5. Demi
Cannon held the door open for me as I walked into The Bridger, which I was told got its name from being semi-near the Golden Gate Bridge, and if you stood in just the right spot on the street and tilted your head with your eyes squinted, you could make out a sliver of the orange metal.
A dimly lit room greeted me, the air already thick with the smell of smoke and alcohol even though it was only eight o’clock and the bar was probably only half full. People milled around close to the bar, others sat at the round tables scattered around, and music played loudly enough that I couldn’t quite say it was playing in the background.
Cannon placed his hand lightly on the small of my back, his fingers gently pushing me forward. I hadn’t realized I had stopped in the doorway as I took in where I might possibly be working. Shuffling my feet toward the bar where Cannon was guiding me, I couldn’t help wondering if I’d made a horrible mistake. I rarely came to bars as a recreational activity, let alone to work. I’d been more of a let’s go hang out at a nice restaurant with champagne kind of girl. I wasn’t sure I was cut out for a job like this.
A beefy guy in a black t-shirt came up to greet us from behind the counter. His dark beard made up for the hair he was lacking on his head, and the tattoos that covered both of his arms were done in bold, bright colors. His scowl looked like it might be permanent, but then he smiled with perfectly white teeth, and I involuntarily sighed in relief, not realizing I’d been holding myself rigid.
“Cannon,” his voice boomed, his smile softening his rough features. “Aren’t you sick of seeing me yet?”
“You? Yes,” Cannon said with that smile he used to schmooze people. “Your drinks? Never.”
The bartender chuckled. “You barely even drink when you’re here.”
For a split-second, Cannon’s smile started to drop, but he was quick to replace it. “What can I say? The atmosphere at The Bridger is unbeatable.”
If Cannon wasn’t coming here to drink, then why was he spending so much time here? Looking around the room, I saw several beautiful women staring at us.
Oh. Maybe I didn’t want to think about the other reason he’d be going to a bar. I was sure it wouldn’t take long for the women to run at him like a stampede.
Bar Guy, who I was assuming was Robby, gave Cannon a look, like he knew he was full of it. “Okay, what do you want?”
“Can’t a guy compliment his friend’s business?”
Robby crossed his large arms over his chest. “No.”
Now I could see how a guy like him could run a bar. He wasn’t someone you wanted to mess with.
“I don’t want anything,” Cannon assured him. “I’m actually here to help you out.” He gestured to me standing next to him. “This is my best friend’s little sister, Demi. She’s looking for a job, and I noticed your help wanted sign.”
I tried not to stare at him in annoyance. I’m his best friend’s little sister? He couldn’t just call me a friend? Or did he not think we were?
I snapped my attention to Robby, not wanting to start the interview off on the wrong foot by focusing more on Cannon’s words.
I offered Robby my hand. “Hi, nice to meet you.” His hand swallowed mine up with a firm shake.
“Nice to meet you.” He looked me up and down. “Are you sure she wants to work here?” he said to Cannon while his eyes were still examining me. “She looks too sweet and pure to work at a place like this.”
“She’s not as sweet as she looks,” he informed him. “She threatened to kill me this morning.”
Robby’s laugh rumbled through the bar, and patrons looked our way. “Cannon the Charmer had a woman threaten his life? Now that, I would have liked to see.”
Cannon rolled his eyes.
Robby uncrossed his arms, letting them fall by his sides. “Have you ever worked at a bar before?” he asked me.
“No,” I answered slowly, watching as his look turned skeptical. “But I’m a fast learner.” I actually didn’t know if that was true, but a job bartending was better than no job at all. If I hated it, I could try to look for something else, but I needed money now.
Robby stroked his beard, continuing to look at me. “I don’t know. I’d have to train you myself. Which means a lot of added work for me.”
He wasn’t going to hire me. My stomach dropped. If a friend of Cannon’s wouldn’t hire me, then what hope did I have of finding another job? I needed this, and I wasn’t going to let my lack of bartending knowledge keep me from my goals. If I could tell Victor Vanderhall I had dropped out of his precious college that he had wanted me to go to and that I would not be joining him at the company he loved more than anything, then I could win over bartender Robby.
I stood a little taller and looked him in the eyes. “Yes, you’ll have to train me. But I have a Stanford education, and if I can survive years excelling there, I’m pretty sure I can handle making drinks. And let’s be honest, my face is prettier than yours.” I gave him a saccharine smile. “You’ll see an influx of customers, and I’m willing to bet that they’ll be willing to wait so they can order their drinks from me.” I put off a more confident air than I was actually feeling, but, hey, sometimes you had to fake it until you could make it.
He folded his arms again as his stare bored into, like he was waiting to see if I would crack. That wasn’t going to happen. I was tougher than I looked. His stare-down had nothing on my dad’s.
