Jenna turned the Muzak in the salon down and spoke several decibels louder than she typically did as she tried to set the record straight but feared it was like shouting into a hurricane. “I’m sorry to disappointeveryone, but Tiana is on my Trivia Team, and Niko came with her, and when Robbie and Kiki couldn’t come because Layla was sick, Niko offered to play, andheasked Deacon St. Claire to join. I had nothing to do with it. When they left and went home, so did I. Alone.”
After she finished her speech, she turned the music back up.
“So itwaslike a blind date.” Blake smiled widely. “That’s sooooo cute.”
“It wasnota blind date," Jenna refuted even though she knew her daughter was giving her a hard time. “I’ll drop off the sweats. Love you, Peanut.”
“Love youuuu.” Blake tilted her head.
“Love you more.” Jenna hung up thinking about how lucky she was that her daughter wasn’t embarrassed to tell her she loved her in front of her friends, in the middle of school.
Then she remembered Deacon, wow, she knew his name now, that was weird…Anyway, she remembered Deacon telling her she was doing something right because when Blake was out in California with Asher, she’d called to fill Jenna in on the hot gossip and told her that she’d loved her.
Why did that make Jenna feel things she didn’t want to feel? Like hesawher. The real her.
After getting back from lunch, midafternoon, the salonhad finally hit a lull, the kind that lasted only as long as the time it took for another small-town rumor to mushroom in a pressure cooker of idle hands and glancing eyes. Jenna’s hands were still moving in muscle memory—section, snip, brush, repeat—as she tried to focus on the present: the way Mrs. Vassallo’s hair did a stubborn crinkle at the nape of the neck, the way the sunlight caught the loose golden threads littering her smock.
She was in the middle of a root touch-up—gloves on, timer set, foils in place—when she heard the bell over the door, followed by the unmistakable cadence of Robbie’s voice. It was a voice with a built-in amp, loud, warm, and designed to be the center of attention even when it was asking for something as innocuous as an oat-milk latte. Jenna could practically see him in her mind’s eye before she turned: oversized sunglasses, a scarf so bright it needed its own SPF, and the air of someone who’d already read every page of the script and was just waiting for the right moment to improvise his own lines.
“Who needs a caffeine delivery?” Robbie called out, arms full of cardboard drink carriers.
Several hands shot up, including Jenna’s.
He made a lap around the perimeter, distributing little cups of joy to the stylists, then parked himself at Jenna’s chair, leaning in with the intimacy of a friend but the drama of a tabloid reporter. “So, I heardsomeonehad a hot date last night.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a volley, lobbed with just enough affection to make it impossible to be annoyed. Except she was absolutely annoyed. Jenna pretended to focus on the foils, but she could feel her temperature rising, a subtle flush that had less to do with the blow dryers and more to do with the fact that yes, in a way, shehad and she didn’t want Robbie, who didn’t miss much, to notice.
Robbie, undeterred by her silence, waggled his brows. “It’s all over town. You and Deacon St. Claire. Parking lot. Deep conversation.”
There was a time, before motherhood, before the whiplash of two divorces, where Jenna might have let herself fantasize about what it would be like to actually date someone like Deacon St. Claire. He wasn’t just small-town good-looking, he was so far out of her league it was laughable, not to mention the financial imbalance, and she felt those discrepancies deep in her sternum. It was absurd, and yet there she was, privately replaying him following her out to the parking lot to ask her about their one-night stand.
But the past five hours proved why she couldn’t “talk” to Deacon St. Claire after Tiana and Niko left last night. This morning provedno onecould know anything about their past. This morning was proof her love life in a small town was under a microscope, and it wouldn’t just be her life that would be affected. Blake and her friends said everyone was talking about her “date.” She remembered what it was like growing up with her mom ‘dating.’ She would not put Blake through that. She wouldn’t put herself through that.
Not even for Deacon St. Claire.
“Where are we going?” Tabby, buckled into her booster seat, pressed her nose against the window.
“To get my haircut.” Deacon checked the time, it wasalmost six p.m. He wondered if the salon would even still be open.
He’d been wrestling with whether or not to go to The Beauty Spot all day. He’d made a mental pros and cons list. There was a laundry list of cons, and only one pro. He’d get to see Jenna. He knew she was there because clients had tagged her in photos. After seeing the last one five minutes ago while he was doing dinner dishes, he made an impulse decision.
It seemed one pro was all he needed. At least when the one pro was that he got to see Jenna again. Could it backfire on him? Big time. But he honestly couldn’t help himself. He’d always been such a disciplined, measured, controlled person. Right now, he was acting purely on primitive compulsion, on primal instinct, on base drive.
Tabby’s feet kicked as she craned for a better view. “We’re going to see Uncle Peter?”
Peter, just Peter, because he was so good he only needed one name, was his barber, or as he’d branded himself, hair-artist, as well as the hair-artist to the stars.
Deacon met Peter when he was Petey DeMarco from Quincy, MA. He got his first clippers at age twelve from his Uncle Pietro, who owned Goodfellas Barber on Lexington Ave. Deacon had been Peter’s first customer. It was dicey those first few months. Deacon got grounded for allowing his friend to practice on his head, but Petey got better, and now Peter was at the top of his game.
“Nope, I’m going to see someone new.”
Tabby’s jaw dropped as she stage whispered, without even knowing what stage whispering was, “Uncle Peter’s gonna besomad.”
“No, he won’t.” Yes, he would.
Peter regularly threatened imaginative, disturbing scenarios of torture or death if Deacon ever let anotherperson or alien or sentient being touch a strand of hair on his head. But his friend would have to understand these were mitigating circumstances.
“Can I cut my hair?” Tabby’s tone vibrated with anticipation.
