I felt Scout settle beside me as I drank in this man who was roughly the size of a garden shed. Shoulders like he put the ox out to pasture and pulled the cart all by himself. Legs like an old-growth forest, cruelly wrapped in the kind of trousers that whispered of wealth and taste. Forearms kissed with enough sun and strength to suggest he did more than bark orders from behind a desk all day. And that ever-present scowl, the one that teetered into a half smile and tottered into a half frown when he found it in him to express an emotion beyond his usual sludge of gloom and grump.
The years had changed him. He was just as tall and dark as always but there was a polish to him now. Cleaned up, smoothed over, ironed out. Those unruly waves of his had learned some manners and he wore the kind of scruff that was only a few days short of declaring itself a proper beard, and it all fit together in a way that made me think he woke up in the morning and checked off items on his Wickedly Successful Businessman Style Guide.
Time had treated him with a lot more generosity than he deserved. With more kindness and comfort than I would’ve extended him.
Beckett Loew.
Heir to an oyster empire.
Bane of my childhood existence.
My older brother’s best friend.
Chaos, and not the happy accident kind.
And here he was, back home after all these years, towering over me and hoisting the insufferable douchebag flag on my café’s opening day as if it was his preordained right to ruin my life all over again.
Ah, but he knew nothing about my iceberg. Me and the ’berg, we were a goddamn force of nature. There was nothing we couldn’t do and no one who could stop us. We could move mountains and take down ocean liners without a hair sliding out of place.
We were our own kind of chaos, baby.
I knee-shuffled over to the next pot of herbs, giving him my back as I reached for a flat of citronella. After a minute of fussing with the leaves and ignoring him, I called over my shoulder, “Thanks, but I don’t think that’s going to happen, so why don’t you just turn yourself around and stay on your side of the street.”
chaptertwo
Beckett
Today’s Special:
The Meet-Argue, Medium Rare
I didn’t knowwhich time zone I was in. I was only superficially aware of which continent I was on. I had no fucking clue what day it was or the last time I’d changed my clothes. I smelled like airport bars and jet exhaust. My contacts had fused to my retinas about sixteen hours ago. If I could focus on one thing for seven seconds without encountering another disaster, I’d figure it all out. But as it stood, life was fucking me in ways even the most adventurous porn had not prepared me for.
This white girl with her flowerpots hardly ranked with all the other bullshit on my plate. I’d flown thousands of miles, been awake for three (four?) days straight, and had to fire most of the staff of Small Point Oyster Company this morning.
I didn’t have time for anyone’s fucking flowerpots.
It didn’t matter if her cherubic face was familiar. Everyone in this town was familiar and I forgot their names all the same, just the way they forgot about me before the door hit me on the ass on the way out.
I gestured to the pots eating up the already limited space of this area but she didn’t notice. “These things can’t stay here.”
She spared me a quick, cool glance as she arranged a plant in the pot. Dark hair with golden highlights spilled over her shoulders, thick and wavy where it brushed her bare arms. Round, pink cheeks and a cute little nose, like a doll but the kind of doll that would kick your ass while smiling at you with that heart-shaped mouth. She was young, probably mid-twenties. And beautiful. Like,drop everything and stare because how is she even real?beautiful.
I knew she was just following orders and didn’t want to get her in trouble with her boss but I really couldn’t spend all morning explaining to this young woman that her flowerpots wouldn’t survive the weekend if she left them in the middle of my delivery unloading zone.
“And why is that?” she asked, her hands deep in the soil.
I checked my phone for new messages and shoved a hand through my hair. There were at least ten very good, logical reasons why this woman couldn’t drop a half dozen flowerpots in this precise location but my brain was running on empty and I could only manage to say, “It gets busy here on weekend evenings. People park right there, in that spot, all the time. And we have frequent deliveries. If you leave these things here, your flowers will be roadkill before Monday morning rolls around. Not to mention blocking fire lane access.” I glanced up the impossibly narrow driveway, the one that necessitated a valet team of four on the busiest nights of the summer, and remembered the most important point. “And you’re on SPOC property.”
“You might want to check your info because that’s not correct.”
There was an air of authority in her words, one that woke up my last functional brain cells and promised I’d enjoy this fight if I stuck around long enough to get in another shot. A shocked laugh cracked out of me because it was amusing to think anyone could fight me on this topic. I knew the business of Small Point Oyster Company backward and forward, and I’d known it for the past twenty years. There was no doubt in my mind that I was right about this. That simply was not possible. “No,” I insisted, “youare mistaken.”
“Amazingly, I am not.” She didn’t bother looking up from her plants to say this.
The bold dismissiveness, it was killing me. She didn’t give a shit what I had to say and she wanted me to know that more than anything else. And—I liked it? Or I experienced something that resembled mild amusement at this hole-in-the-head conversation. It was vaguely fun to play this pointless game with her while my family’s business crumbled by the second. Kind of like playing Tetris while getting fired or hearing you had six months left to live.
“I have to be honest here and say you’re overreacting in a significant way,” she continued. “A few flowerpots on the perimeter of the patio are not trouncing anyone’s property lines and they certainly aren’t creating fire lane issues. Of all the things to get fussy about, this is a silly one.”
