Chapter 42 Adam
Currently playing: Homesick by Noah Kahan
***
After checking the back of the store for further damage and locking the place up, I reached for my phone to call Nathan.
Technically, he wasn’t my brother. Not by blood, anyway. But he was as good as. Plus, any of my siblings right now would pester me with questions about why I needed a ride and what I was doing outside the record store. Nathan was a good enough guy to keep his mouth mostly shut and not press on the harder questions.
“Hey, man,” he answered after two rings.
“Hey, any chance you could give me a ride?”
There was a silent pause between us. If he couldn’t, I wasn’t above getting an Uber. This seemed easier.
“Yeah. Where are you?”
I rattled off the address. I could hear his brain putting the pieces together, but he didn’t question me. He simply just said, “I’ll be there in twenty.”
When he pulled onto the street, I hopped into the passenger side, swinging the spare key for Sip ’n’ Spin around my fingers. As suspected, he didn’t ask questions.
As we were approaching the highway exit that would lead me to home, Nathan kept driving. I tossed a thumb over my shoulder. “Turn’s that way.”
“What?” he asked, looking behind him and then turning back around, shaking his head. “Oh, no. We’re going to Romfuzzled.”
I shuddered. The last thing I needed was all of my family members jumping me at nine in the morning.
“It’s not open.”
“It’s always open for us. Besides, Luke asked Crew to help with some food truck event thing, and I’m bored. So you’re coming.”
My head rested against the seat. “I’m not good company right now.”
“Are you ever?” He snorted. “Kidding. Well, kind of. But either way, Calla gave strict instructions to bring you back so that when she’s off work, she can come by, and I can’t say no to that girl.” He said it with this dreamy voice that was comparable to a thirteen-year-old talking about his neighborhood crush.
I groaned. If my baby sister had to marry someone, I guess Nathan was as good as we could get in this family.
We pulled into Romfuzzled and entered through the side door, finding Crew and Luke arguing while Layla sat at the bar with a laptop, typing away. Marigold sat beside her, leaned back in the chair with two hands on her barely swollen belly.
“Luke, stop moving and listen to me. It’s swing, two, three, four and turn, two, three, four—”
“I didn’t sign up for dancing when you said you were going to make a TikTok for the bar.”
“Oh yes you did.”
“Where?”
“In the fine print right next to where you need to be better at lip syncing and cutting out your millennial pause—” Crew stopped and looked over at me, eyes squinting.
“Adam.” He tilted his head. “Whoa. What happened?”
He set down his phone and ran over to me, passing Nathan and putting the back of his hand to my forehead—which I promptly smacked away. “Did you get in an accident? Oh no, where’s Rachel?”
I scrunched my eyebrows together and opened my mouth to answer, but he kept going.
“Are you guys getting divorced?”
“Divorced?” Liam shouted across the bar.
“Oh, Adam.” Marigold pouted and then promptly started tearing up—I assumed because of the pregnancy hormones. Liam put an arm on her shoulder.
I squinted at all of them. “I haven’t even said anything.”
Crew pointed at my lower body. “You asked Nathan for a ride, and you’re wearing sweatpants in public. And you definitely have not showered today. This is full-on crisis mode.”
Luke adjusted his glasses. “You do seem kind of off.”
I felt it in my instincts to brush it off, to dip my chin and keep quiet and move the conversation past me. But wasn’t that what had gotten me here in the first place? Keeping everything to myself had gotten me nowhere. Actually it had gotten me less than nowhere. It had gotten me ten steps away from the woman I loved more than anything else on this earth.
My fingers raised to pinch my nose. Force it out. You need help. You can’t do this alone.
“I screwed up.”
That was an understatement for how much guilt was sitting on my chest because I’d made Rachel cry. How everyone around her has somehow messed up and worked their way out of her good graces when I swore I never would.
Marigold twisted the chair beside her my way, patting the empty seat as an invitation. I accepted and moved to sit down while my siblings gathered around. Crew sat beside me and tried to rub my shoulders, but I shrugged him off.
“What happened?” Luke asked, still wiping down glasses.
No more holding back. No more avoiding the subject or brushing it off. They were bound to find out at some point, so I couldn’t beat around the bush.
“Do you remember how I sold my portion of Romfuzzled to Liam a year and a half ago?”
They all nodded.
“I used it to invest in the record store.”
It was silent for a moment.
“Rachel’s record store?” Crew asked.
I confirmed with a nod, and then it got quiet again.
“And…you never told her?” Liam asked, his hands still resting on his wife beside him.
“No.”
Marigold looked between all of us and stood up as quickly as a very pregnant woman could. “This seems like something I shouldn’t be here for, so… I’m gonna walk outside.”
Layla quickly closed her laptop and followed. “Mmm me too.”
