The Barrel House Series: Boxed Set: Bourbon Love Notes, Bourbon on the Rocks, Bourbon Nights, Bourbon Fireball

by Ryan, Shari J.

  “You have officially made me less miserable,” I told Tucker.

  “Whatever it takes, let’s keep the night going,” he replied while sliding another twenty-dollar bill into the slot machine. He rubbed his hands together as if warming up his luck and pressed a few buttons, bidding the whole twenty on the most amount of lines. I was sure he would lose in less than a second.

  However, the one spin he took won the jackpot, not just a few thousand dollars, but a three and a half million-dollar jackpot. I thought it was a scam or a joke, making us think he had won, but the sirens were going off, and lights were blaring. People were staring at us in shock.

  Us. There wasn’t an us. Tucker put the money in, and Tucker played the machine. We were just out for my birthday celebration, nothing more.

  The shock was an understatement. Tucker went pale and couldn’t seem to close his mouth or blink. He spun around in circles until an attendant came to confirm his winnings.

  “I’ve been struggling for money my entire life,” he said to me. “I won’t have to drive that damn truck anymore, and it’s all because of your birthday, Journey. Do you see how lucky you are?”

  I felt far from being lucky. I kept my happiness for Tucker to a phony smile. It wasn’t my luck. If it was, I would have won something, but I asked myself if money would fix my pain, and I knew the answer before thinking it through completely.

  After Tucker met with a financial representative of the casino and filled out the paperwork and tax forms, he was given a portion of the money by check and was told he’d receive the rest in increments on a schedule. The whole process took two hours, but they made us comfortable with more drinks and luxurious accommodations. It was quite a night, even though I’d walk away with nothing.

  “I don’t even know what I’ll do with all of this,” he said, sipping on a top-shelf mixed martini.

  “I’m sure you’ll find ways,” I told him, taking double the amount of sips he took.

  “We should travel the world together,” he suggested.

  I realized he was more than likely beyond drunk and speaking nonsense. “You don’t want to travel the world with me,” I told him.

  He twisted to face me, bringing his knee up onto the cushion. “Are you kidding? You’re like the coolest chick I’ve ever met. It would be thrilling to travel the world with you.”

  The idea didn’t sound horrible. It sounded like a bonus to my plan of running away. “I could be convinced easily,” I said.

  “We’re here because of you. I won this because of you. If you hadn’t stopped me on the highway, this wouldn’t have happened, Journey. I think this is some kind of weird fate, and we’re supposed to be together. It just makes sense.”

  His words startled me because none of what he said had crossed my mind. Fate? Were we meant to be together?

  Something in my head wondered if maybe he was right. Neither of us had a clear direction. He was a good-looking guy, sweet as could be, and easy to get along with. Could the new direction I was looking for in life truly come with fluorescent blinking arrows?

  “What are you saying?”

  “Let’s just go get married. The money will be ours. We’ll start over, build a life from scratch, and never look back.”

  Never look back. I could be free from the pain. It’s why I ran away. I wouldn’t have to rush home on the account of being broke. It could be fate. It seemed very possible.

  “Okay,” I agreed. “Let’s do it.” Adrenaline rushed through me, and I felt more alive than ever before.

  Tucker leaned forward and kissed me. It was just a kiss to seal the deal. It wasn’t a heart-stopping, breath-stealing kiss, but it was the precursor to a new future.

  The night became blurrier by the minute, but I remember acquiring a marriage license, and the words from the Elvis impersonator: “I now pronounce you, husband and wife.” Tucker didn’t even ask me to sign a prenuptial agreement. There’s a chance he didn’t know what one was because I didn’t know much about it either.

  We woke up in a king-size bed surrounded by floor to ceiling windows that offered a view of the orange and red sunrise over the Vegas strip. There was a ring on my finger, and I was not wearing any clothes, informing me we consummated our marriage.

  I thought … now what?

  Regret was my second thought.

  He had morning breath, and it was blowing in my face.

  What did I do?

  I went through the motions of acting as if everything was normal and fantastic. We walked along the strip, stopped at a massive breakfast buffet at one of the bordering hotels and came up with plans to spend large amounts of money on ridiculous things. But the void I had been running from was catching up to me.

  “You look like you feel sick. Are you hungover?” Tucker asked.

  Being hungover would be a nice feeling compared to the way I was feeling at that moment.

  “What’s my last name?” It was a question a woman should ask before marrying a man.

  “Milan,” he responded.

  “I like it.” It was probably the best part of the marriage so far. The money wasn’t giving me a feeling of excitement like it had been the night before.

  “Where should we go first? Paris, Rome?” Tucker gushed.

  I sipped on my cup of coffee, thinking about his question. “Can we fly to Vermont first so I can tell my parents I’m alive and not missing?” I made a joke of it, but the guilt was eating away at me, and I needed to check on Adam.

  “Absolutely. I can’t wait to meet your parents,” Tucker said. I immediately understood that our rash decision would end badly. “God, I feel like I’m dreaming.”

  I felt like I was coming down with the flu, or worse. Whatever was worse—it was definitely that. I stared at the ring on my finger, admiring the beauty of the three carats I never expected to see on my hand. “Yeah, this is all pretty surreal,” I replied.

