About a Dog

by Jenn McKinlay

  “What’s this, a conversation about alternate names for man junk?” Zachary Caine, Brad’s longtime best friend and Bluff Point’s resident man whore, joined them. He was holding his pool cue and spoke into it like it was a microphone. “Count me in. Pulled pork.”

  He held out the cue to another groomsman, Sam Kennedy, who flashed a grin and said, “Trouser snake.”

  The girls all groaned. Then Zach held the pool cue out to Gavin. He’d been standing in the shadows against the wall but stepped forward and flashed a rueful smile.

  “One-eyed Jack,” he said. Zach hooted with laughter and they exchanged a complicated handshake.

  Mac noted that Gavin didn’t look her way, so she kept her gaze averted, not wanting to risk eye contact. Maybe after her embarrassing escape this afternoon, he had gotten the message that she really didn’t want to discuss the past and he was respecting her wishes and giving her space. Excellent.

  She refused to acknowledge any pang of regret she might feel. Obviously, being home on the old familiar ground was wreaking havoc with her common sense.

  “Hey there, Mac,” Zach said. He stepped up close and gave her a thorough once-over. “Long time, no see, but now that I do I must say you are looking goooood.” He grabbed her in a quick hug and then held the cue out to her. “So, what do you have for me, baby?”

  Mac tried not to laugh, but Zach was the eternal twelve-year-old goofball. With his shaggy blonde hair and sloppy, devil-may-care charm, he could work a room like no one else. He was also the reason Brad and Emma had gotten together as he was the one who almost threw up on Emma, but fortunately Brad had put himself in the path of the puke. Ew.

  Mac leaned close to the cue and cleared her throat. “Um, how about the south pole?”

  Zach tipped his head back and cackled. Then he snapped his head in Carly’s direction. He sidled up close to her, gave her a hug, and said, “It’s all on you, sister.”

  “Oh, please,” Carly said. “Just one?”

  Zach drew himself up to his full height and gave her a sidelong look. “Is this a challenge, Miss Carly?”

  “Loser buys a round of shots for us all,” she said.

  “Game on.” Zach wiggled his eyebrows at her.

  “Oh, boy, this could get ugly,” Sam said. He elbowed his way around Zach and Carly and gave Mac and Jillian a quick hug. “Good to see you, ladies. There is entirely too much testosterone in here.”

  “You, too, Sam,” Mac said.

  Zach and Sam had come into Emma’s life the moment she started dating Brad as the three men were business partners in a local brewery. Bluff Point Ale had begun in their college dorm room and the three of them had spent years perfecting it and selling it locally until they finally had enough capital to launch their own brewery, which they did two years ago.

  “Hey, Mac, you should come by the brew house and check out the operation,” Sam said. “As chief brew master, I can hook you up.”

  Mac smiled at him. “I’d like that.”

  “Cool, it’s a date.” Sam turned back to the pool table and gestured to Gavin with his cue. “Hey, Gav, you should come, too. Brad told me you haven’t seen the new eatery we’re building.”

  “Sure, that’d be great,” Gavin said. He didn’t look at any of them, but leaned over the table and took his shot. Mac saw his jaw clench twice and she knew he was brooding about something.

  “Wangdoodle,” Carly said.

  “Love sausage,” Zach retorted.

  “Gross,” Jillian said to Mac.

  Emma and Brad had shuffled off into a dark corner and were whispering together as if they hadn’t seen each other in weeks instead of mere hours.

  “Come on, I’ll help you get the drinks,” Mac said to Jillian. “I think Carly’s going to be here awhile.”

  “Ba-donk-a-donk,” Carly said.

  “The best of three legs,” Zach returned.

  “Knobgoblin.” Carly’s voice was drowned by Zach’s laughter.

  As they walked to the bar, Mac glanced around the room to see if there was anyone else from town that she knew. There was not. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Relieved, mostly, but also a little displaced. A part of her had geared up to run into someone, anyone, who had been at her catastrophe of a wedding seven years ago, but there was no one.

