4
Logan
I have about a second’s worth of warning, spotting the stormy expression on her face. It’s the Palmer’s delivery girl, from before.
She marches over to my table, and I’m under her ferocious glower in an instant. Caught off guard, I ask, “I’m . . . sorry?”
“Mm, no, I need a little more than that,” she snaps, setting down her drinks on my table. “You have been utterly rude to me every single time we’ve bumped into each other. It ends now.”
I knew I was looking at her too much. From the moment she walked in, every time I’ve tried to settle my attention somewhere else, on anyone else, it just keeps drifting back to her.
The loud, mouthy girl captures my attention in a way that startles me as much as it sets my pulse racing in a handful of places, some that it definitely shouldn’t be.
“I didn’t mean to stare. I was looking, but I don’t think I was really, uh, seeing,” I say. I don’t really know what I’m apologizing for, specifically.
Her brows pinch together, her mouth pouting just a little tighter as she crosses her arms over her chest. Clearly I’m talking nonsense.
She waves a hand as her mouth twists in disgust. “Look all you want but quit glaring at me!”
“I . . . don’t know what to say here,” I tell her, the words sound distant from myself, my tone walking the line between confused and cautious.
“You can say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ” She scoffs dismissively, and my cock twitches. Oh, god.
My heart is pounding hard in my chest from the sudden confrontation, warmth creeping up over my skin. This isn’t just adrenaline.
My life flashes before my eyes, specifically the last time a woman snapped at me, and it got me hard. It’s only happened a few times, but each one has left a fun little imprint on my psyche.
“Yes . . . ma’am,” I repeat, the words coming out just a touch too quiet. I swallow, and even as I will everything in myself against it, a familiar heat low in my abdomen stirs.
Christ. I’m fucked.
The Palmer’s delivery girl blinks, clearly not expecting me to have acquiesced so easily. She eyes me warily, then pulls out the chair Shawn had been in before, sits back, crossing a leg over the other.
The seconds tick by in silence as she takes a pull from her ale, her eyes drinking me in, reassessing. There’s a shrewdness to her stare that I can’t hide from.
I’m thankful for the table between us, because my jeans could not keep my arousal a secret, not with how things arranged themselves. The seam of my pant leg presses tight against my cock. Out of view, I try to discreetly tuck things into a less damningly obvious position.
Slowly, I reach across the table and pick up one of the open ales she brought over. I hold her gaze, making sure it’s ok to take one.
She could have come over for the sole purpose of chewing me out; it’s probably not outside the realm of possibility that she brought two ales for herself. With the amount of heat she packed into that cold open, maybe the second one was for pouring out on me.
I wince at how hard my cock pulses at that. God, don’t linger on that thought. This isn’t the time to learn things about myself.
She gives a little nod to signal that no, one of those was meant for me. The mouth of the bottle still touching her lips, she asks, “Do you want to start over?”
“This conversation?” I ask, because I would love to wipe this conversation from my memory. I just know I’m going to be cringing at myself later and remembering every bit of it.
Her face softens, the barest fraction of a smile tucked away in her cheek.
“Yeah, ok. You get one re-do. One. Try being nice to me this time,” she offers with what I hope is a playful tone. “I’m Ava, by the way.”
I nod after a beat. “Logan.” Now that she’s told me a second time, I remember she had said it before too. “Right, we met earlier.”
She scrunches her nose for a moment. “Not to be pedantic, but we met at the Hayes House last week. Remember?”
The question halts everything in my body quieting the thrumming arousal she’d struck me with before.
She was at the wedding? I don’t remember that at all. Then again, I don’t remember most of what happened that day, only that I felt like I was crawling out of my skin, like an animal pacing a too-small enclosure.
“You were?”
She looks incredulous. “Yeah, that’s where we met. I did the flowers; I pinned a little bouquet on you.”
“You did?”
“You don’t remember that?”
Now that she’s raked her nails across my psyche, I’m a little disappointed that I truly don’t remember her being there. She must not have introduced herself like this.
Still, it doesn’t surprise me. This last week, no, even the months leading up to the wedding, I’ve been trying to bury myself. I’m not exaggerating when I tell her, “. . . I don’t remember most of that day, honestly.”
“Pre-gamed too hard?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. I didn’t really want to be there,” I say, trying to talk around the real reasons, but somehow finding the simple truth of it all. Even on the day of, I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself.
“Right, so you were at ground zero, huh?” She raises her eyebrows at me.
