Will
Chapter Two
The worst thing about growing up in a town your whole life was that everyone over a certain age still remembered how you looked waddling around in diapers. As a man, it was more than a little emasculating.
And with Colbridge in particular, where everyone treated each other like family, that history came with some warped idea of ownership.
They knew my family. They’d seen me grow up. Knew my business before I was old enough to realize how screwed up the forged familial affection was with everyone within a ten-mile radius.
But I didn’t have a say in it. No one did. It’s just the way it was here.
Pieces of me belonged to everyone. Pieces of me that I had no say in giving away. There was a sense of obligation. The need to take care of everyone. It’s what my dad would want. It’s what my brother had done.
And now? Well, I didn’t really have anyone else to take care of, so why not the whole damn town?
It kept me busy, that was for sure. Gave my days meaning. Direction. Purpose. A man needed that. I had no right to object. It was the life that had been handed down to me. I’d never even considered finding something else for myself.
I was…content. For better or worse. I wasn’t much of a dreamer to ask for anything more than that.
But I wasn’t above wishing every once in a while for a damned hour of peace and quiet.
On cue, my phone rang. If it were up to me, I’d leave the thing at home. I mean, really, what was the harm in disconnecting every once in a while? Saving the conversation for whenever you saw someone next.
Not for the first time, I regretted missing out on the generation of landlines instead of the modern technology which forced me to be available at all times.
“Hello?” I answered, wondering which fire I was being sent to put out now.
“Will, honey?” Mrs. Shelley’s voice chirped. “It’s me, Deb.”
“Hi, Mrs. Shelley,” I answered, finding it too weird to call my former babysitter by her given name. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, nothing, dear. I was just calling to tell you we have a new friend in town. Out at old Mr. Briggs’s house.”
I fought the urge to snort and ask why this warranted a phone call.
Even though I was twenty-eight, I believed in respecting my elders. Especially ones who used to tuck me into bed at night when my parents worked late.
“Yeah,” I said, mustering up a fair deal of patience. “I saw the rental sign got taken down and put the pieces together.”
“Such a smart boy,” she cooed, without a trace of sarcasm.
I rolled my eyes at that, on account of her not being able to see it. Then again, I was out in the town square, and God knows word travels fast here.
“Well, anyway, I sent the girl over to—”
I didn’t hear the rest of whatever she was trying to say, pulling the phone away from my ear to focus on what was happening in front of me.
It was the hair I noticed first. No one in town had hair like that. A shock of red that glittered almost gold in the sunlight. And she was pacing in front of my café. Peering through the windows as if she were scoping out the place to rob it.
“Hey, I’ll call you back, okay?” I ended the call, already moving toward the girl who was circling the front of the shop like the notion of a front door was a brand new invention to her.
Call it a hunch, but I figured this was probably the newcomer Deb had called to tell me about.
Maybe the call hadn’t been a simple exchange of gossip after all; maybe it had been a warning, since clearly there was something off about the girl lurking outside my café as if she’d never been in public before.
I took a step to approach her, pausing when I saw her take out a phone, a slip of paper, and start dialing a number.
Almost immediately upon her pressing the phone to her ear, my own rang.
“Hello?” I said into the phone, wondering if it was a bizarre coincidence or if this was really happening to me.
“Hi.” I watched the girl’s mouth move from several feet away at the same time words filled my ear. “Is this Will?”
How the hell did she get my phone number? And why on earth would she use it?
“Who’s this?” I said back, taking advantage of the fact that she hadn’t seen me yet.
“No one,” she chirped. “Wrong number. Bye.”
And then I watched her hang up the phone.
Un-fucking-believable. She really was bizarre. And against my better judgment to just leave her be, I had the strangest urge to go confront her about why she thought calling up strangers and hanging up on them was a normal thing to do.
Crossing the street, I switched my stride to a jog as I saw her about to head into the café. Wanting to have a conversation with her without the ears of half the town listening, I knew I had to catch her before she went through that door.
“Can I help you?” I asked, causing her to startle.
She turned, staring up at me with surprise, and I took the moment to zero in on the details of her. Freckles. Messily braided hair. The dark hint of purple under her eyes indicating that she was probably in need of a good night’s sleep.
She was younger than I had thought. It was rare for people to move into Colbridge. Rarer still for the ones who did to be any younger than forty. We didn’t have a ton of vacancies here to begin with. People tended to settle in and, well…never really leave.
Mr. Briggs’s place had been the single listing on the market for months, and now, here was the new occupant standing before me. All wide green eyes and a bewildered expression. I narrowed in on her hands, which were occupied clutching a small bag by her side.
I jerked my gaze back up to her face, waiting for an explanation.
“Um,” she said unconfidently. “No?”
“Are you sure?” I asked again, hearing the brittle edge to my voice as I spoke. “Because you did just call me.”
Her face paled.
“Oh my gosh, you’re Will?” she asked, evidently displeased by the fact.
“Thought you would’ve known that since apparently you already have my number?” I crossed my arms over my chest, waiting for an explanation.
“If we’ve never met, how would I know who you are?” she countered, more sassily than I thought she had a right to be.
“If we’ve never met, why would you call me?” I asked. “Or better yet, how do you even have my number to make that a possibility?”
