him.
He set the glass down more quietly this time before standing and heading for the door.
“If he wants to go, I won’t do anything to stop him,” Seth said over his shoulder with one hand on the door handle. “You should give him all the information. Even if it’s as a parting gift. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”