2
Logan
I came home that night with blood in my mouth, and it wasn’t mine. It’s been almost a week since, and no one’s said anything to me about what happened, how I ruined the wedding.
And they won’t. If there’s one thing you can rely on deeply Catholic families to do, it’s avoid talking about something shameful.
No one at the Aconite Ales Brewery has said anything directly to me about it either. Even though only a few people from Mystic Falls were present at the wedding, they somehow know that it ended badly. They know I left my bride at the altar.
“Don’t you even think about saying anything to Logan, not even congrats. He’s always been a sour fella.”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“A couple of the Hayes boys got into a fight at the wedding. It ended early.”
“What, like, no one got married?”
A few of the warehouse workers on the main floor raise their eyebrows and nod at each other as they murmur about me.
Returning from the break room with a cup of coffee, I slow down as I pass by them on the upper level. My jaw tightens, my teeth grinding. They don’t realize I can hear them even above the hum of the brewing equipment.
I’ve already cracked a molar from clenching my teeth too much this past year, and my dentist keeps threatening me with a night guard if I don’t stop.
I purposefully separate my teeth. My sense of composure hasn’t fully returned since the wedding, the full moon. It’s fine. I’m calm. I can control myself. I am not a rabid beast.
“What happened to that card we signed?”
One of them catches my eye and startles, immediately looking away.
The urge to growl nearly escapes me. Instead, my hand curls into a fist reflexively, and the little plastic lid pops off my coffee as the cup in my hand folds inwards.
My teeth gnash as droplets sear my midsection, seeping through the fabric instantly.
I don’t spill the entire coffee, just enough that I need to change my shirt. Can’t say it’s ruining my day compared to everything else.
Maybe I’ve never been especially chummy with the folks working the floor at Aconite Ales, but I’m pretty damn sure they at least used to make eye contact with me.
It reminds me too much of when Dad was alive, everyone always holding their breath, waiting on edge.
I don’t like it, but I don’t know how to make it stop.
Weddings are stressful. I buckled under the pressure, that’s all. It’s not because I didn’t want to; I couldn’t face the fear of being backed into a corner.
When I said I wouldn’t be taking any time off, my mother suggested working from home. It would be easy, since most of my job is making phone calls, sending emails, and updating spreadsheets. She even offered to go in and get my laptop from my office.
The only thing worse than being here, feeling the judgment of strangers and their stares heavy on my skin, is cowering at home and waiting for them to forget.
I’d rather grit my teeth through a few whispers than try to work at home, feeling the disappointed eyes of my father looking at me from the photographs on the wall.
Back in my office, I grab one of the spare clean shirts I hang on the back of the door. For most common disasters, like shirt stains in the brewery, I have contingencies already planned out.
I’m halfway through buttoning it up when I notice a vehicle parked outside my window, again.
If it’s not one thing, it’s another.
Twice this week, there’s been a car just sitting in the brewery parking lot with the engine running. The low rumble permeating my office again is just the last straw.
I grumble and head downstairs, already set on a warpath.
It’s blindingly sunny when I step outside. Squinting through it, I approach the vehicle, a beat-up truck with mud kicked up under all the wheel wells.
There’s a brunette girl sitting in the driver’s seat, head down as she scrolls through her phone. She looks vaguely familiar, but in a small town like Mystic Falls, that’s most people.
She doesn’t notice me walking up. The cab window is cracked open, so I don’t bother knocking.
“There is a ‘No Trespassing’ sign posted,” I state, with perhaps all the warmth of a chain-link fence rattling. She startles in her seat and looks up, tossing her phone to the passenger seat like she’s been caught slacking off.
“What? No!” she blurts out instantly, clutching the steering wheel in front of her. She stares at me, eyes wide. Really wide. God, she has enormous eyes. And really long eyelashes.
Wordlessly, I point to the sign just a few feet away, right under the “No Solicitors” placard.
“I’m not trespassing,” she clarifies, and starts scrambling to unbuckle her seatbelt.
Great, she’s getting out, the exact opposite of what I wanted her to do. Out of habit, my teeth set together, and I have to remind myself to separate them again.
I take a step back from the driver-side door just before it opens, and she slips out, heavy boots crunching against the gravel. My eyes are finally adjusting to the mid-morning sunlight. I can make out the faded, pale-yellow lettering on the gray side of the truck, and recognize the name: Palmer’s.
