Chapter 17
SEVENTEEN
ASH
I spent a lot of time on the road trying to nail down some kind of routine—just enough to keep me sane when Caro and Gordon were driving us nuts.
I don’t like the idea of doing the same thing every day, but having some stretch of time where I don’t need to think that hard helps.
Working at the bar scratches that itch more than I thought it would.
Are some of the guests irritating? Yeah. But knowing I need to be at the bar at a certain time and having a prep routine isn’t that bad at all.
Plus, Wes isn’t a bad boss. I can see why the other bartenders like to work with him. He’s laid back without the place being completely lacking in structure.
“Ready for trivia night?” Jasper, one of the longtime bartenders, asks me. “It’s going to get busy, but the tips are always good.”
“Yeah, ready as I can be.”
Jada is coming tonight, too. Just the thought of seeing her makes my body thrum with anticipation in a way I haven’t felt in a long, long time.
Fooling around at the drive-in was pretty tame compared to what I’ve gotten up to in the past, but it flipped some switches I didn’t realize were off inside me.
Her soft little sighs and the feeling of her body under my hands… shit.
We have another eleven months of this ruse, and building tension when I can’t relieve it elsewhere is going to be the death of me.
“It’ll be fine,” Wes says from the door of his office. He stretches and yawns. “I can jump in to help if you need it.”
Greta, who runs trivia, comes in a few minutes later and starts setting up the sound equipment, and a few guests start trickling in. I’ve always been able to able to peg tourists versus locals (probably because it’s easy to know basically everyone in this town), and these people are tourists.
Jasper takes the first batch, and I serve the next ones. I’ve gotten used to the flow of things behind the bar, and most of the time, people want basic drinks like a margarita or rum and coke rather than something niche.
The bar starts picking up about a half hour before trivia is supposed to start, and I see Jada come in.
She looks around, almost like she’s afraid someone will whack her with a dodgeball, before she spots me.
I can’t help but smile. She really is fucking cute.
Her hair is up in little buns, and her lipstick is hot pink.
Jeremiah is behind her and gives me a cool look. I nod in greeting and he nods back.
Jada gestures to an open table, and Jeremiah sits down at it. I wipe down the bar as Jada comes up.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi.” She pauses, like she isn’t sure what to do, and glances down the bar at the tourists.
“What can I get you?” I ask, leaning with my hands on the bar.
“Two moonshine Shirley Temples, a rum and Coke, and a moonshine margarita,” she says. “I get the first round.”
“I assumed you weren’t getting plastered. Can I see your ID?” I ask. She huffs and rests a hand on her hip. I grin. “I’m just messing with you, Jada.”
“I know.” She glances around again and says with a low voice, “Greet me like a normal person. A normal husband.”
“Like a normal husband?” I suppress a laugh, but a small one escapes me anyway. “Since when have I been anything but a normal husband?”
I motion for her to lean across the bar and lightly kiss her on the lips. She gets flustered and gently swipes her thumb across my bottom lip, leaving a few tingles behind. I can’t get the memory of her soft skin out of my head from the drive-in.
“My lipstick,” she says, clearing her throat. “Is it messed up? You got a little on you.”
“Looks perfect.” I grab a few glasses and start making her drinks. “Waylon and Bianca are coming, too?”
“Yeah, in a bit. Waylon is getting the food.” She pulls at her earring, which is shaped like a hot pink book, and watches me. “You look like you’ve gotten the hang of things.”
“I have. It’s not too hard.” I shrug and grab the soda gun for the rum and coke. “Dealing with a rush is the hard part.”
“Hey, can we get some service down here?” A man at the far end of the bar asks. He’s probably around my age, with a thick reddish beard and a shaved head. “Or are you just going to talk to her all night?”
I glance at the clock on the wall to make sure I haven’t been ignoring this guy for ages. What a dick. I’d just refilled his drink five minutes ago.
“Be there in a second,” I say. I put down the first two drinks for Jada to take and bring the other two drinks to the table for her.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Really?” the same asshole at the bar says as I walk past him. “She couldn’t make two trips?”
“She’s my wife,” I say.
“And? She’s got legs.” He sighs. “Whatever, gimme a shot of well whiskey.”
I grind my teeth as I pour him a shot, then slide it across the bar. I want to say something back so damn badly. An unfamiliar feeling bubbles up, too. What does he mean by “she has legs,” and why the fuck did he say it like that? Like a verbal leer?
I glance over at Jada but can’t see her legs. She’s wearing jeans, her legs completely covered. But they cling to her thighs, and thighs like hers are impossible to ignore.
His tone bothers me as trivia starts and continues to bother me as his voice gets louder and more obnoxious. My eyes flick to Jada throughout the night, and every once in a while, they catch hers. They always turn shy for a moment before she goes back to having fun.
Trivia night is more popular than I thought it would be, and most of my night is spent rushing around. Wes hops behind the bar, too, and helps grab the customers who I don’t get to.
But this one asshole has locked into me the whole night.
He’s with friends, but they’re secondary to his grudge against me.
He asks me for drinks, and I don’t get them to him quickly enough no matter what.
He bitches about the drinks, even though I make them exactly as I’m supposed to.
