Chapter Nineteen
Sam
The signed paperwork hits my inbox that morning.
His name is at the bottom where it should have been three years ago, black against white, boring as hell for something that managed to hold up this much of my life.
I read the page once, forward it to Doug and the attorney, then lean back in my chair.
The call didn't fix anything between us and his apology sure as hell didn't. I woke up the next morning still angry and spent most of the week that way, but the company is finally moving toward dead and Pilsen gets to move with it.
Autumn's way worked, and that part has been harder to sit with.
I'm still staring at the email when somebody knocks on the locked front door. We don't open for another few hours, and whoever it is knocks again before I get out of the office. I make it halfway across the club before I see him through the glass and stop.
Three years is a long time to avoid somebody's face. It turns out I remember his just fine.
He has an envelope in one hand. For a second I consider leaving him there, then I unlock the door without opening it any farther than I have to.
"What are you doing here?"
"Original signatures." He holds up the envelope. "My lawyer said you'd need them."
"You could've mailed them."
"I could have."
I wait, but he doesn't try to explain why he didn't. He hands me the envelope, and when I take it his attention slips past my shoulder into the club.
"You built this?"
"Yeah."
He looks for another few seconds. "It looks good, Sam."
There are a dozen answers I could give him. I settle for, "Thanks."
"You have a partner?"
"No."
Something shifts in his face before he nods. I catch it anyway. "What?"
"Nothing. I just should've guessed."
I feel my shoulders tighten. "Why?"
He hesitates, and for once seems smart enough to think about his answer before giving it to me. "You always took everything on yourself. Even before we opened the restaurant. If something needed doing, you did it before anybody had the chance to help."
I stare at him.
"I'm not trying to tell you who you are," he says. "I remember you. That's all."
"That was a long time ago."
"Yeah." He looks down at the sidewalk, then back at me. "And I gave you a pretty good reason to get worse about it."
There isn't much I can say to that without opening a conversation I don't want.
He nods toward the envelope. "Everything should be there. If there's anything else, send it through my lawyer."
"I will."
He starts to leave, then stops. "I meant what I said on the phone."
I know exactly what he means.
"I heard you."
He nods once. "Okay."
That's it. No request for forgiveness. No attempt to explain himself. He walks away, and I watch him disappear into the foot traffic before I go back inside and lock the door.
The envelope stays in my hand all the way to the bar. The apology isn't the part of the conversation that follows me inside.
You always took everything on yourself.
For three years I've had a clean version of what happened. I trusted two people and they betrayed me. I lost my wife and my business partner in the same week, and everything after that made sense because of everything before it. None of that is untrue.
What pisses me off is remembering that part of me existed before either of them gave me a reason for it. Staying hours late because asking somebody to cover felt worse than doing it myself. Taking over problems nobody asked me to take over because at least then I knew they'd get handled.
Elise didn't teach me to hate needing people. She made it feel smart.
I drag a hand over my face and look around Vibes.
I built this place surrounded by people I trust. I hand them keys, money, a room full of customers and everything else that comes with keeping the place alive.
I trust them with plenty. I just make damn sure I'm almost always the person they need more.
I care about people. I'm not interested in taking every decent thing I've ever done and turning it into evidence of something ugly underneath.
When somebody I care about needs something and I can help, I want to help.
But giving has always been easier because I already know what happens next.
I decide how much I can give and when. Nobody gets the chance to say no to something I never ask for.
Autumn asked.
She didn't ask me to fix her life, give up Vibes or promise her forever. She asked what we were. She asked for one thing between us that wasn't the same thing I gave everybody else, and one true thing about me she hadn't already learned from somebody who knew me better.
I treated every one of those questions like she'd reached for something I couldn't afford to lose, even though I'd spent months taking everything she handed me.
She came upstairs after a day of making decisions for everybody else and stopped.
She bitched about work, fell asleep in my bed, left shoes under things and hair ties everywhere.
She told me when she was angry and when she was scared, and she let me see her when she didn't have an answer.
I liked being the place she could do that. I loved being that place for her, and I probably loved her long before I would have called it that.
That's the part I pretended I could separate from everything else.
I knew how she took her coffee. I kept food she liked upstairs.
I could tell when something happened at work by how she dropped her bag.
I made room for her everywhere I knew how without ever saying I was making room.
All of it let me feel close to her without handing over the one thing I couldn't control once she had it.
Me.
When she finally asked, I stopped even though I understood enough.
Naming us meant admitting there was something important enough to name.
Treating her differently meant admitting she was already different.
Telling her something I hadn't given anybody else meant trusting her to have it even if she eventually walked away.
Bex asked what I would say if Autumn wanted more, and I gave her the answer I'd been building the whole relationship around.
It's not that deep.
I've spent weeks trying to make that sentence mean something less ugly. It doesn't. I never thought Autumn was nothing to me. I needed what we had to stay small enough that I could survive losing it.
I called it casual so when she left it wouldn't count. She left anyway. It counted.
I stare down at the envelope on the bar because there isn't much room to argue with that anymore.
The worst part isn't even what I said to Bex.
Autumn heard me and came back. She stood in front of me after hearing exactly how little I was willing to admit she meant and gave me a chance to tell her something different.
I understood what she was asking.
I still said no.
That one doesn't belong to Elise. It doesn't belong to the man who just walked out of here or what happened three years ago. That was me.
My phone buzzes beside the register and I reach for it. It's an email about Pilsen. I answer it, then set the phone back down without opening anything else.
Autumn's name would take seconds to find. I could tell her I finally understand what she was asking for. I could tell her the old company is almost gone, Pilsen is moving and she was right about the call. I could tell her I miss her.
Every one of those things is true, but none of them gives me the right to drop all of this in her lap because I finally caught up. She already stood in front of me and did the hard part. My turn isn't explaining myself better. It's doing something differently.
I take the envelope into the office and put the signed pages with the Pilsen paperwork. The schedule is still open on my laptop from earlier, and there's a Friday coming up when I've already rearranged half the day trying to make myself available at both places.
I look at it for a minute, then remove myself from Vibes completely.
My first instinct is to replace myself with instructions. I start typing a message to the person running the night, get three lines into everything I want checked before open, then stop and delete all of it.
Me: I'm at Pilsen Friday. You've got the room.
The reply comes back a minute later.
Bex: Got it.
I stare at those two words longer than necessary, waiting for the follow-up question that doesn't come. There are half a dozen things I could send anyway, but I don't.
I close the laptop.
Friday, I'm staying at Pilsen. Vibes will run without me because the people I chose to trust with it are capable of doing exactly that. It feels uncomfortable as hell, but I leave it that way.