Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
KNOX
I was not looking forward to this.
“Why do I keep letting the man provoke me?” I muttered to the heavens as I stalked down the sidewalk on Stanistead Road.
The morning rain had slowed, but groups of elderly tourists still clustered close to the shop windows, where the awnings protected them from the drizzle, meaning my late ass had to practically walk in the street to get around them.
“For fuck’s sake, why can’t I just behave like a man who’s about to be forty damn years old? ”
My life had been a circus before Gage Goodman had shown up, it was true. But it had been a rational, well-organized circus. Three tidy rings, safety nets all around, and the shit had been shoveled regularly.
Then that… that… kid had come to the orchard two weeks ago, all sunshine-smiley and messy-haired and smelling like the ocean, taking over every single one of my spaces with his sly smile and his hilariously awful T-shirts and his dark eyes that showed his every emotion, and suddenly my life was a chaotic shitshow run by rabid twin monkeys called lust and frustration that made me do stupid things like re-download the Grindr app in the dead of night just to check out who might be located twenty feet away from me—seriously, LumberjackLuvr?
What kind of a username was that, Goodman?
—and blurt out things like, “Sure, I’ll go to lunch at your best friend Jack’s restaurant with you, Webb,” which was tantamount to me agreeing to Webb’s nosy matchmaking bullshit with his friend, and Webb knew it.
I nearly mowed down a lady with a walker in my haste, and I blew out a breath, forcing myself to slow down. To take a deep breath that smelled like wet autumn leaves and maple taffy, and count the beats of my heart, and appreciate the chill in the air that denoted the changing seasons.
“I am in control,” I lied to myself in a slow, soothing voice. The voice was important, because it made super-healthy meditation mantras out of statements that would otherwise be really worrisome self-delusions. “All is well with me.”
Dr. Travers would be so proud.
“Hey, hon. Table or stool?” a friendly, blonde thirty-something called from behind the lunch counter as I stepped into Jack’s restaurant.
Other than the new name emblazoned on the doors—Panini Jack’s Diner—the place looked a lot like it had back when it was our high school hangout, but at a quick glance, I hardly recognized anyone.
Before I could answer, her eyes tracked behind me, and her grin widened flirtatiously. “Webb Sunday! Well, hey there, cutie!”
“Katey.” Webb stepped up just behind me.
“This another brother of yours?” She nodded at me and cracked her gum. “Never mind—I can see the Sunday all over him. Grab your usual booth, honey, and I’ll let Jack know you’re here.” She tossed him a wink as she moved off.
“Thanks,” Webb said with an easy smile.
“Honey,” I whispered under my breath.
Webb shoulder-checked me as he moved toward a booth at the left rear corner of the restaurant, beside the swinging door to the kitchen, and I headed in that direction without comment.
“Nice place, eh?” He slid onto one of the benches.
I grunted, shrugging out of my windbreaker. “Been here before plenty of times.”
“Ages ago, maybe. Jack did an amazing job on the place, huh?”
I glanced around the restaurant, at the dull gleam of the wood floors and the red pleather booths. “Wasn’t it always like this?”
Webb tilted his head to the side. “You are seriously unobservant. No, it wasn’t.
It was getting worn down before you went to college, remember?
By the time Jack bought the place when he moved to town six or seven years ago, it was falling apart.
He redid all the booths, and I helped him do the wainscoting a couple years ago with reclaimed shiplap from the Cauffeys’ old barn.
Em did the drawings.” He pointed up at the framed drawing of a dancing sandwich on the wall.
“Ah,” I said. “Cool.”
It was a little disorienting to think that the diner had had time to not only fall apart, but also be restored since I’d been gone, and that the random guy I’d only met a couple of times in passing at Aiden’s birthday parties was Webb’s best friend.
I hadn’t felt like I belonged in the Hollow twenty years ago, which meant I definitely didn’t belong now.
“You’d know all this if you bothered coming to lunch with me any of the times I’ve invited you this summer,” Webb noted. “I’m here all the dang time.”
“Yes, you are. And I naively thought it was for the sandwiches. Cutie.”
Webb’s cheeks went pink. “No. That’s not… No. That’s just Katey being friendly.” He darted a wary glance over his shoulder toward the counter. “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
I begged to differ, but I restrained myself to another grunt.
Webb leaned over the table, and his green eyes narrowed the same way mine did when I was at the end of my patience.