“You’re hired.” He still didn’t take his gaze off me. “Be here tomorrow at noon, and we’ll start training.”
I nodded. “I’ll be here.”
Finally, he relaxed his stance, spreading his hands out on the counter. “Now, what can I get you two to drink?”
We gave him our orders and went to take a seat on two stools at the end of the bar. Robby slid us our drinks before leaving to take more orders.
Cannon lifted his drink in a toast. “Congratulations on getting your first job.”
I tapped my drink against his. “Thank you.” I took a quick sip before adding, “Your best friend’s little sister may not have work experience, but I do have people experience.”
He set down his drink with a smirk. “Call me crazy, but I think I’m sensing some annoyance at having been called West’s little sister.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “You pick up things quick.”
“I’m a fast learner, too.” He winked.
I gave him a deadpan look, which only made him smile. I was tempted to smack the smug look off his face. It was annoying how handsome he was, how he made simple sentences sound flirty, and how he didn’t seem to be as affected being around me as I was with being around him.
“Funny.” My sarcastic tone was impossible to miss.
“Oh, c’mon, Demi.” He nudged my arm with his. “You can’t stay mad at your roommate forever,” he teased.
First, I’m his best friend’s little sister, and now I’m his roommate? I knew Cannon kept his personal life private, that he kept people at a distance, but could he truly not refer to me as a friend? We hadn’t ever had long conversations or really gotten to know each other, but we’d hung out on holidays and family vacations for the last ten years. We’d had family dinners together once a month. What was his deal?
I should have just blown the whole thing off and not let it bother me, but I couldn’t. It was probably dumb of me, but I wanted to know this man who kept himself so closed off. I already knew he’d never be interested in me romantically—heck, he couldn’t even call me a friend let alone a girlfriend. I knew he wasn’t the relationship type. But was it so wrong to want to be his friend?
I turned on the bar stool, facing him. “Are we not friends?”
He blinked a few times and straightened in his seat, caught off-guard by my question. “I don’t know. Are we?” The teasing glint in his eyes was now gone, a vulnerability filling them instead.
I stared down into my drink. “I don’t know. I thought we were.” My voice came out quiet, and I worried he might not have heard me over the noise filling the bar. “At least friends enough to introduce me to someone as your friend.”
Cannon didn’t have friends. That he was so close to West was a miracle in and of itself. I had just thought after knowing me for so long, I might have been added to his extremely short list, if one name could be considered a list.
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t sure what to say,” he admitted sheepishly. “Your brother is really our main connection, and your parents, I guess.” He spun his drink on the counter, seeming to get lost in the movement. “I know you think of me like a sibling, but I’ve already told you I don’t view you like that. So again, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you told me that last night,” I said, remembering for the millionth time how he’d looked when he had said it. But now sitting here next to him, I worried I had seen something that had never really been there at all, just my own wishful thinking.
Silence stretched between us, the tangible tension from our conversation late last night back.
Did I dare ask him the question now on my mind? He’d told me twice now that he didn’t see me as a sister, and I guess not as a friend either, so what was I to him?
Nerves seemed to crackle under my skin at the thought of asking him.
His focus wasn’t on me but still on his drink in front of him, giving me the strength to say the words.
Looking up at him through my lashes, I asked, “How do you view me?”
His whole body stilled at my question, his fingers halting his drink he’d been so focused on spinning.
Slowly he turned to look at me, and the way his blue eyes seemed to darken as they roamed my face had my breath catching in my throat. His lips parted to answer but abruptly closed, as if he had thought better of what he was about to say.
The seconds stretched on, and I wanted to grab his arms, to shake him and tell him to spit it out already. Was it so bad that he couldn’t say it without hurting my feelings? Or could I dare to hope he might see me as more than a friend?
“You guys need anything else?” Robby’s voice cut in, snapping our attention away from each other.
“We’re good, thanks.” It didn’t take a genius to hear the relief in Cannon’s voice or to see how his body relaxed at what I assumed was a welcome interruption.
“All right, well, flag me down if you want another drink.” Robby knocked on the counter and then walked down to the other end of the bar.
Cannon grabbed his drink and took a long swig. The glass thudded against the counter after he set it down. “Friends.” He nodded as he looked straight ahead at the wall full of different kinds of alcohol. “We should be friends.”
The sentence was simple, common even. But for Cannon to say those four words, it was momentous. I didn’t think he’d ever uttered that phrase before, not even with West. They’d become friends slowly. It had taken years for Cannon to trust West enough to call him a friend. So yeah, this felt momentous. Ten years in the making, but still momentous.
“I’d like that.” A small smile escaped me, and I hurried to cover it by taking another sip of my drink. I didn’t want him to see how giddy I was at the prospect of getting to know him, at the idea of having a relationship outside of being his best friend’s little sister.