  “Do you like it? The ring?”

  “Oh, of course. It’s gorgeous. I love it.” I was lying. I wasn’t a flashy diamond kind of girl.

  “Okay, I will book two tickets to Vermont, and we’ll get moving. Does that sound good?” he asked.

  All I could think was, how could I warn my parents about what I had done. I owed them a heads-up, at the very least.

  “Perfect. Before you do that, I’m just going to go make a quick phone call. I’ll be right back,” I told him with a smile, kissing his cheek on the way by. I didn’t like the way his scruff felt against my lips. His facial hair was too long and fine.

  The moment I found a payphone, my stomach churned and twisted into a knot, realizing what I was about to face at home. My hand shook as I dialed the number, and my heart raced as I listened to the two rings before a click.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom, it’s me,” I said.

  “Journey Quinn,” she said, her voice broken and furious. “I am so angry at you. Are you okay? Where are you? Oh my gosh, it’s your birthday. Happy Birthday, sweetie.” Her anger broke for just a second to say Happy Birthday, but I knew that was the only sweetness I would get from her at that moment.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom. I’m okay. I’m in Vegas. I—I know what I did was wrong, but I had to get away.”

  I heard Mom’s heavy breaths, the sounds she makes when upset. “You’re twenty-one now,” she said with a sniffle. “You could have gone wherever you wanted, but you didn’t have to do so without saying a word. You could have at least brought your phone with you. We’ve been worried sick.”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” I told her.

  “Obviously,” she stated, swallowing hard. “God, I’m so thankful you called. The idea of going another night without hearing from you—I hope you never have to experience such a thing when you have a child someday, Journey. That was terrible, what you did.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Today.”

  “Thank God. We will talk about this more when you get
here.”

  “Mom,” I said.

  “What is it?” Every word she spoke was short and sharp.

  “I met someone. He won a three-million-dollar jackpot, and we eloped. I made a mistake.”

  There was so much silence, I thought she hung up the phone.

  “Journey.” The tone of disappointment was the worst sound in the world. “If I had been able to reach you, I could have given you some good news last week.”

  “What good news? What is it?” I asked, pressing my palm against the wall of pay-phones to support the sudden heaviness in my body.

  “Journey, Adam came out of his coma.”

  We skipped dinner because we fell asleep watching the Kardashians, but Brody woke us up around three in the morning. “Oh, man,” Brody says, seeming disoriented as he pulls himself up on the couch. I lift my head from where it had been resting all night. “What were you dreaming about? You were talking in your sleep—something about Vegas. It woke me up.”

  “It was more of a nightmare,” I tell him. “Sorry for waking you up.” Please don’t ask any more questions about Vegas.

  “That’s where you got married, isn’t it?”

  I lean back into the couch and pull the blanket up to my neck. “Maybe.”

  “Did you go there to get married or go there and end up getting married?” Brody asks through a hoarse laugh.

  “It was when I ran away. The guy who picked me up from hitchhiking took me to Vegas for my twenty-first birthday. We gambled, he won a massive jackpot, we got drunk, and woke up married. End of the story.”

  “Wow. That’s one hell of a story,” Brody says, running his hands over the sides of his face.

  “Did you just take off or something?”

  “It was more complicated than that, but kind of.”

  “You got a divorce, though, right?” Suddenly, Brody was wide awake and focused on me, though we were sitting in the dark with just the glow from the TV.

  “Yes, I’m divorced,” I confirm.

  “But, you must have been able to get the marriage annulled, at least, right?”

  I close my eyes, wishing I could go back to sleep. “The thing about acting reckless at twenty-one is the lack of life knowledge. Not exactly. It ended with a full-fledged divorce.”

  “Holy shit, Journey. Wait, so that means you inherited over a million dollars from this guy?”

  “I didn’t want the money,” I tell Brody.

  “Yeah, I would have sent back the million too,” Brody says, looking around the room, avoiding eye-contact to let me know how crazy he thinks I am. “No offense, but it takes two to get married. He was the idiot for not giving you a prenup.” I stand from the couch and flip on a lamp.

  “It was complicated.”

  “A decent guy who picks up a beautiful hitchhiking girl and takes her to Vegas, marries her, accepts a divorce, and gets to keep all the money? That’s a very unique story.”

  “We’ll go with unique,” I say, making my way into the kitchen.

  “Shit, we didn’t eat dinner, and I’m supposed to be your support system,” he says as I open the fridge.

  “Yeah, you kind of failed your job there.”

  “You were the one who was supposed to cook,” he reminds me.

  “You were the one who was too comfortable and made me fall asleep.”

  Brody pulls himself from the couch and stretches his arms over his head, still wearing a towel around his waist. He’s hot. There’s no denying it. He meets me at the fridge and nudges me out of the way. “Allow me not to forget this time.”

  “I don’t have a lot.”

  Brody rummages through the pantry on the other side of the fridge and pulls out the new box of cereal I hadn’t opened. The milk is next to follow, and then he snags two bowls from the cabinet he remembered my dishes being in.

