Manhattan

by Steiner, Kandi

  My heart was racing, and the smile on my face was so big it hurt as I pulled my hands from my napkin and used them to animate my point.

  “It’s like being in algebra class. You have all the other variables, and you just have to figure out what x is.” I shrugged. “Once we have the variables we need, it’s a matter of solving an equation. And there’s nothing I love more than a good challenge.”

  I sat back on a grin, but one passing glance at each person at that table, and my stomach dropped.

  Logan and Mikey wore identical faces of confusion, their mouths hanging open. Ruby Grace and Mallory were smirking like they were impressed, but still didn’t quite see it the way I did. Jordan watched me like I was something out of a National Geographic film — like a snake eating a mouse, or worse. And then there was Mikey, who looked at me with a chest swelled with pride.

  “My nerd is showing again, isn’t it?” I asked on a cringe.

  That broke the table into laughter, and I let out a long breath of relief.

  “I think you’re going to be famous one day with a brain like that, young lady,” Betty said, matter-of-factly. “And I just hope I’m around to see it.”

  “So, science major?” Noah asked.

  “Bioscience, yes,” I answered. “I’m thinking microbiology, or science engineering.”

  “That’s amazing,” Mallory mused, leaning toward me over the table. “So, why a gap year? If you’re so into this kind of stuff and you know what you want to do… why wait?”

  A smile found my lips, and I looked down at my hands. “My mom took a gap year after she finished high school,” I explained. “I’ve always wanted to do the same. You know, to honor her.” I looked up at her, then, and her smile was soft and understanding. “I just have to figure out what to do with said gap year.”

  A soft chuckle from the table, and Lorelei reached over to pat my hand.

  “It’s okay to not have everything figured out,” she said. “I think it’s great that you’re taking a year to decide what you want to do next.” She side-eyed her youngest son. “I wish someone else would do the same.”

  “Mom,” he warned.

  Betty snapped her fingers. “Say, Kylie — if you’re so good with techy stuff, does that mean you can help me set up my Face Space while you’re volunteering at the nursing home?”

  “Facebook, you mean?” Ruby Grace chimed in.

  “Whatever,” she said, waving her off. That earned another fit of laughter, and then Mallory asked Ruby Grace if she and Noah had chosen a wedding date yet, and all attention was officially off me.

  Thank God.

  At our graduation dinner last night — right before Mikey told everyone he was leaving for New York — Noah told us he and Ruby Grace were getting married. Their love had been a whirlwind, a summer affair that was taboo — being that she had been engaged to someone else. But now, seeing them together at that table, I couldn’t imagine either of them with anyone else.

  They were meant to be.

  Oddly, I could say the same for Logan and Mallory, even though I was probably the only one at that table who would say it. After all, Mallory was a Scooter — the daughter of the current owner and CEO of the whiskey distillery our town was built on, Patrick Scooter. And it was no secret in this family that the Beckers and the Scooters didn’t get along.

  At least, not anymore.

  They say there was a time when the two families were practically one. In fact, it had been Michael’s grandpa who had essentially built the Scooter Whiskey brand with Mallory’s grandfather — the original founder. They had been best friends, business partners, but when Robert J. Scooter passed away, he didn’t leave anything in his last will and testament that said the Becker family was owed any part of the distillery. Patrick, the oldest Scooter son, assumed full ownership and top responsibility.

  And the feud began.

  I didn’t know much about it, being that I was young and wholeheartedly uninterested in the town gossip, but being best friends with Michael, I knew that they slowly smoked his father out of his role on the board, down to practically a paper pusher.

  And then, there was the fire.

  The fire that John Becker died in, leaving a wife and four boys behind. The fire that the town claimed was started by a cigarette, knowing full well that Mr. Becker never smoked.

  The fire that changed these boys forever, and left a mystery that they were still trying to solve today.

  Suddenly, I had the urge to go home and fuss with the hard drive they’d found in their father’s old, half-burnt laptop. Logan had found it over the holidays, and Michael had convinced him to let us take a crack at it. He’d volunteered me for the cause mostly because I’d gone through a phase of being obsessed with coding, but it was all child’s play, little video games and website designs that I’d toyed with for a small period of time. I had hacked into our school’s system our sophomore year, just to see if I could do it. But that had been a joke, one somewhat-legit looking email to the principal and he’d clicked my link and typed in his username and password like the dummy I always knew he was.

  This hard drive was different.

  It was encrypted, backed up by the Scooter Whiskey Distillery firewall and too difficult for me to crack swiftly. I’d been trying to break into that thing for months now with no luck, and we’d recently started trying ten random passwords an hour — the max before it locked us out — instead of trying to break in. Sometimes we’d work for one hour, sometimes for a couple, sometimes we’d take an entire week break from it.

  I wondered if I cracked it over the next two months, if Mikey would stay.

  That urge to get home and try fired up even more at the thought.

  Betty started cleaning up the dishes off the table, and when she stood, Jordan wiped his mouth with his napkin and placed it on the table before extending his hand for his mom’s. “Well, I think it’s about that time.”

