Trouble Brewing

by Suzanne Baltsar

  “That is absolutely crazy.” I took the corner a little hard, and my car bounced when all four tires hit the street again. I swore, I couldn’t understand why Piper thought so little of herself sometimes. “I thought we had this issue all ironed out.”

  “You’ve been lying to me this whole time. Our relationship is based on a deal you broke.”

  “I didn’t break our deal. I helped it along.” It was a flimsy excuse at best, but at this point it was my only defense. I had supported her the best way I knew how.

  She pointed a finger at me. “Don’t try to lawyer your way out of this.”

  “I’m not trying to lawyer my way out of anything, but I am trying to explain what happened. I can’t defend myself if you won’t listen.”

  “You wouldn’t have to defend yourself if you didn’t do anything wrong to begin with!”

  This twenty-minute ride back to Piper’s house was starting to feel like twenty hours. I couldn’t get there fast enough, and the guy in front of me wasn’t even driving the speed limit. “Come on,” I yelled through the windshield. “This is . . .”

  My words trailed off. My brain was driving on all cylinders, but it had no direction. I had no idea what to say to Piper to make this better. I had no idea if I could say anything to make it better. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her gaze fixed out her open window, and I figured it was best to wait until we got to her home to talk about it further.

  I hadn’t even fully slowed down in front of her house when Piper opened her door. “Piper! Jesus.”

  I shut the car off and followed her to the front door. “Piper.”

  She refused to acknowledge me, and when I reached to open the door, she turned abruptly in the entrance, halting me.

  “I need to think.”

  “Okay.” I held on to the door with my right hand, moving to step inside again.

  Piper was immobile. “Without you.”

  Those two words cut me in half. That wasn’t us. We talked things through, we worked together. We were a team.

  “Can’t we talk for a little bit?”

  She gazed at the toe of her shoe for a moment before she stood up straight, pulling all of her long red hair behind her shoulders. “I think you’ve done enough talking.”

  I immediately wanted to argue. I had points all laid out in my head, reasons for us to sit down, but logic wouldn’t help this situation.

  “Talk to me, please. Nothing’s changed between us.” I stared into her hardened eyes. “Has it?”

  “Everything’s changed,” she said quietly with a shrug, one that looked as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders. “I don’t want to be reliant on you or anyone. And you made me, whether you realize it or not. You took away my independence.”

  “I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I thought I was helping. I never intended to hurt you.”

  She ignored me, and each second she didn’t smile or take my offered hand was a dagger in my chest. “Don’t do this,” I pleaded, unsure of what I was even begging for. Don’t turn me away. Don’t let this come between us. “Please.”

  “I don’t think we should be together anymore,” she said with finality.

  “Don’t say that. Come on, you’re upset, I get it, but we can get through this.” In my previous life, I’d won more cases as a lawyer than I could count, and been to court more times than that, but this was one fight I wasn’t sure I could win.

  “There is no we, Blake. There is you and me, and I’m not even sure I want to have us in the same sentence.”

  I’d lost the trust of the one woman who’d become my world, and hell if it didn’t feel like I’d lost part of myself, too. I blew out a breath, hoping I’d be able to take another one. “That’s it then? You’re giving up on us?”

  “I’m not giving up. I’m moving on.” She turned and went inside, and I stood frozen, staring at the white paint peeling on the corner of the front door.

  Just a few hours ago, I’d kissed her, tasted her mint toothpaste. Two days ago, we’d been together, nothing between us but our sweat and skin. Weeks before that, I’d met her parents, told her father I was in it for the long haul. And before that, on the windy and cold first day of April, when Piper first walked into my pub, I’d thought she was like no one I’d ever met. I thought I knew deep down she was special, that she would be special to me.

  And now we were nothing?

  I wanted to scream, punch something. I wanted to riot. And with the way my heart beat so hard in my chest, my body even protested.