“Look, I know you’re not feeling sociable these days, Knox.
And that’s—ugh.” He ran a hand through his hair in frustration.
“You know, I could kill you for putting me in the position where I’m the one trying to get you to talk about your feelings, right? ”
“Then you could just not. That would work well for me.”
“Nope. Em said it had to be either me or Drew, and he’d probably make you do sun salutations and smoke weed first, so.
” He sucked in a breath like he was preparing to dive underwater.
“You’ve gotta stop holing up in the office all damn day every day.
Now you’ve got poor Gage doing it, too, and it’s not healthy for either of you. Okay? I’m worried. We’re worried.”
“You don’t have to worry about poor Goodman,” I scoffed. “Me doing something is more likely to make him not do it, and the kid is plenty well rested, too. He leaves his desk to eat literally fourteen times a day. And if he wants to go out, he can go. No one’s stopping him.”
Webb shook his head. “You’re so blind. He’s trying to make a good impression, Knox. He’s doing what you do.”
Yeah, right. “Has he complained to you?” I demanded. “About his work hours or… anything?”
“Anything? Like the way you alternately pretend he doesn’t exist and bite his head off? Don’t bother denying what all of us have observed,” he said blandly when I shot him a look.
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say. I knew I wasn’t overly nice to Goodman—and, yes, on one or two occasions, I’d been downright curt—but the man was obnoxiously flirty and knife-blade snarky and unprofessionally cheerful.
And drop-dead gorgeous, though that wasn’t something I blamed him for.
Much.
In any case, assholery was the best defense, because otherwise…
“No,” Webb continued, plainly exasperated. “Gage hasn’t said a word to me. But then, he doesn’t strike me as that kind of guy.”
I shrugged again. The man-child was perfectly capable of complaining to me about all sorts of shit, but I supposed Webb was right.
Goodman didn’t seem the type to tattle. Why should he when it was so much more effective for him to just give me an angelic look and then spout off for twenty-two minutes and twelve seconds (of course I’d timed him; it was either that or listen to him) about which cover of “Landslide” best captured the essential pain of the original, while I contemplated the many, many pleasurable ways I could shut him up?
It had been years and years since I’d wanted something with an all-consuming passion, and longer still since I’d wanted someone that badly, and the whole thing set me off-balance.
I wasn’t entirely sure whether I wanted to wipe the smile off his lips with my own or just sit beside him and bask in his presence like he was sunshine—and, Jesus Christ, that right there was a more flowery sentiment than I’d expressed about anything in over a decade.
I hated the compulsion of him. The way he’d swooped in and taken up rent-free space in my head within seconds for no good reason whatsoever. My inability to swiftly evict him felt like a sign of my weakened mental state.
One more sign I wasn’t in control.
Rick and my colleagues at Bormon Klein Jacovic would laugh their asses off if they ever got wind that their steady-handed head investment auditor had turned into a caricature of a middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis, behaving like a moody-assed teenager over a man nearly half his age.
Webb cleared his throat, and I startled guiltily. I hadn’t been paying attention.
Goodman’s wandering brain was infectious.
“Knox, I know it hasn’t been easy for you, moving back here.
And I know you like to pretend you’re invincible, so it’s hard for you to wrap your mind around the fact that you have certain…
” He broke off as Katey came over and deposited two giant plastic cups of ice water and a couple of menus on the table, then continued. “…certain health issues—”
“Panic attacks, Webb,” I interjected. “That’s all. Mental bullshit. Not cancer, okay? I’m not dying here.”
But even as I said it, I remembered how I’d felt the first time I’d had one.
The sickening lurch in my stomach, the iron band around my chest, the feeling that I was endlessly falling—through the floors of the building, through the sidewalk, through the entire earth, and out into the stratosphere on the other side—and no force on earth, especially me, could stop it.
It had felt like I imagined dying might.
“You ended up in the ER twice.” Webb toyed with his straw wrapper, an uncharacteristic show of nerves.
“The first time was a massive overreaction because my coworkers thought it was… something else.” I waved a hand, dismissing my colleagues’ heart attack concerns.
“And the second time, it was because my dumb ass hyperventilated, passed out, and concussed myself. But there was zero blood, and they discharged me almost immediately. And now I have a therapist and good coping mechanisms, so I’m good. ”
All is well with me. Or it would be, anyway. I was making sure of it.