by Serena Bell
“Doctor didn’t say anything about that,” Evan pointed out.
“She said take it easy.”
“Flying is easy,” Evan said. “I wasn’t the pilot or anything.” But he looked a little gray, and Jax pulled the door wide open and ushered him inside. He settled him on the couch and offered him a big glass of water and some grapes. Evan took both gratefully.
“Seriously, man, what are you doing here?”
“I’m here in case you want to talk about anything.” Evan shrugged.
“What would I want to talk about?”
Evan raised both eyebrows. He’d let his moth-eaten beard go full gamer-nerd scruffy, which Jax hated, but you couldn’t argue with an eighteen-year-old about bad hair choices.
For a moment, the brothers stared at each other over Evan’s snack. Jax was the first to look away. When he looked back, Evan was watching him with curiosity but no judgment.
“Who’s watching the shop?” Jax asked.
Evan smiled. “Asher’s friend Tamara.”
“Is Chiara still in Tierney Bay?”
Evan’s smile got bigger. “That shouldn’t matter to you, should it? Since you’re in Bakersfield?”
Jax closed his eyes.
“I remember when we used to have dinner at the Campbells,” Evan said.
Part of Jax wanted to stop the conversation dead in its tracks. But most of him wanted to know what Evan was going to say. If the only little bit of Chiara he could have was Evan’s memories of her, then he’d take it.
Evan took his silence for permission to continue. “I really liked going over there.”
“Me, too,” Jax said.
“I liked playing with Hannah. Even though she was a baby.”
“She was six.”
“I know, but I was older. And I loved Mrs. Campbell’s food. That woman could cook. Rumor has it Auburn is the one who inherited that gene. But you know why I liked going over there most?”
“Why?” Jax asked.
“Because of how you were when we were there. All the worry lines went out of your forehead. I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I think I understand it now. I liked being there because when we were there, there were grownups taking care of us. There were grownups taking care of you. You didn’t have to be the grownup.”
Jax felt so much pressure behind his eyes. If he breathed too hard, it would burst right out of him, so he held his breath.
Evan sighed. “I just want you to know. I don’t take any of it for granted. Not then. Not now. You were the best big brother anyone could have. You are. And I just want you to be happy. That’s why I came down here.”
Jax seized the opportunity to lighten the moment. “I thought it was so I could talk to you if I needed someone to talk to?” he teased.
“Oh, right,” Evan said. “That, too.” He sized up his brother with a long glance. “What do you love most about her?”
Startled, Jax said, “What?”
“Chiara. What do you love most about her?”
“Who says—?”
“Jax,” Evan said sternly. “You’re not fooling anyone.”
He couldn’t look at his brother, but the words spilled out, against his will, anyway. “She makes the world hold still. For just a second.”
Evan nodded like that made perfect sense to him. “Asher does that to me,” he said. “He, um, doesn’t know it, though.”
Jax felt a moment of surprise, followed by the shock of realizing how un-surprised he was. The brothers’ eyes met, recognition of the size of the revelation.
“Thank you. For telling me.”
“You’re the first person I’ve told.”
“You should think about telling him.”
Evan gave him a long, hard look.
Jax sighed. “I know. I should take my own damn advice.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Evan said, with a smirk.
“No,” Jax agreed. “You didn’t really have to.”
“She’s still in Tierney Bay,” Evan said, quietly. “She’s going to stay there through the reunion, and then she’s going to Seattle. And she’s—she’s unhappy. No. She’s miserable. I think that’s fair to say. I’m not telling you that for any particular reason. I just thought even though you are in Bakersfield, it might matter to you.”
“It matters to me,” Jax whispered.
Evan grinned. “Yeah, dumbass. I know.”
49
“Hey,” Evan said, coming in through the front door of Meeples. “I thought Tamara was minding the store today.”
“Tamara got the stomach flu,” Chiara said. “We figured if we infected all our weekend customers that wouldn’t be good for business.”
It was Friday. The reunion dinner-dance was tomorrow night. Sunday, Chiara would drive a U-Haul to Seattle with all her belongings on board, and by Wednesday, she would have started her new job at Buyathon.
Everything was falling into place.
Well, almost everything. And she was getting better at not thinking about the thing that wasn’t in place.
Who was she kidding? She thought of him a hundred times a day. She’d been thinking of him when she’d seen Evan get out of his car across the street. In fact, for a split, insane second, she’d thought she’d seen him, and her heart had taken wing. And then she’d looked up again and it had only been Evan.
A broken heart was an awful lot like a bad flu, hallucinations and all.
Evan set his overnight bag down.
“Where’d you go?” she asked.
“Nowhere in particular,” he said. “Just needed to get away for a day. Prove to myself that I’m not fragile. And I had to save someone’s ass. All in a day’s work.”
She smiled at that. “You don’t seem very fragile to me. And whose ass?”
“Long story,” Evan said, waving a hand. He started breaking down a box with a penknife. “Everything go okay while I was gone?”
