Butterflies. Fuzzies. All the Jonah-induced tingles. God, this man. Unable to stop, I lifted up on my toes and kissed his cheek. “You’re good for my ego, Mason. I’m going to keep you.”
He stood there and watched as I got in my driver’s seat and closed the door. He was still standing there as I drove away. Something in his expression made it hard to breathe and set my thoughts spinning. But I didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t put my finger on it. So instead of hyper focusing on all things Jonah, I drove myself home, got ready for bed, and then deleted all my dating apps.
nine
Charlie pokedhis head into my office almost a week later, and said, “Lola’s back,” without any inflection in his voice.
I looked up from the website of a new up-and-coming brewery in Georgia, which had the loveliest social media presence, surprised to see him. Charlie was one of the most charming human beings on the planet—I was convinced of it. He was the kind of person who other people immediately loved. Will always said he’d be a fantastic cult leader. But I knew his attention was too short for that kind of long game.Even if he successfully gave up sugar for the rest of his life.
When we were kids, he had an uncanny knack for wrapping every single teacher around his finger. To this day, Will and I still didn’t know if Charlie could really read or if teachers had just passed him because they liked him.
Obviously, you couldn’t get to our age without knowing how to read... except this was Charlie. And there were several times I just wasn’t convinced he knew what all the letters in the alphabet meant. Sometimes I’d catch him staring at the menu like it held the secret to life. Or death. And I would ask him to read something on it just to test the waters.
So far, he’d managed to pass all my half-hearted tests. But there was one time when a drop of water had skewed part of the word “cornichon,” and he’d read “cornucopia” like he was totally confident we’d serve German pretzels with beer cheese sauce alongside homemadecornucopias.And he never read actual books. Only listened to audiobooks. Suspect, for sure. I mean, he could be dyslexic.
Ada told me I was crazy regularly.
Anyway, Charlie had two modes. One was on. When Charlie was on, he was warm, open hilarious, and inclusive. And when Charlie was off, he was different. Not that he wasn’t still magnetic and funny...
More like, he was reserved, reclused, more restrained than normal. And even though I was used to both sides of him, I still found him hard to read when he was off. I thought he liked Lola, but I couldn’t say for sure. I thought he liked owning the bar with Will and me... but I could be wrong about that too. I thought he was secretly and madly in love with Ada. But he was just as likely to be totally in love with the girl who made his Jimmy Johns sandwich every Friday afternoon.
Unlike Will, who always kept his cards so close to the vest and never shared his opinion that it was impossible to know what he liked or wanted, Charlie shared all his thoughts and what he wanted, yet I was still just as confused about what he really wanted.
Ugh, why were the men in my life so damn complicated?
“Oh, okay,” I said lamely. “Is she here now? Or...”
“No, Will went to pick her up from the airport.”
“Gotcha. So are you handling the main floor? Or do I need to go out there?” It was five o’clock on a Friday. Things were just starting to pick up. Miles was behind the bar, and Ada was waiting tables and training a new guy.
“Will wanted me to find you so you could go out there. Apparently, I’m too much of an idiot to manage for an hour.”
“Fuck Will.” The bold words were out of my mouth before I could think better of them, but after they were out in the air, I realized I meant them. Clearly, I should confront him about his second location plans soon before I ended up irrevocably angry with him. But I was going to get really bitter and resentful first and then ambush him during our busiest night of the year by making a very public sceneorwait until next Christmas and do it in front of Mom, Lola, Charlie, Uncle Tim, and Granny, effectively ruining everyone’s holiday.
Which was the way with family in business together. We didn’t have strategy meetings or mediated disagreements. We just started screaming profanities at each other after the smallest things went wrong, swore never to speak to each other again, googled how to dissolve the business three ways after I vindictively picked it apart, and then got over it thirty minutes later.
I didn’t make the rules. I only followed them.
Honestly, what else was I supposed to do? I was in business with my brothers. This was the way.
But for some reason, it bothered me that Charlie might not like Lola. He should be happy Will finally found someone.
“You’re not an idiot,” I told him. “Will is a control freak. It’s not you. It’s him.”
Charlie rolled his eyes and jutted out his bottom lip, reminding me of the little boy he used to be. “You say that all the time. But meanwhile, he’s treating me like an idiot. And talking about me like an idiot. Given the evidence, there’s only one conclusion: I am an idiot.”
I bit the corners of my lip to keep from smiling. “So prove him wrong.”
He didn’t move, but something in the expression on his face intensified. “What?”
I shrugged. “I’m not going out there. I have too much work to do. Prove Will wrong. Just do the damn job. And do it well.”
For too long, I’d been mediating the delicate peace—read constant conflict—between Charlie and Will. But if I was honest with myself, I usually sided with Will. Charlie had made a ton of mistakes in the past, and I tended to default to babysitting him. Not only that, I tended to be the one who went out of my way to make sure he never failed. I mopped up his messes, swooped in to save him from himself, and protected the bar from his self-destructive ways twenty-four seven.
But with Will’s possible defection, a new fire had been lit within me. True, I had no grounds to assume Will was actually going to pull out and open up shop elsewhere. But even if things went on per usual, we had to start counting on Charlie to pull his weight. It wasn’t that Charlie wasn’t willing. It was that we’d taken away his option.His belief in himself.
Which meant Will and I had to shoulder our own work and divide up Charlie’s. And now that Will had a serious girlfriend and found purpose outside of this building, more and more shouldering fell on me.