  I’m in a daze as he pours two bowls of cereal then places them down on the table. I grab a couple of spoons and take a seat, ready to face-plant into the bowl. “It’s so early,” I tell him.

  “We’ll get a head start on the day,” he says.

  “Seriously. You have a daughter and need to work, right?”

  “I got this,” he says.

  “Do you?” I question with a raised brow.

  “Yes, Hannah is going to her mother’s this weekend. My dad has a shipment of barrels to deliver to Connecticut and offered to handle it and bring Hannah along to save me a trip. They’re leaving in a couple hours. I hate pulling her from school, but her mother likes to make everything hard, and if I can get help with that six-hour trip, both ways sometimes, I’ll take what I can get.”

  “That’s why she stayed at my parents’ last night,” I figure out, speaking my thoughts out loud.

  “Yeah, I don’t just ditch her all the time, but thanks for assuming.”

  “I didn’t assume,” I argue.

  “Well, you like to make an ass out of you and me, so … it’s hard to avoid the thought.”

  I dig my spoon into the cereal and take a small bite, enjoying the sensation of the cold milk traveling down my parched throat. “What about work?”

  “Let me worry about that, okay?” His response is snippy, and I feel like I crossed a line, an odd line I wouldn’t have thought would be a line, but it’s also three o’clock in the morning.

  “Whatever,” I groan.

  Brody watches me taking bites of the cereal, and I can only imagine what thoughts are going through his head. I assume he’s wondering if I’ll want to vomit after this, or if this is a safe food, or if I’ll stop eating after three bites. The amount of misconceptions that come along with the illness is never-ending. “What makes you tick?”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Is it a certain food, or is it a stress-factor?”

  I appreciate the question rather than the assumption. “It’s usually stress. I like food. I could eat all day, in fact, but when I’m anxious or upset, the food in my stomach feels like it’s suffocating every free inch within my body, and I can’t breathe or move. It’s like I need the empty feeling, the pain behind my ribs to make the other pain go away. I don’t know if that makes sense, though.”

  Brody takes a few more bites of his cereal before responding. “It makes perfect sense. It sucks, but I understand.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, why? Some people drink, some smoke, some do drugs, others work out like crazy, everyone handles stress and pain in a way that works for them. Going through crap in life sucks as it is, but humans aren’t built to take on never-ending pain, which leads to other methods of medicating. It’s human nature.”

  “You just made yourself sound a lot smarter than I’ve given you credit for,” I say.

  “Or you just realized you’ve been calling me a dumbass most of your life for no reason.” Brody flicks his spoon at me, splattering milk on my face.

  “It hasn’t been for no reason. You were a troublemaker, always getting into fights, and doing stupid things, from what I heard.”

  “You heard that, huh?”

  “Sure did. That’s why you weren’t at a lot of the family get-togethers as we got older.”

  “Oh, I see,” Brody says, cocking his head to the side.

  “Did you think no one knew?” I ask.

  Brody shakes his head. “No, I didn’t think that. However, now I know no one knew the truth, which is how I liked it.”

  “What are you saying? You weren’t the troublemaker everyone said you were?”

  “Oh, I was in a lot of trouble, but not the way you think I was.”

  20

  I think we both fell back asleep a few times between the hours of four and seven, but I’m awake, thinking about the day being Friday and what I should do about Brody. Is it selfish to let him come with me, or is it selfish to prevent him from going? I’m not sure there’s a right answer.

  Brody is still kind of sleeping, I think. His eyes are closed, so I slip away from the couch to make some
coffee. Yesterday was like a hurricane of emotions, and I feel like I have some cleanup to do today. I wonder if Brody took some time to think about the reality of being with someone like me—a person who doesn’t have control. I’ve dumped so much on him this past week, and I can’t figure out why he’s still attracted to me or wants to spend time here.

  When the Keurig begins to drip coffee into my cup, I spot Brody stretching in the corner of the couch where he’s been comfortably resting.

  “Do I get coffee too?” he asks through raspy words.

  “I don’t know if you’ve earned the right to have coffee at my apartment yet. I haven’t decided if I’m over the fact of you stealing it from me,” I tease.

  I see a pouty lip and puppy dog eyes, and it’s in this moment, I realize I can’t resist the look on his face. “Fine,” I mutter.

  “I think we’re turning a corner, Journey,” he says.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Once I have the two mugs filled and topped with creamer, I bring them over to the sofa and curl my leg up beneath me as I sit down next to Brody, handing him a mug. “What do you usually do when Hannah is away for the weekend?”

  “I work or tend to the honey-do list I’ve made for myself. Things are always breaking at our house because Hannah is like a gentle flower most days.”

  “Oh, boy,” I respond. “I think I want to see your house.”

  “Nope,” he says without a second thought.

  “What? Why not?”

  “I live with a tween girl who refuses to pick up after herself, and the place is a mess. I have trouble keeping up.”

  I like neat and tidy, although I don’t make my bed most days. That’s my only weakness when it comes to cleaning. I’m not sure I could deal with a tween child leaving messes everywhere.

  “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

  “You’ve been scared about running me out the door with your confessions, Journey. I’m scared the state of my house would have a much worse effect on you than your past has on me.”