  Before she had left Bluff Point at the age of twenty-five, this had been one of her hotspots to hang out on the weekends with the Maine crew. At the time, she couldn’t have imagined a day where the bouncer wouldn’t know her name or she wouldn’t recognize any of the people seated at the bar.

  “Curtis,” Jillian called the bartender, another person Mac didn’t know, and ordered four pints of Bluff Point Ale, natch.

  “Why do you suppose the two of them never got together?” Jillian asked Mac as they leaned against the bar and watched Carly and Zach, who were still going one for one in the name game.

  “Maybe they’re too much alike,” Mac said. “You know, that whole extroverted commitment-phobic thing they both have going.”

  “They’ll be fun at the wedding though,” Jillian said. “Carly can keep him in check and if not, I’m sure she’ll have no problem hog-tying him and shoving him in a closet somewhere.”

  “And you’re paired with Sam?” Mac asked. She glanced over at the lean man with the neatly trimmed goatee and head of dark hair. He was the tallest of the groomsmen, which suited as Jillian was the tallest of the girls.

  “Yeah,” Jillian said.

  “Is he still single?” Mac asked.

  “Why, are you interested?” Jillian asked. “Emma told us you were single for the next few weeks. I asked if you and Trevor had split and she said to ask you.”

  “Oh,” Mac said. She wondered briefly if she should tell Jillian that she and Trevor were taking a break, but since Jillian was no more of a fan of Trevor’s than Emma, she decided not to as it would only complicate things since she hadn’t told Emma about their break. “The timing was bad for Trevor. He has business in London and can’t get away so Emma paired me with Gavin for the festivities. As for Sam, I was thinking of him more for you.”

  “Oh, no,” Jillian said. “I am not dating anyone until I get to Paris.”

  “Excuse me?” Mac said. “Did I miss something? You’re going to Paris?”

  “No, I just want to go to Paris,” Jillian said. She had tied back her shoulder-length curls with a pretty purple scarf and she fussed with the ends of it while they talked.

  “So go,” Mac said.

  “I will,” Jillian said. “When the time is right.”

  “What’s wrong with right now?”

  “Emma’s wedding.”

  “After the wedding.”

  “The bakery.”

  “Is always going to be there.”

  “You don’t understand,” Jillian said.

  Mac looked at her friend. Her brow was furrowed and her mouth was pinched. She looked like a person wrestling with some inner demons. That, Mac understood.

  “You’re playing the ‘what if’ game,” Mac said.

  “Huh?”

  “You want to go to Paris, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But in your head, you keep asking yourself ‘what if’ and then you fill in the blank with a random worry that seems legit at the time but is really just keeping you from doing what you want, which is to go to Paris,” Mac said.

  “No, I’m not. Okay, well, maybe a little, but still, flying to a country where you don’t speak the language is a huge undertaking and it’s not something a person should do lightly,” Jillian said, but she didn’t meet Mac’s eyes.

  The bartender put four tall pints in front of them and Jillian paid the tab. Mac wondered if she should say any more but she didn’t want to risk annoying her friend. They had time to talk about Paris, no need to hash
it all out in one evening.

  Jillian took two beers and Mac took the other two. They arrived back at the group just in time to hear Carly shout, “And it’s the homewrecker for the win!”

  “Lovely,” Mac said. She handed Carly a glass and toasted her with her own.

  “All right, smarty pants, winner carries the shots,” Zach said to Carly and he led her to the bar.

  Jillian delivered Emma’s drink to her and Sam joined her with Brad and Emma. Mac wasn’t sure if she should crash that group or follow Carly to the bar. She knew she needed to move quickly before—

  “Mac, how about a game?” Gavin asked.

  Too late.

  Chapter 7

  “Sure,” Mac said after just the slightest hesitation. She pointed to the pool table. “Rack ’em up.”