They both slipped out, and with them gone, I felt a little more relieved to share, considering they would probably rather hear Rachel’s side of things.
When the door shut, I continued.
“When she told me that the store was for sale years ago, I felt like I had to do something to help. The old owner needed a certain amount out of it to retire, and I tried pulling strings, but I couldn’t make it work.”
I left off the part where I searched for two weeks to try and find Arthur’s number without Rachel finding out. Or the fact that when I couldn’t get the right number, I showed up at his house and nearly gave the guy a heart attack until I mentioned wanting to buy the store. He said he thought I was coming to rob him—I would assume because of the tattoos that he eyed like they were going to jump off my skin and attack him.
“I told him I wanted to invest at least. Make it better for her. She’d call me and complain about her feet hurting from standing all day or say how there was a spider infestation in the back room and she was scared to go in there. Stuff like that. I wanted to help. I offered him the cash up front to fix what he needed, but he refused. I left him my number in case he changed his mind, and I waited. Eventually he called me. Said that there were some investors new to town that wanted to buy it. They didn’t have all the cash for the building and renovations. That was where I came in. I loaned them the rest of what they needed and used the leftover money for essentials.”
Liam tilted his head. “So you were an investor then?”
“Right. But then I started suggesting different things, and they started listening and implementing and…” I closed my eyes and flared my nostrils. “I didn’t see it as a bad thing back then. Not really. I thought I was doing her a favor. Then she was being so overworked when business started doing good again, and even though they hired help, I knew she deserved more. So when the other investors mentioned raises, her name came up, and I…well.” I avoided any of their staring gazes. “What was I supposed to do? Not sign off on it?”
Crew spoke up next to me. “I don’t see anything wrong with it. You bought her a record store. Got her a raise. Cool to me.” He shrugged.
Nathan, Luke, and Liam all shook their heads.
“Nah, don’t listen to him. You did screw up,” Luke said.
Nathan snorted. “Yeah, to be fair, Crew hasn’t had a real relationship in…forever, so he doesn’t get it.”
“Screw you guys. I could have a real relationship tomorrow if I tried hard enough.”
None of us fought him on that one. Crew was good-looking—maybe the most good-looking of us, objectively. But he also was a walking train wreck, and most women realized it about two minutes into a conversation. About the time he started talking about his obsession with different kinds of cheese.
“Look.” Liam leaned in. “Trust me. I lost Marigold by keeping stuff to myself. You did screw up. Own that shit. Don’t play it off as something it wasn’t. You can’t expect to keep her close without actually letting her in. She’s gotta know everything from beginning to end.”
Luke nodded. “We’ve all done it. Being vulnerable with her is the only way you can ensure your marriage stays intact.”
“Is that what you want?” Nathan asked. “To stay married, I mean. Calla made it seem like you guys were doing it for, like, a temporary thing.”
I nodded. “We agreed to use the extra money from my work to help her with her dad’s bills and then to get them both good insurance. Plus, I needed extra money for the renovations. But I knew going into it that I didn’t just want that.”
I pulled a deep breath in through my nose as I worked up every bit of courage to force out the next bit. “We’ve been friends for…years. I met her before I even knew she was Layla’s friend, and then we felt weird because we hooked up once, so we agreed to stay only friends and then,” I paused, remembering every step that led us here. “And then we just kept hanging out. When I realized I was in love with her, it felt like it was too late to go back. Buying into the store, securing it for her, felt like a way I could keep her close.”
“Like a safety net?” Luke asked.
I nodded. “Yeah, basically. I was going to tell her a long time ago. I had plans to tell her about the store and the whole love thing, but just when I was starting to work up the courage, she was going on a date with that baseball player—”
“Oops,” Nathan said, and I glared at him.
“It felt like I needed her to want me for me, and not because I’d bought her a store. So I thought that, after her race, I’d tell her for sure. When I knew without a doubt that she loved me. I had plans today to take her on a ride to her favorite mountain and do a whole setup and just…spill it all out for her. But my phone rang, and the store was flooded. So she knew when they called me about it first.”
“Ouch.” Crew chuckled. “I mean, that is some rough timing. Seriously, what are the chances—Ow. Quit it, Nathan.”
I sighed and leaned back in my chair, raising my hands to take off my hat and run my hands through my hair before putting it back on. “I just don’t know what to do from here.”
“Give her some time. Then, when the opportunity comes, go talk to her,” Liam answered.
Luke nodded. “Yeah, listen to him. He somehow managed to lock Marigold down twice. He knows what he’s doing better than the rest of us.”
Liam smirked, looking out the window to his pregnant wife as she waddled up and down the sidewalk.
Time. I could give her that. If I was going to do this, and I really wanted to, then I’d sacrifice wherever it took. Even if that meant leaving her to herself for a while.