Chapter 17 #2
I jump at the high-pitched squeal, my attention drawn to the young server who walks toward us with a pen stuffed into her peppy little ponytail.
She greets the grizzled man next to me with all the enthusiasm of a kid who's just been told they are getting an inflatable obstacle course for their birthday party.
Surely she can’t have the right person, because no one looks at Mr. Clay this way. She stoops over to kiss his whiskered cheek, placing a warm hand on his shoulder. “We missed you around here! Where have you been?”
“He pushed me over and broke my hip.” Mr. Clay points a crooked finger at Chase, who looks hilariously horrified.
“That’s not true,” he clarifies quickly for the server, snatching up a laminated menu.
“Would I have fallen if it weren’t for you?” Mr. Clay chews out.
The server finds this highly comical all of a sudden, letting out a long stream of giggles and patting his shoulder. “Oh Terrence, you’re so funny!”
I exchange a stunned look with Sunny.
“What do you want for breakfast, Mr. Clay?” Chase asks through teeth that sound ever-so-slightly clenched.
“My usual please, Isabelle.”
Excuse me while I pick my jaw up from the floor, because not only did this man just say please, but he also smiles at the woman. It’s not a creepy type that some older men give women, either. It could almost be considered grandfatherly, with genuine warmth creasing his grey eyes.
“Right away, and for the rest of you?” Isabelle plucks the pen from her hair and the pad from her belt, and waits eagerly for the rest of us.
I glance down at my black nail varnish, spotting the chip in my pinkie and hiding them beneath the table.
Isabelle here is a positive ray of sunshine, but my style tends to be more thunderclouds and typhoons—not that I mean to be that way.
It’s hard to be any other way when you’ve seen the worst of humanity over and over again.
The scent of copper fills my nostrils, threatening to suck me back in time.
“Pepper?”
I blink up, noticing four sets of eyes staring expectantly at me. “Erm…” I drop my head to the menu, my cheeks filling with warmth. “I’ll just take some coffee, please.”
All of a sudden, my appetite is gone.
“Oka—”
Chase cuts off the server, that X-ray scrutiny he sometimes uses focusing on me. “Are you sure?”
I nod, finding my throat too tight to reliably speak, and although he looks reluctant, he lets the topic lie. Mr. Clay grumbles something I don’t catch as our server retreats, but apparently Sunny does and takes umbrage. “Oh, do you ever stop being a grumpy old grouch?”
“Sunny!” I reprimand just as she finishes rolling her eyes.
I see Chase lift his fist to cover his mouth out of the corner of my eye, and try to wipe it from memory.
This is one of those moments where I can’t do what I really want and high-five her.
Instead, I have to try and walk the delicate line of big sister/guardian.
If I acknowledge to myself the way Chase’s shoulders shake, I’ll ruin this parenting moment and get the giggles.
“I’ve outlived better insults,” Mr. Clay drawls back, folding his arms and staring out of the large windows at the front of the diner.
I give Sunny a pointed look and she dips her head on a sigh and mutters, “Sorry, Mr. Clay.”
The old man looks at her, his large nose scrunched as if contemplating his next move. “You can call me Terrence,” he says finally.
Well, blow me down. That’s the second time in ten minutes that I’ve nearly lost my seat.
I start thinking brain damage. Or perhaps the fall has sparked the onset of some type of dementia.
You do hear of that happening. Either that or they swapped his face out like Nicholas Cage in that film, and the man we are left with here is actually a spy posing as the old man.
Our drinks are plonked down a little haphazardly by our server, who also leaves some toast for the table. Chase and Sunny don’t hesitate, both pulling slices of toast off the rack, perhaps intent on avoiding the uncomfortable silence that settles over us in the wake of Mr. Clay’s concession.
I scramble around in the dusty corner inside my head to try and find something safe to say, but Sunny gets there before me. Although, you can hardly call what comes out of her mouth safe.
“So, Pepper says you’re rich.”
“Sunny!” I choke on the sip of coffee I had just taken.
“What?” She lifts a shaped brow. “It’s relevant.”
Chase’s decadent mouth twitches as he brings his buttered toast to it. “Is it?”
“Well, yes…in the sense that I’ve never met a rich person before.” Sunny scratches her chin and categorizes every inch of Chase.
“Well, you have now,” I snark. I mean really, who needs that many zeros tagged onto the end of their bank balance?
And that doesn’t even cover his assets. He hadn’t even blinked when I donated a quarter of a million dollars to charity without his permission.
A quarter of a million, written off as couch change! One person doesn’t need all that money.
“What is it you actually do?” Sunny follows up, taking a slurp of the milkshake I didn’t hear her order.
“Work.” Chase shrugs one broad shoulder.
The server reappears and starts moving plates off the circular tray she holds above her shoulder.
Chase has something predictably protein heavy with avocado, Sunny a tower of pancakes so high they should come with a structural engineer, and Mr. Clay appears to have every breakfast meat available, alongside what look like beans in a puddle of red sauce, plus a bacon sandwich on the side.
“That’s not an answer.” Sunny narrows her eyes and plucks a bottle of syrup off the end of the booth.
“Technically, it is.” Chase carves apart a slice of bacon and gathers it onto his fork. The slutty part of my brain forces me to watch him place it into his mouth with a flash of white teeth, his strong jaw muscle flexing as he chews. It’s like my own little private masseter strip tease.
“Are they always like this?” Mr. Clay grumbles as he spears a large sausage with his fork.
I shrug in place of answering, transfixed on the exchange, something in my stomach twisting with an irrational weight.
Truthfully, they have barely spoken until now, but Chase seems totally unruffled to be facing a teenage girl giving him an inquisition.
That is something I’m learning about him.
He’s unflappable. It makes me want to get under his skin and ruffle until I see the polished facade crack.
“You’re impossible.” Sunny huffs, flipping the cap on the syrup and pouring it over her pancakes.
“And yet, you keep trying,” Chase muses aloud, popping a forkful of scrambled egg into his mouth.
“That’s an outrageous amount of syrup, boy,” Mr. Clay cuts in, his grey eyes glued to the lake of syrup expanding on Sunny’s plate.
“Girl,” I correct Mr. Clay with a forced measure of patience.
“It’s called joy,” Sunny responds dryly, without paying too much attention to the slip up.
“It’s called diabetes,” Chase adds, his lips quirked into a teasing smirk.
She squints at him. “I’ve decided I don’t like you.”
“That’s a shame,” Chase replies offhandedly, scooping up another forkful of eggs. “Because that singer you like, this one whose song was playing when we arrived?”
“What about him?” Sunny demands hotly.
“My friend is his PR manager, I was going to introduce you.” Chase says this with such a casual tone that you might miss the slight gleam in his warm eyes, had you not met him before.
Sunny’s fork clatters onto her plate, her jaw practically grazing the table. “I take it back. I don’t like you, I love you.”
Great.