Approaching carefully, I balanced my too-full plate of food that I now regretted in one hand and my nearly empty drink in the other. “Hey, sorry, there was a line.”
Jonah looked over at me and smiled. “Oh, hey, Eliza.”Oh, hey, Eliza.I refrained from kicking him in the shins. He turned back to the intruder. “We’ve only had a couple of drinks so far,” he was telling her, “but it’s a massive improvement from what I remember. I wouldn’t hesitate to introduce them to my clients back home.”
I cleared my throat, a nervous tic that always gave me away. Jonah didn’t notice. But the woman did.
She raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you going to introduce me to your friend?”
The planes of Jonah’s cheeks turned pink, but he nodded. “I was just about to.” She shot me a look that said she didn’t believe him either. “Eliza, this is Logan Kendall. She’s a rep with Modern Bev.” To Logan, he said, “This is Eliza English. She owns Craft with her brothers.”
Logan’s raised eyebrow inched higher. “Craft, the cocktail bar in Durham?”
I nodded, tucked my now empty cup into the crook of my arm, and extended my hand, “Nice to meet you.”
She gave me a firm handshake but didn’t return the polite smile. “I thought this was a distributor-only event?”
“It is,” Jonah explained. “Eliza’s my plus-one. I’m here on business, but she’s here for fun.”
“Well, you better give her an alias,” Logan scolded him. “Or she’s going to be swarmed all night.” Leaning toward me, she put her hand up like she was telling a secret. “We’re vultures. He should know better than to let you loose with all of us circling.”
I laughed nervously. “Well, I wasn’t planning on meeting anyone.”
Her head tipped back, and she laughed a tinkling sound like that was the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard. “Not meet anyone? It’s a mixer. And we’re salespeople. Meeting strangers is like an addiction.”
Well, she wasn’t wrong. But I had figured Jonah and I would just do our own thing. Plus, it had been such a last-minute decision, I hadn’t considered... well, anything honestly. And also, Jonah had always been our lead distributor and handled almost all purchasing for the bar. I managed the stuff he couldn’t or didn’t want to get by email. I wasn’t used to aggressive distributors vying for my attention.
Nor did I ever want to get used to it.
Clearing my throat, I offered a weak, “I guess I didn’t think about that.”
She turned back to Jonah, conversation with me over, and clung tighter to his arm. “Are you doing the whole glamping thing?”
I recognized her tone. It was carefully neutral. That way, if he said yes, she could offer an enthusiastic “me too!” but if he said no, she could talk about how stupid it was instead. It was a trick I’d pulled many times before. And part of me wanted to ask her if she was staying before Jonah could respond so we could get her real answer.
But I also wanted to see how Jonah would handle this. I had almost never met a girl he was dating—mostly because he never dated for long. Sure there had been randoms over the years, but he never brought them around Will, Charlie, or me.
This woman was clearly into him. And she was gorgeous. But he seemed more uncomfortable than interested. His cheeks were slowly growing redder, and he seemed increasingly uneasy with her on his arm. Or maybe I was the one making everything awkward.
Shame and discomfort spiraled through me. I had the strongest impulse to throw my food on the ground and sprint from the building. But I had nowhere to go. We were in the middle of the country, hours from Durham. I doubted I could Uber home from here.
Suddenly I was the little sister trying to tag along again. A chill ran down my spine, and I regretted everything. Not just my most recent bad choices like letting Jonah talk me into this overnight. Butallmy life choices. Starting at birth.
“Yeah, it sounds cool,” he told her. He glanced at me. “I’ve been trying to get Eliza to go camping with me forever. But she always turns me down. Says she has to work or she hates nature or whatever. This seems like a step in the right direction.”
I perked up. A slow heat warmed me from the inside out. He’d only tried to get me to go camping one time. And it was last fall. And I did have to work. Also, it hadn’t just been me. He’d wanted Will and Lola to go too. The weekend hadn’t worked for any of us, and then the good weather had disappeared. We kept it on our radars but then it was winter and freezing. However we’d been throwing around a future trip, maybe for this summer.
Logan’s gaze swerved back to me. Then back to Jonah. “I’m staying too. I’ve heard great things about their setup, but I believe we’re the first people to test them out. They just built them.”
“Oh,” Jonah said. “Cool.”
“You don’t have food,” I noticed suddenly. The room was quickly filling up with reps, and the table near us looked significantly picked over. “Go ahead, Jonah. Grab food. We’ll wait for you.” Not that I wanted to be stuck here with Logan Kendall. But I was genuinely worried he wouldn’t get anything to eat.
And even more worried he was going to ask to share my plate. It was one thing to go halfsies. It was another thing to give up half my food and go hungry.
I looked down at my loaded plate... not that I would go hungry per se.
I fully expected a “You’re not my mother” joke like my brothers would have thrown out, but he nodded in agreement and repeated what he was going to do to Logan. He squeezed my bicep and headed toward the food. Then it was just me and this woman I didn’t know at all.
I rocked back on my boots. “So you know Jonah through your work?”