“I left before shit went down, apparently. Everyone I talk to about it has a different version of what happened. Some people think there was a fight, someone else said someone’s dog started tearing all the tables and things apart. ”
The breath stalls in my chest. I haven’t really thought about the perspective of people who weren’t part of the wolf packs present for the wedding. There were some regular humans there, but not many. At least it sounds like none of them got a clear view of the destruction.
She leans forward against the table, peering at me. “So, what actually happened?”
“I, uh, got into a pretty big fight with my brother. It unearthed some buried shit,” I say.
Ava’s brows crease together and she bites her lower lip. She offers, “If it’s too personal, you don’t have to tell me.”
I give my head a little shake. I want to talk about it. Everyone’s been so careful to tiptoe around the subject with me.
“No, it’s just . . . I’m aware I’m definitely the asshole in this story.”
I take a long pull from my ale, gathering my thoughts. She’s quiet, looking up at me with those large eyes, waiting to listen.
“There were a lot of big feelings. There was a lot of built-up resentment, and Shawn said something that was just the last straw for me. I don’t even remember what it was.”
“I mean, he still got married after, right? You didn’t ruin his wedding.”
“I . . . yeah, he did get married that day,” I say slowly, seeing the way Ava has artfully connected the dots to exclude one important detail: It was supposed to have been my wedding.
Now I really want to remember the conversation we supposedly had that day, wishing I hadn’t been pre-emptively drinking to forget. I slide a nail under the corner of my drink’s label, picking at it absently for a moment. It’s weird to think of sobriety as something that could have an upside.
“I guess it didn’t ruin absolutely everything. It was just the weirdest wedding I’ve been to.”
Ava shrugs like that’s a non-issue. “I mean, from what I’ve heard, everyone knows the Hayes family have always been a weird crowd. Not that I’ve met any of them.”
Ouch, alright.
“Yeah . . . not the most neighborly.” I nod, looking away and running a hand through my hair. “So, are . . . you interested in ales? There’s a lot of interesting variety . . . ”
“No, I’m more of an IPA girlie,” she says, and my mouth tightens. She scoffs before I can say anything judgmental about hops, apparently reading my mind. “Fuck off, dude.”
I nearly smile. Instead, I roll my eyes and gesture at myself with the tip of the bottle; I’m pretty much the opposite.
The gesture doesn’t translate clearly. Her brow tightens a little in confusion. “Oh, right. You work at the brewery.”
“Me and everyone else in Mystic Falls.” I shrug, fighting back a bit of a smile. People usually only say glowing things to me about the brewery, how my dad’s work revitalized this old mill town. I’ve been tired of it for a long time, and I’m weirdly glad someone else is too.
“How’d you get hired there with all that?”
Her eyes sweep over me again, landing on my forearm, and I realize she means the tattoos, piercings, and lack of a haircut.
“Uh, nepotism.” I shrug. It’s easier than explaining that until my younger brother turns twenty-five, our dad’s will named me the sole owner and proprietor.
“The ol’ ‘I know a guy,’ ” she says with a little eyeroll that has no business being so endearing. It utterly distracts me from what she said until after I’ve hummed and nodded along.
“Something like that.”
“Mm. I’m fighting off a job application there myself. Pray that I don’t get it.” She sighs, blowing a soft note into her half-empty drink. “Do they have that weird corporate ‘oh, we’re like a family here’ shtick?”
Despite myself, I smile. “Can’t say I’ve noticed.”
“What do you do, exactly?”
“Mostly I yell at people to park somewhere else and keep off the grass.”
That makes her laugh. Not just a laugh, an explosion. Her head tips back for a loud, misshapen bleat of a sound, her eyes squeezing shut for a second that lights my heart on fire. It’s as startling and captivating as a firework going off.
Her chin lands in her palm as it’s over too quickly, gone in a flash, and she’s peering at me with a grin and those eyes that are just a little too wide and pretty.
It’s unnerving. If I hold her stare too long, the world seems to fall away, gravity tipping like I’m going to fall into her, into that stare.
I realize my heart is beating a little too fast for this.
“And, uh, distribution,” I mutter with half a shrug, willing myself to look away. “It’s mostly emails and paperwork.”
For as unbalanced as I feel, this is refreshing. I finally feel my shoulders lowering away from my ears. I’d forgotten that conversations could be this easy. Maybe I don’t leave the house enough to interact with people who aren’t related to me.