“So…now that we’re friends,” I said, swiveling back and forth on my stool, sure I had a goofy smile on my face. “Does that mean you’re going to tell me all your deepest, darkest secrets?”
“You wish.” He shook his head before taking another drink.
I had been teasing him, but there was a part of me that actually did wish to know what he kept locked away in that head of his.
“Okay, so maybe we won’t be sharing our deepest, darkest secrets, but what if we ask each other getting-to-know you questions?”
He gave me a wary look. “Like what kind of getting-to-know-you questions?”
I shrugged one of my shoulders. “I don’t know…just stuff you’d like to know about your friends.”
“Demi,” he said pointedly, his amused expression not matching his tone. “It’s not like we don’t know anything about each other. I’ve known you since you were sixteen.”
“Yeah, but I’m not sixteen anymore.”
His gaze went from my high heeled shoes all the way to the top of my head. “You think I don’t know that either?” A flicker of heat flashed in his eyes for the briefest second, but it was enough to have my cheeks turning pink.
I fidgeted in my seat. “I know you know that, but…” I searched for the right words to tell him I was looking for a real friendship between us. “All I know about you is that you go through women like cigarettes, you’ve never had a girlfriend, West is your only friend, and you don’t like to talk about your past before you met West in college.”
He tipped his drink toward me. “Congratulations, that’s more than anyone else knows.”
“And that’s how you like it?” I asked slowly, struggling to understand why he would want to keep people out of his life.
“Yep.” He was staring down at his drink again, only ice remaining in the glass.
Okay, so he obviously wasn’t going to open up to me all of a sudden just because he said we should be friends. That was a dumb assumption on my part.
“So if you haven’t been out late the last few nights hanging out with friends, what have you been doing?” I asked conversationally.
“Wow. We’ve only been friends for five minutes, and now you want to keep tabs on me?” he said playfully.
“More like I didn’t picture you as the kind of guy who goes out to the bar every night.” I guessed I really didn’t know Cannon at all. Maybe he was that kind of guy. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t trying to stay out of the apartment because of me.”
He choked a little, on what I’m not sure, since he’d already finished his drink. “What? What would make you think that?” He looked like he was having a hard time swallowing. He raised his hand, trying to get Robby’s attention.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe how you never come home until late,” I pointed out. “And how you can’t look at me right now.”
He swung his gaze to me. “It has to do with me, not you.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “Wow. We’ve only been friends for five minutes and you’re giving me the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ excuse?”
That had him laughing, and I couldn’t help the warm feeling that spread throughout my body at knowing I’d put that smile on his face.
“Touché.”
“What can I get you?” Robby asked, interrupting our conversation again.
“Just sparkling water.”
Robby nodded and filled a new glass, sliding it over to Cannon.
It looked like Robby had been telling the truth when he’d said Cannon didn’t drink much. He’d only had one drink and looked like he was done for the night.
So if he wasn’t coming here to drink, he had to be coming here because of the women. There were definitely enough here to choose from. In the half-hour we’d been here, the crowd had doubled, and I assumed it would only get busier as the night went on.
He might be open to us becoming friends, but I doubted he wanted to talk about women with me, so I’d let the topic drop. For now.
The last two days I’d spent the afternoons training with Robby, learning more about alcohol than I thought I would ever need to know. It was a lot to remember, but I was a great note taker—Robby had mocked me about it—and had studied them each night before I’d gone to bed.
Cannon was still pretending not to avoid me. I’d been alone at the apartment both nights, wondering if the conversation we’d had at The Bridger about us being friends had really happened.
I’d asked Robby if Cannon had been coming to the bar, but he said he hadn’t seen him since he’d helped me get the job.
I shouldn’t care where or with whom he spent his free time. He could be a part of an underground fight ring. He could be smuggling drugs and selling them on the black market. He could have a secret girlfriend. Whatever it was, I shouldn’t care. It was his life. I didn’t have any right to know what he was doing.
But should was a precarious word. One that had a lot of power. It could either push you to do better, or it could make you feel like a failure. When it came to Cannon, there were a lot of things I should stop doing.
I should stop thinking about him.
I should stop caring about where he was.
I should stop wondering why he thought the idea of being friends with me was so hard.
I should stop thinking about how good it had felt to be against his bare chest that day in the kitchen.
I should stop reliving the moment he told me he didn’t have any brotherly thoughts about me.
And I should definitely stop imagining what it would be like if we became more than friends.
But you know what else the word ‘should’ was? A judgmental jerk.
As I sat on the couch going over the different types of drinks customers could order, I couldn’t find it in me to care about any of those ‘shoulds.’ I wanted to tell those ‘shoulds’ they could go back to whatever hole they had climbed out of. I could feel however I wanted about Cannon.
Except no matter how confident I felt in my reasoning, I couldn’t help wondering if one day those ‘shoulds’ was going to come back to hurt me.