  Gavin gave her an amused glance. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mac frowned at him. Did he really just call her ma’am? Was that his way of being funny about her being five years older than him? Or was he just being polite? She was pretty sure ma’am was only polite when a woman was old enough to have gray hair south of her equator; before that, it was just rude. Now she felt the need to whup his butt at pool. It was a matter of principle.

  She took a long sip of her beer and put it on a nearby table. Then she headed over to the rack to select a cue. She had spent an awful lot of nights right here, shooting pool and flirting shamelessly with whoever came near the table. She had some skill. She’d show Gav who was a ma’am.

  The upside was that if they were busy playing pool then things couldn’t get too hot and heavy in the conversational sense and there would be no need to revisit their talk from earlier. Or so she hoped.

  “Do you want to break?” Gav asked but Mac gestured for him to go ahead.

  She watched him lean over and study the table. He had put on a gray and black plaid flannel shirt over his T-shirt and she liked the way it fit his shoulders. As he lined up his shot, she glanced away, not wanting to be distracted by his hands, which looked big and strong and a little bit wicked as he slid the cue through his fingers.

  Mac quickly turned her back and reached for the chalk and tended the end of her cue, although it didn’t look like it needed it. There was absolutely no reason why she had to be looking at Gavin’s hands. None at all.

  Crack! Gavin’s shot was true and balls scattered all over the table, sinking two stripes and one solid. He moved into position to hit a combination to send another stripe into the corner pocket.

  He moved in front of Mac and she was pushed back up against the wall as she tried to look anywhere but at the derriere in front of her. He missed his shot and she exhaled a huge breath when he moved away from her around the table.

  “Your shot, Mac,” he said.

  “Speaking of shots.” Carly joined them carrying a tray of drinks. “Bottoms up.”

  Mac and Gavin both took one and then Carly delivered the remaining ones to the rest of the group.

  “To the happy couple,” Zach shouted over the other conversations in the bar. “Long may you honk the magic goose.”

  Emma laughed and they all raised their glasses in a toast to Brad and Emma. While the others downed their drinks, Mac took a sniff of hers to determine what she was in for.

  “It’s Zach’s shot of choice called the Three Wise Men,” Gavin said. He tossed his back and put the empty glass on the table by her pint of beer.

  “Three Wise Men? As in Larry, Moe, and Curly?” she asked. She took a sip and felt it burn like a ball of fire down her throat into her chest. It made her ears ring and not in a bad way.

  Gavin grinned and said, “More like Jim, Jack, and Johnnie.”

  Mac puzzled it out for a minute and then blew out a breath and said, “Jim Beam, Jack Daniels, and Johnnie Walker?”

  Gavin nodded.

  “Oh, hell, no,” she said and put her glass down. “That’s the sort of drink that makes a girl do really dumb things.”

  “Really?” Gav asked. He leaned on his pool cue and studied her with a look of fascination. “Such as?”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say sleep with her best friend’s little brother but Mac held it in, gave him a closed-lip smile, and instead said, “Drunken texting leaps to mind.”

  She lined up her shot and struck the cue ball, knocking a solid into a side pocket.

  “And who would you be drunk texting?” he asked. He had his arms crossed over his chest and his head tipped to the side as he studied her.

  You, Mac thought. She shook her head. What? Why was she thinking that? Thoughts like that were not helpful, not at all. She lined up her next shot and then paused. Wait. This was perfect.

  This was her moment to admit she’d drunk text her boyfriend and tell him how much she missed him. She had told Emma that if Gavin asked her outright if she was seeing someone, she wouldn’t lie. This would put an end to anything between them once and for all.

  She opened her mouth to say “Trevor” when Zach staggered in between them, pointed at the shot Mac had abandoned, and shouted, “Party foul! You have to drink to the happy couple, Mac, it’s a rule.”

  “No, it isn’t,” she protested.

  “Yes, it is,” he insisted. Then he put his hand on his chest and gave her a half bow. “Unless, of course, you want to donate the shot to the noble charity of Zach.”