He bitches about trivia, even though I don’t have any control over that.
He’s not even talking to me directly most of the time. He’s just complaining into thin air loudly enough for everyone around him to know. He hates everything and everyone equally, even other random guests.
And even worse, he’s giving me a familiar look—like he’s trying to place me but isn’t sure where he knows me from. We didn’t go to high school together, so he can only know me from one place.
“Wait, are you that guy?” the asshole asks. “In that band. The one with the annoying song in the car commercial.”
I hold in a sigh. I rarely get recognized these days, at least correctly. Most people assume I’m just someone they know from somewhere. Why is this guy even aware of who I am? I decide to lie. “No.”
“Yeah, you are.” The guy digs his phone out of his pocket. “I’m googling you.”
“Can you back off?” Jada says, appearing near the man. “He’s not that guy.”
“Who asked you?” the man asks, looking at Jada in a way that ignites my rage. I nearly let loose but remember I’m at work. And as Wes said, I can’t be an asshole to assholes here, as much as I want to.
“What do you need, Jada?” I ask. I take a breath. “What can I get you?”
“Just plain soda water,” she says.
I hop right to it and the asshole sighs.
“Yeah, that’s you, you liar,” the man says, showing me a picture of the band. It’s a zoomed in group photo, one from a promo shoot for our shows. “What’re you doing here? Band flopped?”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Jada says, even though I want her to back down. I don’t want this guy to even know she exists and here she is, leaping in to defend me.
“This doesn’t have shit to do with you.” The asshole gives her a dirty look. “You marry him for money? I doubt he has any.”
Fuck this guy.
“Listen, asshole,” I bark. “Do you need some shit to do? Because I can give you something to do out back, something that’ll finally shut you up. Don’t fucking talk to my wife that way.”
I haven’t started a real fight before—I’ve only been pulled into them by accident—but I’m ready to do it tonight. How did he manage to push my buttons and mess with Jada? Did Danika send this guy, too?
“Ash.” Wes puts his hand on my shoulder. “Take a break.”
I take a deep breath and take the out. I go outside to the alley between the bar and the restaurant next door, trying to gather myself.
But I can’t, because technically, the guy was right. And more importantly, he treated Jada like shit. I doubt he would have gotten physical, but the fact that she was close to a drunk guy and tried to defend me has my heart racing.
What if he hurt her? What if this escalated?
I lean against the wall and ignore the old itch to smoke or hit my vape. It would help me in the moment but set me back years.
The door opens again a few moments later and Wes steps out.
“You good?” Wes asks.
“Getting there.” I force myself to relax my shoulders. Hopefully the rest of my body will follow.
Wes gives me another few moments to pull myself together before he speaks.
“We get drunk assholes all the time, and yeah, they’ll do anything to get under your skin,” Wes says. “But you need to cut them off sooner, or they’ll end up like this. The guy’s wasted. Jasper’s kicking him out.”
I rake my hands down my face and cup the back of my neck, taking a few deep breaths. I’m still too wound up to speak like a normal person, so I take more deep breaths.
“I get the urge to punch that guy’s face in. If he said anything like that to Rose? Or acted like that even in her general direction?” Wes shakes his head. “It’d be over. But we can’t. We just have the power to toss him out on his ass.”
I finally get a grip. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” He rubs the back of his neck, too. “But I’m going to have to tell JD.”
I don’t want to get an earful from JD, but Wes is just doing his job.
“Fine.”
It won’t be the first time JD’s been pissed off at me, and it won’t be the last. I just hope he doesn’t decide to throw me out of the family business before I can finish my year’s worth of work.
“Take another few minutes.” Wes nods at me and heads inside.
I crouch and lean against the wall, biting my thumbnail. It’s better than smoking, even though it’s still a bad habit.
Before I step inside, though, the door opens and Jada comes out.
“You okay?” I ask Jada.
“I came out here to ask you that.” She looks me up and down and steps all the way into the alley. “They threw that asshole out before you kicked his ass.”
“I know. Wes told me.”
My adrenaline rush is coming down, so I let myself look at her for longer than I usually do. Her eyes look tired and worried, and I hate that I’m a part of the cause.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “But that guy was crossing the fucking line and I—”
“You don’t have to apologize. You were just…” Her head tilts to the side as she studies me. “Protective. Of me.”
Her words hang in the air between us. I’ve never once described myself as protective of anyone, not even women I’ve been with in the past. Not even with the woman who wrecked my heart ages ago, and those feelings seemed so massive at the time.
This protectiveness snuck up on me, hard and fast.
I haven’t thought about my feelings for Jada too closely because it’s flat-out uncomfortable.
Our relationship is supposed to be stuck in the “fake” box, and nothing else.
But now I’m seeing it’s spilled out of that box and I don’t know how much it’s spread into territories that I want to keep my feelings out of.
All I know is that I like her too much, and I care too much. But I can’t do what I’ve done in the past and just detach.
“Yeah,” is all I say in response.
“Well, thank you,” she says, tucking a loc that’s fallen out of one of her buns back into it. “I appreciate it.”
I just nod instead of telling her the truth—that the protectiveness over her scares the shit out of me.