“Debra gave it to me,” she said with a look of irritation. “Told me to call you if I needed anything. But she failed to mention how charming you are. Something else to add to the Wikipedia listing.” She muttered the last part under her breath.
Ignoring the last quip, I focused on what mattered. My phone number was being handed out to the town strays, and I was being advertised as the man to go solve all her problems, as if I didn’t already have enough to deal with.
“And you need something already? After being here for an hour?”
If that were the case, I could only imagine the amount of requests I’d be getting from this girl during her time here.
“No,” she countered defensively, matching my body language with a defiant crossing of her own arms. “I wouldn’t ask you for help. I don’t even know you!”
Despite her best attempt at holding her ground, she was about eight inches shorter than me and about as intimidating as a kitten. A feral kitten, maybe. But nonetheless, something I could pick up in my arms and move to a location where it wouldn’t be such a nuisance.
“Hence the question: why did you call?” I said, reiterating each word.
“If you really want to know, I was calling because I was hoping to figure out if you were in there or not based on if I saw anyone answer the phone.”
“What, are you stalking me from afar?”
“No!” she countered, affronted. “And if I were, I’d be the worst stalker ever, clearly.”
She looked me up and down, and for half a second, I felt self conscious about my worn Levi’s and dirt covered boots.
For a first impression, I wasn’t making a very good one.
But then I thought, what do I care what the girl peeking through windows thinks?
As far as I was concerned, I needed to keep my distance from her.
No way did I have room for yet another person’s problems. She could figure it out herself. Unlike everyone else in town, I had no history with her that gave me that exaggerated sense of obligation to help her through every micro-crisis she encountered.
She didn’t know me, my past, my life. And for the first time in a long time, I finally had a clean slate with someone.
“I was just trying to figure out who this famous ‘Will’ was so I could make sure to avoid you,” she explained, as if it made any sense at all.
“Well, coming to my place of work is an excellent strategy to do that,” I mocked. “And why the hell are you trying to avoid me, anyway?”
Better question: why did I care that she was avoiding me? I was irritated that she’d been seeking me out, and somehow even more annoyed by her admittance of going out of her way to make sure our paths didn’t cross.
Why couldn’t she just be normal?
“Because I figured if the two women I ran into were more than willing to share your information with a stranger, then I could only imagine what they’d tell you about me.”
She had a point there.
“I’m sure it can’t be worse than what I’ve already observed for myself,” I retorted.
She scoffed. “You know what? Sorry. Forget this happened. Next time I see you, I’ll make sure to go the other way.”
As lovely as that sounded, I knew better than she that this town was too small to go about avoiding anyone. Especially when I covered every square inch of the place twice over daily.
So, unless she stayed burrowed up in her house the entire time, we’d probably be seeing a lot of each other. At the very least, in passing.
Which meant I had to at least attempt to salvage this disastrous meeting, lest the newest town gossip be centered on me being rude to the new girl.
There wasn’t much in the way of scandals here, but people took what they could get. So, even though this spat was nothing short of minor, I knew there were surely people already pressing their noses against windows to insert themselves into something that was none of their damn business.
“Hey,” I said, holding my hands up in surrender. “I think we—”
“You’re kind of an asshole, you know that?”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah, I mean, who acts all pissed off and confrontational with a stranger they’ve never met over a simple misunderstanding?”
“I wasn’t confrontational,” I retorted. “I was clearing up the fact that I’m too busy to be running around town helping out random women passing through.”
“Well, I didn’t ask you for help, so it was unwarranted.” She stuck a hand on her hip, head tilted as she stared me down.
Once again, I was reminded of an angry kitten.
“Listen,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m sorry that I came across as a little abrasive, but—”
“Don’t apologize.” She laughed wildly. “I’m sorry for crossing your path in the first place. I had no idea the thought of me having his phone number could piss a guy off so much.”
You know what? Town scandal be damned. This girl was testing my last nerve, and I didn’t have the time or the patience to deal with some fiery tourist who clearly had questionable taste in vacation destinations.
She could find some other guy to torment while she was here, because it sure as hell wasn’t going to be.
“So, what? Are you going to avoid the only place in town that serves coffee for however long you’re here?” I asked.
“If there’s a chance of running into you, then I’ll let myself die of caffeine deprivation,” she muttered, turning on her heel to storm off.
The direction she chose alone was enough to tell me she was new here, because there was nothing in that corner of town but a murky pond and an old field that had been supposedly important during Revolutionary War times, though no one had ever found any reference to it in the history books.
“Great!” I called back to her retreating figure. “But don’t call me to clean your gutters out once you realize Mr. Briggs hasn’t had it done in the past ten years!”
“Jokes on you, asshole.” She turned back, glaring at me with a scowling face that I highly doubted looked anywhere near as intimidating as she hoped it did. “I never check my gutters, anyway!”
Well, that really wasn’t good.
Did that mean she didn’t care about house maintenance? Would she even bother to get any of the crap fixed in Mr. Briggs’s house, because God knows he’d let it fall into disrepair over the years.
Plus, the lock on his back door was still screwed up and—
Not my problem. I shook my head, forcibly tearing my gaze away from her retreating figure.
I had shit to do and people to see. I didn’t have time to waste ruminating on her.
For my own sanity—and my blood pressure that apparently had spiked in her presence—I figured it would probably be best for all parties involved if I stayed far away from the new girl.