Heading out to my car, I look at the time on the dashafter I start up. I’m not quite ready to go back to my condo and I could call Carter to see if he wants to grab a beer, but it would all be filler for the real reason I’m debating with myself. I want to see Angela. I want to at least try to talk to her. I want to see if my anger is all for nothing. I want to see if I just want her. I don’t know her, but I want to.
I want.
I want.
I want.
It’s not too late and my decision has been made as I put my car in gear and head toward Blue Pint Outpost to see if Angela’s working. This puts me on some insane stalker level, but I realize that a little drive-by can’t hurt. Maybe if I see her, I’ll finally utter some words.Ugh!
Just a drive-by.
Okay, sit in the parking lot by her car.
I’m gonna hate myself in the morning.
4
ANGIE
“Go home,” Hannah tells me when she finds me in the kitchen.
I look up at her with furrowed brows from where I’m cutting up limes and lemons for the bar. I break our eye contact and pick the knife back up to continue slicing, but she places her hand over top of mine, effectively stopping me.
“No. Angie, stop. You’ve worked doubles all week. Plus, you just had a ten-top leave.” She carefully takes the knife from my hand and nudges me out of the way. “Go. Home.”
I drop my eyes to the stack of cut fruit and cutting board, willing myself not to cry, then turn away from Hannah to head back to the front of the house to clock out and grab my things.
I don’t say goodbye to anyone as I push out of the front door, but I keep my head down as I walk down the street to the parking lot that’s designated to us. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m finally a bartender, and it’s everything I thought it would be. School is out for the summer, which has never been an issue for me. I love summer and being ona break from school, but unfortunately, I haven’t had much interest in piano lessons. So maybe that’s it. I’ve been stuck and I’m frustrated because I don’t know how to get unstuck.
That’s the thing about depression. It hangs onto you like a hair that’s stuck on your shirt and you’ve tried everything to get it off.
Digging my keys out of my purse, I find them and unlock my car, but my steps falter when I see a familiar figure leaning against my driver’s side door.
“I’m not in the mood for whatever mind games you want to play with me,” I tell him wearily as I get within earshot. It feels foreign that these are the first words I’ve ever spoken to him in the two decades of our families knowing each other. But Brandon and I have never had any reason to speak to or with each other—that could be the ten-year age gap between us talking. One of my first memories of knowing about him was that he was my brother’s best friend's older brother. Brandon and I are on different ends of the life experience spectrum, so those fifteen words feel like such an odd thing to say to someone for the first time.
While we may know of each other, we’re strangers in every other way. Everyone in the Philadelphia area knows the Hayes and Taylor families were a packaged deal. Any sort of celebration that was held together: birthdays, anniversaries, graduations; you name it, and our families did it together as the biggest, loudest group, making friends with the owners of wherever we ended up, so they were comfortable the next time we came around. But it feels like another lifetime ago because I can’t remember the last time anything was celebrated or worth celebrating.
Like the first time he came into the TapHouse, I felt so exposed in my work outfit compared to his. My black cotton mini skirt, black restaurant-issued baby doll tee that shows asliver of my midriff, and black Doc Martens have become my accepted work attire. As long as we’re wearing black and our restaurant shirt, Hannah is accepting of it. I’m comfortable in my body, and anything I wear becomes an extension of me. But Brandon, in his tan jeans and long-sleeved, forest green, button-down shirt that’s untucked and with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, makes me feel more underdressed and fully exposed than if I were in my birthday suit.
In the fading daylight, I can just make out the closely shaven facial hair on his square jaw. It adds a ruggedness to his put-together outfit. His brown hair is neatly styled and his normally hazel eyes are dark under his furrowed brows. Brandon is obscenely attractive, but with the way he’s been around me these last two times, I can’t ignore that there’s an ugliness hiding in there.
With a groan, I move toward my car door but he still doesn’t move. So, I unlock the car again hoping that he gets the hint.
“Move, please,” I order and I hate that my voice betrayed me by coming out shaky while the familiar feeling of tears begins welling up in my eyes. I hate when my depressive episodes hit me out of nowhere. I’m usually fine with burying myself in work until my depression takes over and it’s too hard to function. Like today. Work was a struggle to get through when all I wanted to do was escape to the industrial-sized freezer and let the cold consume me.
I finally look up at him and see his furrowed brows scrunched together and his eyes roaming over my face. Like I’m a puzzle he’s trying to solve, only I’m so far from being a puzzle. I’m basically an unsolvable math equation.
“I might’ve been wrong about you,” he says.
My confusion and shock must be written all over my face. I’m about to respond when he’s the one who shocksme by grabbing my face and fusing our mouths together in the hottest kiss I’ve ever received. I feel my bag drop off my shoulder and to the ground as I mistake him for someone not tied to my family and relax in his hold, giving in and kissing him back. Only for a moment. But then I remember the cold looks he’s given me the couple of times that he’s come to just sit at the bar and I push him away.
“What the hell?” I ask, and bring my hand up to my lips.
Brandon must realize what he did as he stands there with his kiss-bruised lips and a whispered, “I’m sorry,” falling from his lips before he whips around back to his car, where he speeds off before it’s barely even on.
I clench my jaw and the first tear slides down my face as I watch his taillights fade in the distance.
“What the hell do I do, Liam?” I ask as I look up to the now darkening sky and feel more tears slide down the side of my face and into my ears.
