“Yeah, but I was wondering if we might be able to swing by the Tap for one before we head over.” Knowing Mom would put us to work as soon as the dinner table was cleared, maybe a drink wasn’t a bad idea anyway.
“That sounds like a damn good idea.” Anson sounded as wrung out as I felt. Being an attorney in a small town, his work went in fits and starts, but when he got busy, it seemed like everyone wanted him to work on a real estate transaction at the same time. “I can be there in about fifteen. We’ll have to hurry so Mom doesn’t start blowing up our phones trying to find out where we’re at.”
I wasn’t so sure we’d get that lucky, but the reminder we didn’t have time to waste was good.
Since I was only a couple of blocks away, I beat Anson to the bar. I parked in the back so no one could see my truck and rat me out. The black crew cab with tinted windows and chrome everywhere I could manage without making the truck look too gaudy tended to stand out whenever I parked it on the street.
Inside, the regular after-work crowd lined the bar, ready to wind down after a long day. Quinten waved to me from his seat at the other end of the bar. I should have known it’d be impossible to go anywhere in town without running into someone who’d want to chat. I jerked my chin up in a silent hello but didn’t move closer to him. He was like a dog with a fucking bone when he caught wind of any sort of gossip. As it was, I was pretty sure he’d caught on that something was going on between Ezra and me.
Which would have been funny if there actually was an us. But there wasn’t because I was too chicken-shit to do anything more than that first kiss on his forehead. My lips tingled as I remembered the feeling of his soft skin, warm against my lips. The way his body melted against mine, the way he tried casually putting some space between us, hoping I wouldn’t feel how hard he’d gotten for me.
The feeling was absolutely mutual. I’d even found myself watching more porn in the past week than ever before. It wasn’t about getting myself off though—at least, not entirely. If something was going to happen between us, I didn’t want to be a bumbling idiot. I wanted to go into this the same way I did everything else in life. I learned as much as I could, and only then would I take on a new challenge.
Wes, who was a few years younger than me, was working the bar tonight. He waved to let me know he’d seen me as he helped some of the crew who looked like they’d just gotten off from the manufacturing plant down the road. Finally, he approached. “Hey, Carson. What can I get for you tonight? You need a menu?”
“Hell no. I’m just here for a quick one before family dinner.” No further explanation was needed. Wes had grown up down the road, and our families were similar other than the fact that my parents had land they leased out to a farmer while Wes’s family worked their own farm. Both properties had been in our respective families for over a century, which was a huge deal. If anyone understood my family’s dynamics, it would be him. “Grab me a pint of the cider and whichever IPA you think is best for Anson. He should be here soon.”
“Drinking before heading over to the parents’ place?” He grabbed a bar towel and started wiping the already clean bar in front of me. “Everything good over that way?”
“Yep.” I wasn’t falling into his trap. Everyone knew bartenders were masters at getting people to spill their darkest secrets. “Just want to spend some time with my brother before the chaos starts.”
“That’s right, you guys are doing your baking thing this weekend.” Wes shook his head. “Man, I can’t believe you guys are still doing all that. I miss those days.”
This was why I was usually careful about who I talked to about this sort of shit. To everyone else, family traditions were sacred. While I understood where they were coming from, they could also become one hell of a chore. And it wasn’t until Ezra had forced me to face my feelings that I realized it was more resentment than loathing. While people like Wes longed for what my family had, I’d always wondered what it would be like to spend Christmas Eve with just my parents and brothers, followed by a single big meal on Christmas Day. Instead, our family had always dragged shit out because there were so many different branches.
“Yeah, the insanity will begin as soon as Mom fires up the oven in the morning.” Wes left the rag sitting in front of me and drew my pint. I grabbed it before he could set it down on the cardboard coaster and took a long pull from the chilled glass. “I’m sure she’ll have us mixing up the dough tonight so she can start baking while we’re eating.”
“It’s cool to hear that some things live on,” Wes mused. “Sometimes it feels like the old traditions are dying off. Did you hear they’re not doing the tree lighting this year?”
“Yeah.” I was glad he hadn’t mentioned that particular turn of events in Anson’s presence. It had been the topic of conversation the past two weeks at family dinner. Michael was frustrated by how Mayor Thompson kept trying to inject his beliefs into town policies, and the more he heard, the more determined Anson became to get him out of office come spring. In this case, the problem was that a group from Pineville had protested the nativity being displayed on city property the way it had been for as long as I could remember. The mayor’s solution had been to say there would be no tree, either, because he considered it too much of a nod to perverse beliefs that had no place in this town.
I was just waiting for someone to point out that it wasn’t submitting to other religions so much as appropriating holidays to try to squash the minority. Decorating trees, caroling, and even mistletoe and holly had all been taken from pagan customs. It was too much to hope the mayor and those like him knew this and that was why they were so adamantly against it.
Anson walked in and sat on the stool next to me, rescuing me from more of Wes waxing poetic about how people our age weren’t living up to the deeply rooted history of Harmony Grove. He wasn’t wrong, but sometimes things needed to change in order for them tolive on.
“Hey, brother.” Anson patted me on the back as he reached for his pint. “Thanks for this. I needed it.”
“Rough day?”
“Rough week,” he responded. “I’m trying to get everything together for the party, but then there’s this inconvenience called my job.”
“Then why’d you agree to the Christmas party?” I really wanted the answer to that because it was even more out of character for Anson than it was for me. He kept to himself for the most part. The fact Kevin’s name kept coming up in every conversation felt like a clue as to his motivations.
Anson shrugged as he leaned back on his stool. “We need to be doing more. Things are going okay over there, but numbers have been dropping lately. It seemed like a good way to get more people through the doors.”
“Mm-hmm.” I lifted my glass to my mouth.
“So what did you really call me down here for? It’s not like we wouldn’t have seen one another in a little bit anyway.”
My mouth went dry, and my chest tightened. If I asked what was on my mind, there’d be no coming back from it. Billy knowing was one thing; he was safe. He’d spent years geeking over the human condition, and he’d recently fallen in love with his best friend. Anson was different. Someday, he’d be the head of the family. As much as I didn’t want to think about what it would take for him to ascend to that role, it was an inevitability of life. Because of that, his opinion felt weightier.
“What would you do if you found yourself attracted to someone totally unexpected?” I asked, hoping that was close enough to the truth for him to give me some sort of guidance.
He didn’t respond right away. He paused with his glass halfway to his mouth, just watching me. “What are we talking about here? I don’t want to make any assumptions.”
“Let’s say, hypothetically, of course, that you started hanging out with someone, but it was more than friendship.” That much, I was almost certain he could identify with. “You’ve always hung out with petite women, most of them with dark hair and eyes. What if you started to feel similar things with someone who…wasn’t like that at all?”
“Cut this shit, Carson,” Anson chided me. “Either ask me what you really want to know, or I’m going to drain this pint and head out to the farm.”
