“Ronnie,” Leah said, voice taking on that high, bright edge that Carter knew meant she was thrilled about something. “Hi. How’s it going?”
The guy hesitated, and then came forward, his expression cautious. “Hi. It’s Leah, right?”
“Right,” Leah chirped. “This is Carter.” Grand gesture toward him behind the counter. “He went to high school with Ava and me. Carter, this is Ronnie.” Her dark almond-shaped eyes cut over, bright with mischief. “Ava’s boyfriend.”
So that’s why he looked familiar. Carter had only glimpsed him through the window, as he stood at the end of Ava’s truck and played with his phone, but the hair was unmistakable.
Carter’s first reaction was to laugh. Rude, stomach-clutching, howling laughter. He checked that impulse and said, “Hi. Good to meet you.” But he couldn’t rectify this pretty boy as Ava’s boyfriend. How had Ava Teague, club daughter to her bones, who’d stabbed Mason Stephens in the leg and miscarried Mercy Lécuyer’s baby on the floor of Hamilton House, ended up with some country club tool like this. He himself had been too preppy for her, back in the day. And here she was now with the captain of the lacrosse team, or whatever the hell rich-boy sport this dick played.
Ronnie grimaced in a delicate way and fiddled with the change in his pockets. “I’m not so sure ‘boyfriend’ is the word for me anymore.”
“Oh?” Leah’s crestfallen expression belonged on a stage somewhere. “You two broke up? How awful!”
Ronnie studied the toes of his loafers. “I don’t know what you want to call it. Ava’s going through…some stuff, right now.”
Carter didn’t miss the quick wink Leah shot him. He didn’t misinterpret it either; he’d seen Mercy among the ranks of Dogs on bikes that kept parading through town. Ava wasn’t going through “stuff”; she was going through Mercy-withdrawal.
He almost felt bad for Ronnie. Poor dumbass, he thought. She’ll only ever be in love with that walking nightmare.
Ronnie seemed to shake himself off. “I need to get some gas,” he said, a silver money clip coming out of his pants pocket, a fifty peeling off a roll of others just like it. “Can I get thirty on pump two?”
“Yeah.” Carter noted how crisp, green, and new the bill was as he put it in the register.
“Carter, huh?” Ronnie’s voice had that awkward, forced-conversation quality to it. “You played football for KHS. Quarterback, right?”
“Right.”
“Didn’t you get a full ride to Texas A&M?”
Carter nodded. “And lost it, too.” There was a prickling up the back of his neck, an uneasiness. “How’d you know all that?”
Ronnie’s mouth trembled; his eyes widened. There and gone again, anxiety tweaked his face. But then it smoothed over and he shrugged as he accepted his change. “Ava told me.” He looked at Leah, nodded. “Nice to see you both.” And out he went again, bell chiming.
“Okay, what the hell was that?”
Leah shook her head, mouth drawn up tight in excited surprise. “I dunno. She’s totally back with Mercy. I really can’t believe any guy would stick around once he realized he was competing with somebody capable of turning him into a human pretzel.”
Carter frowned as he watched Ronnie pump gas into his slick Lexus. “I swear he looks familiar. What’s his last name?”
“Archer.”
Ronnie Archer. He swore he knew that name. Then again, it wasn’t that unusual; there could be fifty Ronnie Archers in Tennessee.
“Poor Ronnie,” Leah said. “He has no idea that he was thestuffshe was going through.”
“Did you see your mother yesterday?”
Aidan took the toothpick in his mouth between thumb and forefinger and flicked it up onto the dash. “For a sec.” He retrieved his smokes from the center console between them, shook one out and lit up, needing that first draw of nicotine before he was willing to go into any detail. “She’s setting us up with a booth at the yard sale?”
Behind the wheel, Ghost nodded and sipped his travel mug of coffee. Aidan knew Maggie had packed that coffee, had made the breakfast sandwiches of toasted rye, sausage patties and cheese, had included napkins and shiny green apples and a fresh Bic lighter for their cigarettes. Just like Maggie, at seventeen, had packed his ham and cheese sandwiches, Oreos and chips and little boxes of raisins in his sack lunches when he was in third grade. Only eight years older than him, and his stepmother had hugged him and done cartwheels across the yard with him and argued with his teachers for him at parent-teacher conferences.
The woman who’d birthed him had bowed out of all that. And yesterday, when she’d approached him outside the bike shop, hands clasped in front of her, keeping her distance like she was afraid he’d get motor oil on her pristine clothes, she’d greeted him with a stiff nod and said, “Aidan. You look…healthy.”
“Do we need her for that?” he asked, taking another deep drag and watching the dead street through the windshield.
“If we applied for a booth, we’d never get accepted. Olivia can set one aside for us, and no one has to know until we’re all set up. We need this,” Ghost added, a heavy, paternal look cast across the cab of the truck at him. “It’s not personal. It’s just damage control.”
“Right,” Aidan sighed, sinking lower in his seat, blowing smoke up at the headliner.