  Lorelei smiled, slipping her hand into his, and Logan crossed to the stereo in the living room, turning on a song I’d heard dozens and dozens of times inside those walls.

  “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton.

  It was the song Lorelei and John had danced to at their wedding so many years ago, the song he used to dance with her to every night after dinner, and a song that the Becker brothers still danced with her to in his place.

  Jordan was already swaying softly with his tiny mother in his arms, and Logan pulled Mallory onto the dance floor, too, giving her a spin that made her laugh nervously as she gripped onto him like she would fall if he stepped too far away. She clearly was not a dancer, and my heart swelled when Logan leaned into her and whispered, “I got you.”

  Noah and Ruby Grace were next, and they fell into a beautiful waltz, showing those dance skills that they both had. Betty leaned against the door frame of the kitchen with a smile, watching the three couples in the living room along with us.

  “Why don’t you two get out there?” she said, nodding at us.

  I flushed so hard I thought lava would burst out of my eyeballs, and Betty narrowed her eyes at me like I’d just exposed all my deepest secrets to her.

  Like that I was completely in love with the boy she just casually recommended I should dance with.

  “Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head with a nervous smile. “We don’t… We aren’t…”

  “Pshhh.” Betty waved her hands in the air before she shooed us toward the floor. “You don’t have to be married to dance. Go on, now. Get.”

  My nervous laughter turned into something close to a goose call, but everything stopped altogether when Michael grabbed my hand, leaning in to whisper by my ear.

  “We better dance before that old woman smacks us both upside the head.”

  “I heard that,” she warned, shoving us forward now that we were standing. “I may be old, but you’re damn straight I could still whoop your butt.”

  We both laughed, though my laugh was strangled with my hand in his like that. It w
asn’t like he hadn’t ever grabbed my hand before. It wasn’t like that electricity I felt pulsing through his palm to mine wasn’t the same thing I’d felt since we were eight years old. But feeling him drag me toward the dance floor, falling into step next to his brothers and their loved ones, next to his mother, it was too much.

  Because it felt natural.

  Because it felt like I was already family, like I belonged… like we belonged, together.

  Because I knew dancing with me didn’t mean anything to Michael.

  And because I hated that it meant everything to me.

  Michael smirked a little as he pulled me into his arms, and I aimed for completely cool and calm as I threaded my own around his neck, stepping in time with him. It was just a simple two-step sway, but then he grabbed one of my hands, twirled me out to the center of the dance floor, and spun my hips fast so that I twirled twice more before landing back into his arms.

  “Show off,” Logan murmured as their mother laughed with delight.

  I shook my head, breathless and a little wobbly after that stunt. “Good thing you were here to catch me, otherwise I’d be on the floor right now.”

  “I’m always here to catch you,” he teased with a wink.

  My chest ached.

  “So,” he said, tugging on a strand of my long hair. “What’s first on that list of yours.”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “Oh, keeping secrets now? I should have studied that notebook harder when I had the chance.”

  “This will make it even more fun,” I pointed out. “It’ll be like you’re a secret agent, never knowing when the next mission is going to come or what it’s going to be.”

  “Speaking of missions,” he said, glancing at his mom before he lowered his voice even more. “Any luck on the…”

  He didn’t have to finish the sentence — the hope in his eyes told me all I needed to know about what he was asking.

  I gently shook my head, hating that I didn’t have better news. “Not yet. But, it’s not hopeless.”

  Michael deflated, but forced a small smile and a nod.

  That urge to get home and work on the hard drive struck again, this time as hot as lightning.

  Mikey watched his mom dancing with his oldest brother, and a softness came over him that was rare nowadays. I couldn’t help but stare at him as he stared at them, noting the strong set of his jaw, the slope of his nose, the flecks of gold in his eyes. He was stuck between a boy and a man, still that eight-year-old boy I fell in love with, and yet somehow, a man I didn’t know at all, too.

  He sighed the longer he watched them, and the next time he spoke, it was three words that turned my stomach and stole my breath.

  “I miss her.”

  I didn’t have to ask who her was. I knew it, he knew it, we all knew it.

  I swallowed down the pain I couldn’t let him see, leaning in to rest my head on his chest, instead. “I know,” I offered softly, squeezing him a little tighter. “I’m here.”

  He nodded, squeezing me back, and I thought about my list, about the promise he’d made me, about the one last shot I had to shoot. I thought about all the years I’d kept silent, about the years I’d stepped back and let him love another, never telling him how I felt.

  I wondered how much longer I could keep quiet.

  I wondered what would happen if I ever spoke the words out loud.

  And on the drive home, I prayed to God that I wouldn’t completely shatter my heart in an attempt to keep that boy in my life.

  Michael

  The Scooter Whiskey Distillery Gift Shop was my own personal hell.

  It was my first job, one I acquired just after my sixteenth birthday, and one I used to enjoy. In fact, I’d loved it so much when I’d first started that I’d volunteered for other people’s shifts, working as much as I possibly could as a minor.