  I pounded on the door. “Piper, please, please open the door.”

  A second passed.

  Two, then three, and then a hundred more without any answer. I let my forehead drop to the door. When I had gone to those bars so many weeks ago, I simply went to talk to them, put a bug in the managers’ and owners’ ears about her beer. I didn’t convince them to do anything. I didn’t make any deals or contracts. All I did was support a woman I believed in very much by talking about her in a positive way.

  And why was that so bad?

  I hit the door with the side of my fist once more and stomped back to my car. She’d get over it, she’d have to.

  And then it struck me like a blow to the head.

  She didn’t have to. Because there was Iowa.

  I didn’t want her to move. I wanted her here with me in Minneapolis. But after today and the flat good-bye she’d offered, I had a feeling she’d made her decision.

  Iowa.

  I fucking hated Iowa.

  I jerked the car key, turning the ignition over, and pressed the Bluetooth on. Connor picked up on the second ring. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “What are you doing right now?”

  “Uh, nothing, why?”

  “Piper just broke up with me.” My stomach churned, saying those words out loud, and I wanted to vomit.

  “Oh.” A ruffling of some sort sounded in the background, then “What do you feel like drinking?”

  “Anything but beer.” It hurt to even think of the drink that had brought Piper and me together.

  “All right. I’ll be at your place in a bit. I’ll call Bear.”

  I disconnected the call, heading home in a fog.

  I flicked on the lights in my apartment, illuminating the evidence of my life that had just shattered. A pair of Piper’s shoes were next to the door, the charger to her laptop haphazardly thrown on the couch. I went to my bedroom to change, glossing over her clothes in my laundry basket and the black hair tie on the dresser. I ignored the small hand lotion bottle tipped over on the floor by the nightstand because she’d tried to toss it there and missed.

  “Goddamn it,” I moaned, hitting the doorjamb. My world was filled with Piper. She was in every vein of my existence. I’d bleed out if I tried to extract her, and no Band-Aid would help.

  I flopped onto the couch and turned to whatever stupid movie was on TV. I didn’t want to think about anything. I wanted to be numb. And just in the nick of time, a couple of hard knocks echoed from the door.

  “It’s open,” I said from my spot on the sofa.

  Bear walked in with pizza boxes in his hand, and uncharacteristically had nothing to say. No smartass remark, no big jovial hello. Just a nod of his head as he stepped over my legs that I hadn’t bothered to remove from the coffee table.

  Connor had the bag from the liquor store. “I didn’t know what you wanted so . . .” He placed down a bottle each of Bankers Club vodka, Old Crow whiskey, and some tequila I’d never heard of. “What’s your poison?”

  “Are you actually trying to poison me with this cheap stuff?”

  He shrugged and pulled out a bunch of mixers from his bag. “What’s the difference when we’re drinking to get drunk?”

  “Good point.” I grabbed the blue Gatorade and the vodka, and proceeded to mix a drink every high school kid would envy.

  “What happened?” Bear asked, offering me a slice of meat lover’s.

  “I don’t kn
ow,” I said before biting into my pizza. I swallowed and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “We went to dinner at my parents’ house, which was a total disaster, and when I have the motivation, I’m going to light them up. I’m so done with them. How they treated Piper was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

  Connor poured some whiskey into his soda. “That’s why she broke up with you? Because of your parents?”

  “No.” I gulped down my Blue Blast concoction. It was disgusting. “Yes. I think. I don’t know.”

  “Which one is it?” Bear asked with a mouthful of pizza.

  “Both, I guess. We left but got into this big fight because she said I don’t support her. I told her I’ve always supported her and tried to do everything I could for her. She flipped out when I said I went to Monkey Bar and Pete’s Tavern.”

  “You went to Monkey Bar and Pete’s?” Connor got up to look through the cabinet by the sink and returned with three shot glasses.

  “Yeah. I wanted to introduce them to Piper’s beer.”