What a supremely terrible color choice, for both marketing and basic visibility.
I’m a little ticked over rudimentary graphic design flaws and frown deeper just on that alone.
I can’t remember if Palmer’s is technically a flower farm or plant nursery off the top of my head, but it’s one of them.
I know they have a florist shop attached to it, for the occasional obligation I’ve had to duck in for.
So, they finally decided to deliver our order.
I cross my arms over my chest and try not to be too outwardly annoyed with this girl, even if it might be a little late for that.
I’ve been emailing this company for the last two weeks about when the shipment would be ready, and whoever is supposed to be answering them has a vague, unending out-of-office message automatically responding, every time.
Ever since our usual supplier wrote to us saying they’ve had a bad season, and pests have eaten most of the aconite flowers we buy from them, I’ve been looking for a replacement. Just one of the many little details I have to stay on top of, amongst everything else.
It rubs me the wrong way that Palmer’s couldn’t be bothered to let me know they’d be delivering it today. Now I need to go back to the other flower farm I’d contacted and cancel that order.
“If you’ll, uh, sign here, I can drop the order off and get going,” their delivery girl says, ducking back inside the truck seat for a clipboard, a pen swinging by a string with it. There’s a large bandage wrapped around her hand when she hands it to me.
I nod, chewing the inside of my cheek. I’ve got things to get back to. I’m really not about to waste time on pleasantries.
I start scanning the sheet for which box with painfully tiny print I need to put my name in, and she jogs off to the back of the truck.
I feel too acutely aware of her presence. It’s distracting. The corner of my mouth digs down. I can’t focus on reading the form over the sounds of her opening the tailgate, her footsteps crunching on the gravel, the little grunt she makes as she tugs something out of the back.
“What’s it for?” she asks, strain in her voice.
I glance over at her, frowning to see her taking one large milkcrate full of dried and vacuum sealed bags of flower buds, hefting it over toward me. “Brewing, I imagine.”
“Even the aconite?”
“What?” I look up again, perhaps a little too sharply.
The delivery girl holds my gaze steadily. “Isn’t it like . . . poisonous?”
Too many beats go by without either of us saying anything.
The package she holds is plastic, with bright red letters spelling out “WARNING” and then a solid block of text that is too dense to pick out a word from a distance. I recognize the little purple aconite buds in the clear part of the package.
I return her stare. The family recipe the brewery is named after isn’t meant for human consumption, and it isn’t available to the public. It is deeply poisonous but serves to dampen the vigor of the wolf. I wouldn’t drink it for fun, certainly.
But her bright, curious, brown eyes hold mine, waiting patiently for an answer.
“I wouldn’t know. I work in distribution,” I reply, tonelessly.
She nods, and drops it, along with the crate of packaged flowers. “Oh, well. I gotcha. I was only wondering. We sell it to, like, holistic pharmacies sometimes, but I’ve never really seen an order of it this big before.”
I take a moment to finally sign the form and realize she’s gone back into the bed of the truck. “What are you called, at Palmer’s?”
She pokes her head around the side, her brow furrowing. “ . . . Ava?”
“No, your job title.”
“Oh, I don’t have a title.”
Yeah, that seems about on par with how they run things.
Her large eyes hold mine, expectant. It’s a little too much prolonged eye contact with nothing else said. Her presence is unnerving.
“Who is—” My voice catches awkwardly, and I stop myself. It must be the sun on the back of my neck, because I feel oddly warm under the collar. It’s making me slip. “Who is supposed to be answering emails at Palmer’s? I’ve been trying to get in contact for a week.”
“Oh, Mary Anne used to answer all the messages. But she’s been recovering from surgery, so we’ve really only been taking phone orders since, like, August? Yeah, she had the surgery in late July,” she says like she intends for this to become a long, neighborly sort of conversation.
Being that Mystic Falls is a small, spread-out town, it’s not unusual to find oneself trapped in this sort of hell.
The cheeriness she says it with gives me just enough of a headache that I think about making another cup of coffee when I get back inside.
“So, who took over answering the emails?”
“Oh, uh, me.”
Oh, fantastic.
The wind changes direction, and I watch her drag a few strands of untamed, frizzy hair out of her eyes before a scent hits me.