Page 26 of Her Rival

I drove to The Hideout.

It was a bad call. I knew it was a bad call while I was making it. The Hideout on a Friday afternoon was Brynn's domain, she was running day shift this week because Marco was still at his sister's in Reno, and Brynn was the one human in Vegas other than Rhett who could read me at a glance, and she was specifically the one human I needed not reading me right then. But the alternative was going back to my empty house and standing in my own kitchen for the rest of the afternoon thinking about Dani Hartley's forearms, and that wasn't a thing I was prepared to do to myself.

I went to the bar.

Parked in back. Came in the side door. Brynn looked up from wiping down the bar top and her face did the small flat thing it did when somebody she loved walked in looking worse than she wanted them to.

"You look like garbage," she said.

"I had a hard practice."

"You didn't have a hard practice. I checked the schedule, you all had twenty-five-minute pieces with one full scrimmage. That's a coast for you."

"Bartender or sister-in-law right now?"

"Both at once. That's the whole point of the job, Sturgill. Sit down."

I sat at the end of the bar where nobody could overhear. The day shift had four other guys at the far end watching a tennis match on the wall TV, not paying attention to me. Brynn put a Coke in front of me without asking, because she knew I didn't drink before five on a practice day, and she leaned her hip against the back counter and crossed her arms and looked at me.

"Talk," she said.

"I don't have anything to talk about."

"You drove out of your way to come here in the middle of the afternoon. You don't do that. You go home and play video games and complain about my husband-adjacent boyfriend to the dog you don't have. You don't come sit at my bar on a Friday at three unless something's eating you. Talk."

"Bry, leave it."

She looked at me a long second.

"Is this about the interview yesterday."

"There's nothing to talk about regarding the interview yesterday. I did it. It went fine. We talked about hockey. She has what she needs for the next session. We're set for Tuesday."

"Mm."

"Bry."

"I'm just saying mm."

"That's not just an mm. That's the mm you do when you're filing something for later use."

"How do you know what kind of mm I'm doing."

"Because I've known you for two and a half years, Brynn Caldwell, and I have catalogued every single one of your mm sounds and assigned each a meaning, and that was a six on the Brynn-mm scale, which is the I'll come back to this with a sledgehammer later mm, and I'm telling you in advance there's nothing here for the sledgehammer."

"Don't full-name me, Sturgill."

"You started it."

She almost smiled. Pulled it back. Turned to the back counter, picked up a lemon and a knife, started cutting wheels for the well, which was the Brynn version of having something for her hands while her brain did other things.

"She came back from the second interview different," Brynn said. To the lemon. Not to me. "I wasn't in the room this time. She went straight to her car, came straight back to the penthouse, went straight to the guest room and closed the door. Didn't come out for two hours. I made her tea three times and three times she didn't drink it. Told me at dinner everything was fine. And she did the version of fine where she could tell I knew it wasn't, and she let me see her doing it, which is what Dani does when she's trying to make me feel taken care of without giving me anything I can actually use."

She kept cutting lemons. I kept drinking my Coke. She was building toward something. I knew the build.

"And you," she said. "You came in here on a Friday afternoon like a man whose dog just died. You don't have a dog. So that leaves the woman across the table from you yesterday. I'm going to ask you one question, you're going to give me an honest answer, and then I'm going to drop it and let you sit at my bar in peace for an hour. Deal?"

"Bry."