She nodded. “Good sales. We’re still getting people coming in and asking if they can do the scavenger hunt, so clear word-of-mouth carryover.”
He grinned. “You’re a marketing genius, you know.”
“Hardly. It was basic stuff.” She leaned over her laptop and tried again to get the email to Buyathon HR to go through with her W-9 information. “Crap,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been trying to get this email to go to Buyathon all morning. And I keep getting error messages. The WiFi’s fine, no other Internet traffic is affected. I’ve made the file smaller, I’ve checked the address a million times. I just keep getting error messages and bounces.” She sighed. “Okay. One last thing to try. I’m going to paste the PDF in the email instead of doing it as an attachment.”
“It still goes out as an attachment, I’m pretty sure,” Evan said.
“Well. Nothing else is working. I’m going to try it.”
She sent the message again, and again heard the frustrating ping of the same stupid error message she’d been getting for hours. “Fuuuuck,” she said. “It’s like the universe doesn’t want me to take this fucking job.”
She exited the email app, closed the PDF reader, and reopened everything yet again. She was going to give it one more try and then she was going to—
Well, she’d go find someone with a fax machine. They still had to exist somewhere, right? Maybe Cape House still had one buried in a back office.
Evan was looking at her, a peculiar expression on his face. “What?” she said, swiping at her mouth with the back of her hand, then checking her teeth with her tongue for food. Not that she’d had anything to eat since she’d brushed her teeth.
“Do you want to take that—” he hesitated. “—fucking job?”
“Yes,” she said, not looking up from what she was doing. And then, suddenly, really hearing the question, “No.”
Evan looked a little, but not very, surprised.
“No,” she repeated.
She surveyed the shop. Looked a
t Evan, who had the world’s worst beard; she wished Jax were here to talk him out of it. Looked at all the work they’d done together to make the shop what it was. At the blank space where there was still no mural, at the counter—just the right height—the shelves, the racks. At the two teenagers playing Magic at one of the demo tables, deep in their world.
Her father would probably accuse her of a lack of ambition. He might even guilt her, intentionally or not: I know you won’t disappoint me, Kee. He’d had another thing he said sometimes. I know you’ll make the right choice. Which had always terrified her a little bit, honestly, because obviously he knew what the right choice was, but she always had to guess, and what if she got it wrong? She’d almost never gotten it wrong because she’d learned to read him so well, because she’d known what kinds of things he expected from her and how to make him proud.
The truth was, if he’d told her in high school that he wanted her to break up with Jax, it would have been one of the hardest moments of her whole life. She would have had to weigh a lifetime of pleasing her father against the strongest and best connection of her life. This new, perfect thing.
And maybe Jax would have won out.
And maybe her father had known that, and he’d set it up so he never had to be the bad guy or the loser.
The truth was—just as Auburn had said—that even her father didn’t know what the right choice was sometimes. He’d certainly fucked it all to hell with her and Jax.
“My dad wanted me to take this, um, fucking job,” she said. “My dad wanted me to go to Stanford and go to business school and work in finance and become the CFO of something, someday.”
Evan raised an eyebrow. It was a very thick eyebrow, and with the beard, it gave him the look of a wise gnome. “And what do you want?” he asked.
She shut her laptop. Gently but firmly.
“I want to stay in Tierney Bay. I want to finish raising my baby sister. I want to help small businesses thrive. I want to work in your game shop. If you still need my help.”
Evan pumped a fist. “Absofuckinglutely.”
Also, I want to marry Jax Walker and have his babies, she thought.
Four out of five wasn’t bad.
Except that it was the fifth thing that Chiara wanted so badly that it made her stomach hurt.
I know this wasn’t what you wanted for me, Dad. But you gave up the right to have an opinion when you took away my right to have one. Even if it took me ten years and a few weeks to figure that out.
She had figured it out, though. And now she was going to find out whether she’d figured it out in time.
50
“What are you doing?”
Chiara dragged her eyelids open and found Auburn standing over her.
“I’m resting,” she said.
“Don’t you have a reunion to go to?”
Chiara rolled over and buried her face in the pillow.
“Uh, no you don’t.” Auburn grabbed her sister’s shoulder and tried to roll her back over, but Chiara made herself a dead weight. “Kee. You’re not going to let him ruin the reunion for you. Willa said you guys worked for hours last night and all morning on setup and decorations, and that it looks ahhhhmazing. You have to go enjoy the fruits of your labors.”
Chiara shook her head. And pointed to her phone, lying face down on her nightstand. Auburn picked it up, flipped it over, held it out for Chiara’s fingerprint, and said, “Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Auburn was quiet, reading through the string of texts Chiara had sent Jax since last night.
Can we talk?
Jax?
Please?
I’ve been thinking a lot, and I know what happened with Evan messed with your head. And you weren’t yourself. I should have seen that and given you more space. And then afterwards at Evan’s apartment, I was a mess. I’d like to talk now that we’re both calmer.
My father made a dumb mistake. And he almost ruined things for us. Twice. I don’t want him to ruin things for us now. I don’t think he has to. Let me tell you why.
