She was—well, she was as kind as she implied she thinks I am.
A little outraged for a moment there, but kind. Like it was my turn to be the duck helped across the road, and she was just a regular woman doing what any human being would do for someone—or something—in need.
She beams at Anya. “I’m helping Dylan get a TikTok account!”
Yes, she’s speaking in exclamation marks. I swear her face is dancing in them too.
The part of her face that I can see, that is.
Anya drops her rag and leans on the counter.“Oooh.”
Bridget pops her head over the swinging doors to the kitchen.“Oooh.”
Even Ridhi stops behind Bridget and stares at me. “No way.”
“Yes way!” Tavi dials her smile up to eleven. “Won’t he be fabu?”
“I’m gonna get yelled at if I say out loud what I’m thinking,” Bridget says.
She gets a double stink eye from her stepmom and aunt, and I don’t know if it’s because Bridget’s implying I’ll suck or if it’s because she’s implying I’ll have women falling at my feet in droves.
Neither makes me particularly comfortable when they’re coming from a teenager who knows entirely too much about the world.
“Right?” Tavi says with an emphatic nod. “Gigi yelled at me, too, when I said what I was thinking—she was all, ‘Tickled Pink doesn’t need to be sexualized to get tourists’—but, like, this is thebestplan. And then Tickled Pink will be famous all over again foryouinstead ofus, and you’ll never have to worry about tourism again after we leave.”
As I said.
Bad, bad idea.
I’m not opposed to attention the way Teague is.Was.He’s loosened up since Phoebe came into his life and then since his own secrets spilled out about his life before he moved here, which we locals are tiptoeing around for his sake.
He’s a good guy. Good dad too. And he cares about Tickled Pink.
So we’re letting him take the lead on how much he wants to talk about his past. Life rule—when a guy can clearly handle the hard shit, you don’t dig into the things he doesn’t want to talk about until he’s ready to talk about them.
You accept him for the decent person he’s been for as long as he’s lived here, and you give him the room he needs.
As for me, this whole town—as well as a lot of the surrounding areas—already knows my past, which might be why I’m having some performance anxiety at the idea ofmebeing the new face of Tickled Pink on social media.
Fix a leaky faucet, replace a sink, handle a boiler?
I’m your man.
Get fancy for the cameras?
Probably gonna be a few people who have opinions on me that I won’t like and a little more of my own past coming back to bite me.
I’ll deal. Not like it’s a secret, and there’s no place I’d rather be if I’m going to put myself on display, and there’s no other town I’d do this for.
Probably be good for me, actually, to face the stuff that’s been haunting me again.
Hannah’s gonna think I’m a dork.
And I need to quit worrying what Hannah thinks.
She’s the past.
Still a friend, but she’s the past.