  I loved talking to the tourists passing through our little town, suggesting the best diners and restaurants in town, recommending a drive up the old, windy road to our north that would take them to a little hidden waterfall and view of the mountains. I loved hearing who was in our town, how they’d found out about it, and why they were here. Some of them had stumbled upon it by mistake. Others were more obsessed with whiskey than I’d ever care to understand. Either way, I was their last stop before they left our distillery, and it was always fun for me to tell them where to go next.

  Bailey used to love it, too.

  She’d visit me, lean over the counter and smile at me with that dazzling smile of hers, those moss green, almost transparent irises sparkling in the natural light that poured in from the gift shop windows as she told me about whatever song she was writing. And when a tourist interrupted to buy their gifts, she’d chime in with her own suggestions, and I’d watch as each and every guest fell just as much in love with her as I was.

  It was impossible not to.

  I was convinced that was why Nashville had been so receptive to her, why a label had been so quick to sign her and so urgent to get her started on her music career. There was just something about that girl — even when she wasn’t singing. And when you put a guitar in her hands and gave her a stage to perform on?

  Forget about it.

  Might as well kiss your heart goodbye.

  And as much as I hated to admit it, I knew deep down in my black heart that she was the reason I’d lost the love for this job — for this distillery, this town.

  This life altogether.

  Now, I didn’t care to talk to the tourists. I didn’t care to greet them with a smile or ask how their tour was or offer suggestions on which bottle of whiskey was worth it to pack in their suitcase to take home with them. I didn’t have a long list of suggestions for them to round out their trip to Stratford, and if anyone ever did ask where they should eat, I gave the same answer every time — a short, clipped response that told them they were better off stopping for food in the next town over than to eat any of the garbage here.

  I wasn’t too stubborn to admit that Bailey had made me prickly.

  But I was too stubborn to do anything about it.

  In a way, I kind of liked the new way people responded to me. Everyone who knew me in this town watched me warily, from a distance, like I had a bomb under my coat that I could pull the cord on at any moment. The tourists seemed to pick up on it, too, which meant my long shifts that used to be filled with people-pleasing now mostly consisted of me surfing the Internet on my phone and occasionally breaking contact with the screen long enough to ring someone up.

  It wasn’t a career, but it was a job that paid me well enough to save for my first few months in New York. And that was all I needed.

  Still, Mondays were the worst, it seemed, and I was grumpier than usual that I was still at the same job even though I’d graduated high school. It was yet another sign of proof that nothing had changed by me receiving that diploma.

  “Twenty-two ninety-one,” I told the girl I’d just rung up, who, by the looks of it, was just old enough to do the distillery tour and tasting. She couldn’t be a day over twenty-one, and she smiled at me like she’d just bought a prized pig as she handed me her credit card — along with her driver’s license.

  I handed the latter back to her without looking at it.

  “It’s my birthday,” she said as I ran her card. “First day getting carded and not having to show my fake.”

  She added that last part with a laugh, and I cocked a brow, glancing up at her just as she leaned a little over the counter.

  Flashes of Bailey assaulted me — the way she’d leaned over that same counter in just the same way — and for a moment, it was her I saw instead of the blonde tourist.

  But it was gone in a flash.

  I scowled, ripping the receipt from the machine with more force than necessary and handing it to the girl along with her card. “Happy birthday,” I murmured. “Do you want a bag?”

  Her face crumpled, and she swallowed, shakin
g her head and grabbing the bottle of whiskey off the counter. She opened her mouth to say something more, but didn’t follow through with it, and as soon as she was away from the counter, I took a seat on the bar stool again, pulling up the search for Manhattan apartments I’d been going through on my phone before she interrupted.

  I’d only scrolled past three more shoe-box-sized, ridiculously priced apartments before there was another girl at the counter.

  “Ouch,” she said, clucking her tongue as she looked over her shoulder at the one who’d just left. “That girl is going to have a complex, thanks to you. Bet she never attempts to flirt with a stranger again.”

  I rolled my eyes at my best friend without even looking up from my phone. “She wasn’t flirting. And I was nice enough. I told her ‘happy birthday’.”

  “You growled ‘happy birthday’,” Kylie corrected. “And if you couldn’t see that that girl was flirting with you, then you’re even more helpless than I thought.”

  I shrugged. “Even if she was, I’m not interested.”

  “Yeah. Apparently you’ve got an internet girlfriend there,” she said, snagging my phone out of my hands before I could react.

  I didn’t even reach for it back, just sighed and waited.

  Kylie wrinkled her nose. “These apartments are awful.”

  “Well, that’s what happens when you start at the bottom in the biggest city in the United States. Gotta struggle for a while.”

  Kylie swallowed, a shadow of something passing over her face before she tossed the phone back to me. “Do you have anything going on after work?”

  “Actually, I was going to—”

  “Great. We’re going mudding.”

  My eyebrows shot up into my hairline at that. “We’re… I’m sorry, what?”

  “You heard me. You made me a pinky promise, and we start today.”

  “You hate mudding.”

  “But you used to love it,” she said, pointing her finger right at my chest. “And I have a truck. Therefore, we’re going.”