Willow #2
I look back at the menu, trying to act like I’m not conscious of him watching me. It doesn’t work. I can feel it anyway, his attention moving over my face, my hands, the hoodie tied around my waist like he’s taking inventory of every detail I’d rather he didn’t notice.
“You can stop staring,” I say without looking up.
“I could.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.”
Warmth crawls up my neck. “Do you make a habit of unsettling people?”
“Only the interesting ones.”
I glance up despite myself. “That sounds like a line, too.”
“It’s not.”
“That somehow makes it more obnoxious.”
His gaze holds mine a second longer than necessary, then drops briefly to the menu in my hands. “Get the steak.”
I laugh. “Absolutely not.”
“It’s better.”
“I’m not ordering steak in a diner T-shirt. That feels every type of wrong.”
“You’re still going on about the T-shirt?”
“I’m sitting in a room full of people who dressed for date night while I look like I got kidnapped on my way to taking out the trash.”
“You look better than most of the room.”
There it is again. That certainty. That maddening, immovable confidence in his own conclusions. I should hate it more than I do.
Martha comes back before I answer him, and for once I’m grateful for the interruption.
She takes our orders without even pretending not to notice the tension at the table. Xander orders for himself. For me, I pointedly choose something cheaper than what he suggests, purely out of spite.
He notices.
“You’re doing that on purpose,” he says after Martha leaves.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need you deciding what I eat.”
His thumb taps once against the stem of his glass. “You think I’m controlling.”
“I think you’re used to getting your own way.”
He leans back, eyes never leaving mine. “And you think fighting me on dinner fixes that.”
“I think fighting you on dinner fixes me.”
“Someone taught you that,” he says.
“I taught me that,” I say, equally calm. “Turns out it’s a useful life skill.”
The bread disappears between us in pieces, and the strangest thing happens.
The conversation gets easier.
He asks about the town. He wants to know my favorite place to get coffee when I’m not serving it, which roads are best to drive with the windows down in fall, where people go when they need peace, what nights Bennett’s gets loud, and whether the farmers’ market is actually worth dealing with or just an overpriced zucchini convention.
It’s easy to answer him. Worse, he actually listens.
“Why here?” I ask finally, tearing off another piece of bread. “For whatever it is you’re doing.”
He glances at me. “You mean the label.”
I pause. “So, that’s what you’re doing here.”
His expression stays closed off. “You thought I was opening a tax office?”
“I thought you were being mysterious on purpose.”
“I was.”
“That’s incredibly irritating.”
He inclines his head, like I’ve complimented him.
I sigh. “So you run a label.”
“Co run.”
“With the other two?”
“Yeah.”
I let that settle. “And you brought it to Redemption Falls because…”
His gaze drifts briefly toward the room before coming back to me. “Because cities make people loud. I’m interested in what artists sound like when they can finally hear themselves think.”
That isn’t the answer I expected.
I set my bread down. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“That sounded almost like a real thought.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. “You’re surprised I have those?”
“I’m trying to keep an open mind.”
“You’re doing a bad job.”
“That’s because you’re making it difficult.”
He leans forward. “You still came.”
I take a sip of water, buying myself half a second. “You keep saying that like I’ve made some grand gesture instead of accepting an invitation to dinner while hungry.”
His gaze drops briefly to my mouth when I set the glass back down. “I say it because despite all the reasons you gave me not to be here, you still came.”
“That doesn’t mean as much as you think it does,” I say.
“Maybe.”
The food arrives before he can expand on that, which is fortunate because I don’t particularly want to examine why my pulse has decided to develop arrythmia tonight.
Martha sets down our plates, gives me another look full of private amusement, and leaves us with enough steam and butter and garlic on the table to make me briefly forget my own name.
I cut into my food and regret every skeptical thought I’ve had about this place.
It’s incredible.
Xander notices before I can hide it. “Told you.”
I glare at him. “You can shut up.”
“No.”
The answer comes so easily that I laugh.
His eyes narrow on my face at the sound of it, and for one brief second, I wish I could take it back, not because I mind laughing, but because I mind him looking at me like that because of it. Like he’s accomplished something.
“So,” I say, because I need to redirect this entire evening before I accidentally have a feeling, “what exactly do you do at the label?”
His knife pauses against the plate. “Everything.”
“That sounds weird.”
“It’s not.”
“You’ve got to stop answering questions like a man in witness protection.”
He cuts another piece of steak. “I handle the business side. Strategy. Direction. Anything worth doing correctly.”