  “And she didn’t like that?”

  “No.” I tossed my dirty paper plate onto the table. “I told you. She flipped out.”

  “I’m just trying to understand the whole story,” he said, pouring tequila into the glasses.

  The three of us did the shots, and I sat back, happy to have the burn start in my throat on its way to my belly and out to every part of my body. Burning the pain out of me.

  I plowed through another three pieces of pizza and two more of the disgusting Blue Blasts drinks, until I realized Bear still hadn’t said anything. Bear sat there quietly eating and drinking whiskey straight up. I kicked at his knee. “What do you have to say about all this?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  I laughed. “Nothing? You always have something to say. What is it, huh?”

  “I was afraid of this happening. You two getting divorced. Who gets the kids? The beer?”

  “That’s all you care about? While your best friend since freshman year of high school is sitting here crying into his vile vodka and blue Gatorade—”

  “Hey, man, don’t blame the drink,” Connor piped in.

  I flicked my middle finger at him, my attention still on Bear. “What do you really have to say about it?”

  He ran a hand over his face, his eyes scanning the room before landing on me. “You said she didn’t like that you did everything for her, so why are you surprised she’s mad you went to talk to the bars?”

  “It wasn’t that big of a deal,” I said, aggravated that my friend was taking her side.

  “It’s a big deal to her.”

  “I was just trying to help her.”

  “But clearly she doesn’t feel like you did. She feels like you took something away from her. She’s hurt and angry. You can’t be mad at her for feeling that way.”

  I slunk down on the couch, focusing on whatever Tom Cruise movie this was. Mission: Impossible II, I thought, but it was hard to tell between my level of sobriety and all the fighting. All the missions seemed impossible.

  Like finding my way out of this hole I’d dug myself into with Piper.

  Impossible.

  “She doesn’t think she’s good enough,” I said with a smack to the couch, finally acknowledging her words out loud, like maybe if my friends heard them, too, they’d be able to help me. Because I didn’t know what to do. “It’s ridiculous. She’s the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met. She’s funny and smart and good-looking.”

  Connor readjusted the hat on his head. “Yeah. She’s pretty.”

  “Nice eyes,” Bear said, and I pointed at him.

  “Only smart thing you’ve said tonight.”

  He tipped his drink toward me. “Don’t get upset with me because she’s pissed at you. I only pointed out the same thing she did. You’ve made it, man. You’ve got the Public. She’s still working for her dream. How do you think it felt to hear she got her first steps to it because of someone else?”

  “What does it matter? I got some of my capital from my trust fund.”

  “It’s pride.” Bear sat forward. “You hurt her pride.”

  I hadn’t thought of it like that. Easy for me to think it wasn’t that big of a deal, but for someone starting out in her precarious situation, I guess I could understand how it might feel. After all, that’s why I distanced myself from my family. I wanted to strike out on my own, lose the Reed name, build my own future. I should’ve understood Piper’s wants from the beginning, but I was too blinded by my own want. I didn’t take hers into consideration.

  “I told Piper I loved her. I told her and she didn’t care. And now she might move to Iowa, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “You could apologize,” Bear offered.

  “I tried to.”

  “Try harder,” he said.

  Connor refilled the shot glasses. “I think she’s so mad because she loves you, too. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t care so much, right? Isn’t that the key? The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s apathy.”

  Bear slapped his thigh with a loud chuckle. “McGuire for the win. Who’d have thought?”

  Connor raised his shot glass before downing the contents. “We’ve all loved and lost. Some of us just hide it better.”

  For one short second, I forgot about what I was dealing with and felt bad for my friend, who’d experienced his own heartbreak. He’d been through a tough spot, had his heart stomped on, but then I thought of Piper.

  And the organ that used to be my heart cracked all over again.

  My only hope was Connor. He eventually got over his misery, so I would, too. The only bright spot in this stinky pile of shit.