  Mac laughed at his silly smile. She glanced at Gavin to see if he thought Zach could handle any more and he gave her a small nod.

  “It’s all yours, my friend,” she said.

  “Woot!” Zach scooped up the shot and bounced back over to the rest of their group.

  “He’s a lovable idiot,” she said.

  “Agreed.” She was about to take her next shot when Gavin put his hand on her cue and said, “Hey, about before.”

  Mac felt her stomach drop. She did not want to have this conversation. Not here. Not now. Okay, not anywhere. Ever. But especially not here in front of Emma.

  “Listen,” he said as he pulled her away from the table and back into the shadows against the wall. “I didn’t mean to freak you out earlier.”

  “You didn’t—” she protested but he interrupted.

  “Yeah, that’s why you ran like a tsunami was coming to get you,” he said.

  Mac smiled. She had to give him that one. He returned her smile and the dimple in his cheek deepened.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other,” he said. “And my most recent memories of you are, well, let’s go with unforgettable.” His voice had that note of self-deprecating humor that she always found so alluring. She found herself leaning toward him when she really needed to be backing away.

  Mac suddenly wished she had her Three Wise Men back. Was it hot in here? Why was she sweating? She pulled the neck of her T-shirt away from her skin and considered shedding her hooded sweatshirt.

  “That being said,” Gav continued. “I get it if you just want to be friends. This whole event is about Emma and Brad, and we probably shouldn’t let things get complicated by revisiting the past.”

  Mac glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Was he serious? He looked as honest as a Boy Scout. Sweet, delicious relief flooded her as she realized everything was going to be okay, followed by a surprising jab of disappointment.

  Just like that he was letting it go? He wasn’t going to pursue discussion of their one night together anymore? Huh.

  Mac forced herself to nod. He was standing too close to her and it was causing her hormones to try and stage a coup and jump him. She inched away from him under the guise of turning to face him.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” she said. “You’re right; we really want to keep it all about the wedding. We’ll just leave the past in the past and be friends.”

  Gavin’s gaze moved over her face and Mac couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
He looked remote, as if he was shutting himself away from her, and she found she didn’t like that. But that was good, right? That was what she’d wanted, right?

  “So, we’re good?” he asked.

  “Yeah, good,” Mac agreed. “Really good.”

  “Okay, then.” He gestured to the pool table. “Let’s do this.”

  Mac won the first game. Gavin won the second. After their conversation, Mac had expected them to find new footing as old friends, but it didn’t seem to take.

  She felt Gav’s eyes on her when she was lining up her shots, and it was not her face his hot stare was regarding. She caught her own gaze lingering on places on his body that she had no business looking at, but still she did.

  Their conversation was light, how-about-them-Red-Sox type of stuff, and Mac found that she felt frustrated by it.

  She wanted to know more about Gavin the man. She wanted to know how his practice was doing, whether he was happy in Bluff Point, and what his plans for the future entailed. But she couldn’t ask any of that because they had agreed to be just friends, but not really friends, she realized; more like acquaintances.

  But the reality was that’s all they were destined to be. Once the wedding was over, they’d go their separate ways the same way they had seven years ago. It seemed less satisfactory than she thought it would be. After the second game, they hung up their cues to join the others.

  The popcorn machine in the corner of the bar was churning out fresh hot buttery goodness and Gavin went to grab a bowl, while Mac took a seat at a tall table to watch the show. Carly and Zach had taken over the tiny dance floor, not leaving enough space with their wild gyrations for anyone to join them.

  Emma and Jillian joined Mac where she sat watching their friend. Emma nested her arms on Mac’s shoulders and propped her chin on her forearms while they watched Zach and Carly bust out moves that Mac was pretty sure could only be seen on a cable channel about wild animals mating.

  “Are you having a DJ at the reception?” Jillian asked.

  “Yep,” Brad answered as he took the seat beside Mac. “We’ve told the videographer just to film those two when they hit the dance floor. I am pretty sure they could be an Internet sensation.”