“Wow,” I say flatly. “Humility, too.”
“I didn’t say I was easy,” he says.
“No, that part is obvious.”
He keeps eating, then says, “What would you do?”
I blink. “With what?”
“The label.”
I lean back, suspicious. “Why?”
“Because I’m asking.”
Instead, because I’m tired and curious and apparently still a little stuck on the PR degree I studied for, even if it got me nowhere, I say, “You want the town’s support, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t get it by acting like a bunch of rich men who rolled in to build a secret empire behind gates.”
“We’re not.”
“That’s how it looks.”
His eyes stay on me. “Go on.”
“You need people to feel included,” I say. “Or at least not displaced. Right now, everybody’s curious, which is fine, but curiosity turns into resentment fast in small towns if people think change is happening to them instead of around them.”
He doesn’t interrupt.
“You’ll need the support of a local business. Someone people trust. Some kind of event early on that doesn’t feel slick or performative. Something that says this place isn’t here to swallow the town whole.”
There’s a little silence after I finish.
“What?” I ask.
He leans back, studying me in that too-focused way again. “You do think like that.”
My fork stills. “Like what?”
“Like it matters.”
I frown. “What does that mean?”
“You notice systems,” he says. “People. Where pressure builds.” His gaze drops briefly to my hands before coming back up. “You don’t just react. You read the room first.”
There’s no reason that should hit as hard as it does.
And yet…
I look down at my plate because I feel too seen and that impacts me more than anything else he’s done tonight.
Before I can figure out why, a burst of laughter cuts across the restaurant from somewhere to my left. “Oh my God. Maggie, that’s him. Xander…”
Every muscle in me goes still.
I turn my head just enough to see Maggie Rivers standing near the bar with two of her friends, all of them dressed like they got ready for the kind of night Redemption Falls can’t actually provide. Her eyes are fixed on Xander like she’s just discovered buried treasure in human form.
What the hell is going on?
Maggie crosses the room before common sense can catch up with her, her friends trailing after her like backup singers in a deeply embarrassing musical.
“Hi,” she says, arriving at our table with a smile sharp enough to cut glass. “Sorry, I just had to come over because I knew that was you.”
Xander looks up at her with the same cool focus he’s been giving everything all evening. “Did you?”
Maggie laughs as though he’s just gifted her the most charming line she’s ever heard. “You’re Xander Harlow. From The Lonely Ones.”
I stare at him with wide eyes.
“My cousin had posters of you,” Maggie says breathlessly. “Like, all over her room. She was so upset when the band broke up. What are you doing now? Is it true you bought a record label?”
One of Maggie’s friends already has her phone out. The other is staring at him like she might actually forget how language works.
I sit there for one very long second, absurdly aware of myself again.
The jeans. The diner tee. The hoodie tied around my waist. My ponytail.
The fact that I’m sitting across from a man women apparently used to tape to their walls while I still have a crease in my sleeve from leaning against the coffee machine.
“Can we get a picture?” Maggie asks.
Then one of the girls reaches for his arm, fingers landing lightly against his sleeve, and he lets her.
Is this normal for him?
This attention. These women. The bright eyes and the leaning in and the instant assumption that they’re welcome in his space because they’ve already been there in their heads for years.
I put my fork down.
Maggie finally notices me fully and blinks. “Oh. Hi, Willow.”
Small towns are brutal that way. Nobody has to say the rest out loud. It hangs there on its own.
You? Here? With him?
I smile tightly. “Hi, Maggie.”
“You know Xander?”
I glance at him.
At the women gathered around the table.
At the ease in his face.
“You tell me,” I say.
Maggie laughs awkwardly, already turning back toward him, and that’s it. That’s the moment. The exact moment my entire tolerance for this evening folds in on itself.
I set my napkin down and reach for my bag.
Xander’s gaze shifts to me. “Willow.”
I stand.
Maggie and her friends go quiet enough to notice that something is happening, but not silent enough to understand it.
“You leaving?” Maggie asks, and somehow that’s the final little pin in the whole thing.
I look at her.
Then at him.
Then back at her.
“Seems like the table’s getting crowded,” I say.
Xander’s voice drops, colder now. “Sit down.”
And there it is.
That command again. That assumption.
That controlled certainty that his words should become the shape of the room.
I meet his eyes and feel a cold, hardness settle into place.
“No,” I say.
The change in his expression is microscopic. But I see it.