Please, answer. Or call.
Auburn closed her eyes.
“Pretty bad, right?”
“Maybe his phone was turned off.”
“Maybe,” Chiara said.
“Or he lost it.”
“Maybe.”
“That stuff does happen.”
“It does.”
They had had a very similar conversation, ten years ago. Awake, in the dark, late one night, tears streaming down Chiara’s face. The worst part is, he won’t talk about it. He won’t tell me why. He won’t tell me anything.
Auburn lay down next to her sister. “Kee?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“I think you should still go.”
“That’s what you said in high school. And you were wrong.”
“Was I?”
“I cried in the bathroom.”
“What happened after that?”
Chiara had forgotten that there was an “after,” because when she thought about prom night, she always remembered crying in the bathroom.
“My friends came in. And made me go back out on the dance floor.”
“And then?”
“We danced. We shut the floor down.”
It hadn’t repaired her broken heart or made her forget Jax. But it had been a good reminder that life would, slowly and lurchingly, go on.
She thought of what Auburn had said to her in the dressing room at Bay Boutique, about how many people had left her in such a short time. She had mourned for Jax, and she had mourned for her parents—but she had never really, truly mourned for the girl she had been. Someone who’d been on the verge of discovering her freedom and bravery and capacity for love—before she’d gotten smacked down.
She’d never quite gotten up again.
“You know how you said you’d like to see me date guys I actually like?”
“Mmm-hmm,” Auburn said.
“Do you think I date guys I don’t like because it won’t break my heart if they abandon me?”
Auburn’s smile was tinged with sadness. “That sounds about right.”
Chiara bit her lip. “I don’t want to do that anymore.” She took a deep breath and crossed her arms. “I want to figure out what I want to do and who I want to be with and where I want to be. I want to make sure I’m choosing things and not just accepting them because wanting more is too threatening. I want to throw out the plan and just—do. It’s scarier. But it’s a hell of a lot more fun, too."
She rolled over and reached for her phone.
“What are you doing?” Auburn asked, clearly worried that she was about to text Jax again.
She held up the phone to show her sister. The chat on the screen was the one named Badass Reunion Bitches. Willa had named it.
“I’m calling in reinforcements.”
Fifteen minutes later, the doorbell rang, and Auburn let Willa and Vannah in.
“Up,” Willa said, hooking a finger.
Willa was wearing a gorgeous deep maroon gown and her twists were fixed in a structured updo. Her makeup was smoky and dark. She looked like she belonged on a Hollywood red carpet, not standing in Chiara’s bedroom. Vannah wore a glittery pale-blue dress that swirled around her ankles, and her red hair loose. Her makeup was fresh and natural. Just looking at them revived Chiara.
“We don’t have much time,” Willa said. “Into the shower.”
Ten minutes later, Vannah was blow-drying Chiara’s hair and Auburn was pouring the bottle of white wine that Willa had brought along. A few minutes after that, Willa, holding her makeup case, frowned disconcertingly into Chiara’s face. “Like Van’s,” Chiara said. “The natural look.”
But when Willa was done and Chiara looked in the mirror, she saw that her friend had done something much more dramatic. Deep shimmery shades, tipped-up eye liner, and ruby red lips. Chiara barely recognized herself—in the best possible way.
She looked beautiful. And strong.
<
br /> She looked like someone who wouldn’t take a job she didn’t want, or miss a reunion she cared about because a guy had dumped her, or cry in a bathroom—if only because that would totally and completely wreck her eye makeup.
“No crying in the bathroom tonight,” she said, sitting up straighter.
“That’s right,” Willa said. “No crying in the bathroom.”
Then they very carefully slipped her dress on, making sure not to muss her hair or ruin her makeup, and she looked at herself for a long time in the mirror.
“Let’s go dance,” she said.
They clinked glasses, and then they all went out to Willa’s car together.
51
She was having a good time.
Like, she wasn’t over the moon, but there were a lot of people here that she wanted to see. Her friend Lucy, who’d been the only reason she’d survived two semesters of PE. Her friends Devon and J.C. who’d introduced her to Magic the Gathering, which she had secretly played with them after school, every other Thursday, without fail (they’d promised to visit the shop tomorrow). Her high school English teacher, who’d worn cardigan sweaters and had dubious personal hygiene but had introduced her to Toni Morrison.
She danced with Devon until he got a little drunkenly handsy, and then she danced with Willa and Vannah, whose unselfconsciousness made Chiara feel like she, too, could dance like no one was watching.
And then she had one too many glasses of champagne and found herself sitting at the table by herself, watching Vannah dance with Bryce Avers. Bryce had undergone a complete physical transformation, and was borderline suave. Vannah looked up from Bryce’s shoulder with huge “what the hell happened” eyes, and Chiara gave her a big thumbs up and tried to ignore the sinking sensation in her belly.
Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Grief had a way of coming and going at the most inconvenient moments—
She would just go to the bathroom, not to cry—
Well, she didn’t think so—