  CHAPTER 26

  Piper

  There was a soft knock on my door. After writing, deleting, rewriting, and deleting again the angriest text I could think of, I fell asleep crying to the Titanic soundtrack. Because the only thing sadder than what had gone down last night was Jack freezing to death in the Atlantic Ocean while holding Rose’s hand.

  I picked my head up, wiping the mascara from around my eyes. “Yeah?”

  “You all right in there?” Sonja asked from the other side of my bedroom door, then poked her head in.

  I sat up, my throat all scratchy when I said, “I guess.”

  “You look . . . good.”

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  She sat next to me on the bed. “You look like shit.”

  I ran my fingers through my tangled hair. “I feel like shit.”

  “Bear told me what happened.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet I was. Sonja made herself at home next to me under the covers and asked, “What happened?”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Bear and I were going to go for an early morning run today, but he canceled when word got out that you broke up with Blake. Sounded like an all-hands-on-deck situation. I’m pretty positive they all got drunk last night.”

  I searched the bed for wherever I had left my cell phone last night. I found it tucked between two pillows. There were twenty-two text messages. All from Blake. And all after midnight. I could practically see him getting drunker and drunker as the night went on.

  “Yep, they did.” I read the messages out loud. “ ‘I think I get why you’re mad at me, but I’d like to talk to you about it. Please call me.’ ”

  “What time was that at?” Sonja leaned over to see the time by the blue bubble.

  “Twelve-sixteen. And a few minutes later he wrote, ‘Please don’t ignore me. It’s killing me.’ About twenty minutes later, ‘You’re killing me, Smalls.’ And a GIF of Ham saying that.” I showed it to her.

  She took the phone from me, scrolling through all of his texts. “He’s determined, if nothing else.”

  I had used to adore his persistence. Now I found it tiring. I took my phone back to reread the messages.

  Remember our first meal at the Pancake House? You got the chocolate chip pancakes. I kn
ew from that day I wanted to be with you.

  I won’t stop trying to fix this, no matter how mad you are at me.

  Im not going 2 bed until u call me. Call me. Call me. Cll me.

  Pepper, please. forgive me?!?

  While I was crying in my bed last night, Blake had gotten drunk enough to send me grammatically incorrect and misspelled texts. And it made me even angrier. He’d betrayed me by going against my wishes, but it also made me feel inferior, patronized. His words reminded me of Oskar. Why don’t you want me to take care of you? You should be happy I want to.

  It was exactly like Oskar, but worse because it was Blake. My Blake.

  I’d experienced the imposter syndrome before, but now it was multiplied by a guy who couldn’t even bother to spell-check his texts.

  I didnt mean to hurt u. Your my sunshine.

  I clicked on the link he’d sent me with that one, which opened up a YouTube video of Natasha Bedingfield’s earworm “Pocketful of Sunshine.” I rolled my eyes and quickly closed the link, silencing the song.

  Remember that song? It’s so annoying, amiright?? I’m write. But it remind me of u. not cause your annoying but because i got a pocketful of sunshine.

  Its you. Your my pocketful of sunshine.

  Then the smiling emoji with sunglasses.

  These ridiculous messages continued until three in the morning, when I could only guess he finally passed out. His last text being:

  Why won’t you ducking talk to me!

  I tossed my phone aside and laid my head on Sonja’s shoulder.

  “So, what’s the real story?”

  I inhaled deeply, pushing my lungs to expand for the first time in what felt like twelve hours, and told my friend the whole sad story of last night. She nodded along, cringing or sometimes mumbling a curse until I got to the part about Blake going to Pete’s Tavern and Monkey Bar.

  She held her hands up. “Wait. What?”

  “He said he was the one who got my beer in those bars. He supported”—I added quotes around that word—“me from the beginning.”

  Sonja blinked away from me. Her arms crossed over her stomach, and she tilted her head. “I followed you up until now. Tell me why exactly you broke up with him?”