Her question brings me back to reality, like being doused by a bucket of frigid water. “Gus is marrying Eloise.”
Mom’s hazel eyes soften, a look of concern passing over her features.
I try my best to look unaffected, lift my shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “It’s fine,” I say, pushing around the spilled contents of my taco on my plate with a fork. “Anyway, he came into the shop to tell me and basically said he hoped I didn’t get emotional like I did when he broke up with me, so—”
“He said what?” Grey asks. I’m startled by the grit in his tone, the flat look on his face. His jaw is pulsing from how tight he’s holding it shut. When I look beside him at Holden, he’s wearing a similar expression, but much less…justmuch less. Everything about my brother looks less intense than whatever is going on with Grey. I don’t know what to make of it, because this is so unlike him. He’s usually all relaxed lines and easygoing confidence. He’s rarely whatever this is.
“He made some dig about me being emotional during the breakup,” I say, waving it off like it isn’t a big deal. It is, but whatever energy is buzzing off him right now feels electric, pulsing with something unreadable and tangible.
His jaw ticks. It’s so firm it looks like it might snap. Instead of responding, he makes a noise in the back of his throat and takes a sip of his beer, his eyes connecting with Holden’s.
I roll my eyes at them. “I know you guys never liked him.”
Wren cuts in before they can reply. “No, it wasn’t that—”
“He’s an ass,” Grey says, and my gaze cuts to his. His expression is still steely, but something about the way he’s not holding back makes a laugh bubble out of me.
The sound of it makes him soften, and everything feels back to normal.
“Yeah,” I say through laughter. “He kind of is.”
“Uncle Grey,” June pipes up from beside Wren. He meets her gaze, a smile hitching up the corner of his mouth, no longer tense and bristling. June holds out her little hand across the table. “You owe me a dollar for the swear jar.”
Grey’s eyes snag on mine, the dimple in his left cheek making an appearance as he pulls out his wallet and hands her a dollar.
After Saturday night dinners at Mom’s, June stays over, and traditionally, Wren, Holden, Grey, and I find something to do for the night. Usually, we end up at Matty’s Bar in town. It’s dark, the menus are always sticky. The music is too loud, and there’s never enough seating. In short, it’s my favorite place in town.
Tonight, the place is packed. Live music pours out of the open windows—an eighties cover band from the sound of it—drawing in locals and tourists alike from the swampy, blistering summer night. With all the bodies, it’s not any cooler inside, but at least there are cold drinks and free bowls of peanuts and enough people to never run out of conversation.
Holden groans as we make our way through the packed bar. I have to hold back a smile, because I know what’s coming. “Can’t we just go home?”
Wren looks up at him from where he’s got his hands on her shoulders, leading her through the maze of people to the bar. “C’mon, grandpa. Let’s stay for a while.”
I don’t even have to watch to know he’s caved. He’s so gone for her that he is unable to tell her no. It makes my heart pinch a little every time. I want to know what it feels like to be loved like that by someone. To know that a simple request from me is enough to change his mind. With Gus, it was never like that. I’ve just started to realize all the ways in which I’d settled with him, all the ways we weren’t right for each other.
All the ways I wasn’t enough for him.
“You see a table anywhere?” Grey asks directly into my ear, his broad chest colliding with my back as I come to a sudden stop. Wren and Holden pause when someone walks in front of them. His palms catch on my waist, steadying me, and a shiver runs through me at the contact, the feeling of his large, calloused hands connecting with bare skin.
He drops his hands before I have a chance to dissect my reaction to them. “Fin?”
I glance over my shoulder at him. The blue of his eyes looks even more striking in the dim lighting of the bar. There’s a tiny scar above his eyebrow that, somehow, I’ve never noticed before. “What?”
He leans closer, placing his lips right at the shell of my ear to be heard over the music. “I said do you see an empty table anywhere?”
His warm breath on my neck feels like honey dripping down the column of it until it pools in the space below my belly button. I shake my head, trying to clear my thoughts and whatever thisreaction to him is. Then I look around the crowded bar. Right in the middle of the room, I spot one free table.
“I found one,” I yell to him. “I’ll go save it. Order me a margarita, please.” I need some tequila to snap me out of whateverthatwas.
He nods, moving me to the left with a hand on my hip before following the path Wren and Holden are forging to the right, where the bar is.
I can still feel his phantom fingers on my skin as I make my way to the table.
What is wrong with me?
It’s been fifteen years since I’ve harbored any kind of romantic feelings toward Grey, and although what I was feeling a minute ago wasn’t exactly romantic, it was…electric. It was a pulse of want that I don’t even want to examine.
Seven months is too long to go without being touched or held, and it isn’t helping that Grey was technically the last one to do it. The night of Wren and Holden’s wedding is foggy, but I do remember the feeling of his cool hands on my neck as he held my hair back. The beat of his heart beneath my cheek. The feeling of rightness at being held in his arms. I remember something else too now, something that has been lost to the tequila haze that night. He said something, right as I was drifting off to sleep, about wanting someone in Fontana Ridge. But that can’t be right. Not when he’s dated almost every single woman in town within a ten-year age range.
