On the Rocks

by Kandi Steiner

  “Well, here they are,” I said, tapping one of the barrels on the back wall. They were stacked just as high as the rest of the room, each barrel stamped with a batch number and an exclusive, gold-plated plaque that had all the details about when it was distilled, barreled, what rows it’s been aged in over time, and more.

  “There are so many,” she said, eyes scanning up. “How do I choose? I mean, should I be looking for something specific?”

  I scratched at my jaw. “I mean, there is incredible whiskey inside each and every one of these barrels. Part of what makes buying a single barrel so enticing is that you’ll have a one-of-a-kind whiskey,” I said, finally remembering to give her the spiel I’d put off before. “Usually, we let our potential buyers taste a few to compare but…” I smirked. “There is that whole legal drinking age debacle.”

  Ruby Grace laughed. “Oh. Yeah. That old thing.”

  She swayed from foot to foot, grimacing a little as she eyed the barrels.

  “Are you okay?”

  Her face twisted again as she shifted her body weight to her left foot. “Yes. Sorry, it’s just these stupid shoes. I told my mom I didn’t need to wear heels to inspect whiskey barrels, but she was not having it with me wearing boots.”

  For a split second, I pictured her in said boots. I wondered if the brown leather would cap off under her knee, if her thighs would have been even more exposed in the shorts she would have paired with those boots. Or would she have worn jeans, covering her legs altogether?

  Stop thinking about her legs, Becker.

  “Take them off.”

  Her brows shot up, eyes widening as they found mine.

  “What?” She asked, laughing. “I can’t just take my shoes off.” She threw her arms up, gesturing to our surroundings. “We’re in an old, dirty warehouse.”

  “You act like you weren’t born and raised in an old, dirty town.”

  “Yeah, well,” she said, crossing her arms. “I wasn’t exactly working in the distillery or out raising cows on the outskirts, now was I? A little bit of a different setting when you’re the Mayor’s daughter.”

  She tried to smile, but a soft curse left her lips when she shifted her weight again.

  Without hesitation, I reached back for the collar of my t-shirt and ripped it up over my head, laying it down on the ground at her feet.

  “Here,” I said, holding out my hand. “You can stand on that. It might not be a freshly polished marble floor, but your precious feet should survive.”

  Ruby Grace was gaping, her jaw completely unhinged as her eyes crawled over my abdomen and chest. “I…”

  “Shoes. Off.” I pointed at her feet. “You do that, and I’ll let you taste a few barrels. Just don’t tell anyone, least of all your parents.”

  She chuckled, but finally stepped out of her heels. They fell on their sides as a relieved sigh slipped through her lips, and I watched her polished toes curl on my t-shirt.

  “God, that feels so much better.”

  I shook my head, reaching back behind the first row of barrels for the tasting glasses we housed there. “Are you always so stubborn?”

  “I wasn’t being stubborn.”

  “I guess that’s my answer,” I said, pouring a tiny splash from one of the barrels before holding the glass toward her. “Here. Take a sip.”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “It’s okay. Like you said, I’m underage.”

  “So you’ve never had a sip of alcohol in your life?” I challenged.

  She bit her lip. “I mean… I have, but not whiskey. That’s a man’s drink.”

  At that, I full on belly-laughed. “What the hell kind of talk is that? Whiskey is a man’s drink?” I shook my head. “It’s whiskey. It’s expensive whiskey, at that. And I assure you, it’s delicious — whether you have tits or not.”

  Ruby Grace blushed, biting her lip against a smile. “God, sorry. I sound like my mother. More and more every day now, actually,” she mused, glancing down at her toes before her eyes found the glass in my hand again.

  I pushed it toward her. “Just a sip. You’re not even going to get close to feeling a buzz. But this way, you can taste the difference between a few barrels that were aged in different ways.” I swallowed. “You can pick out the perfect one for your future husband.”

  She hesitated, but her hand reached forward, taking the other side of the glass. Our fingertips brushed just slightly, just enough to make me jerk my own hand away.

  “And, hey, bonus,” I continued, shaking off the awkward tension. “You can be as ‘unladylike’ as you want here. I won’t judge. You can even burp, if you’re really feeling frisky.”

  Ruby Grace laughed, eyeing the whiskey like she still wasn’t sure before she shrugged and tilted the glass in my direction. “Oh, what the hell. Bottoms up.”

  She took a sip, and then promptly grimaced and stuck her tongue out as soon as she’d swallowed.

  “God, that’s awful.” She shook her head, shoving the glass back in my direction. “Definitely not doing that again.”

  I laughed, rinsing the glass with a splash of water from the bottles we kept nearby before filling it with the same whiskey.

  “Okay, that was my bad. Maybe I should have told you how to taste it first.” I handed it to her again, though she eyed it like it was poison. “Smell it first.”

  She did as I said, uncertainty shading her face as she looked my way again. “I’m not sure I’m doing it right.”

  “You’re not sure you’re smelling right?”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You know what I mean. I don’t… I don’t know anything about this stuff.”

  “It’s okay, that’s why I’m here.” I stepped closer to her, taking the glass from her hand, and when I inhaled to demonstrate, it was her I smelled instead of the whiskey.

  She smelled like lavender, like an open field in the heat of summer.

  “Watch,” I said, taking another breath, this time focusing on the whiskey. “You smell it first, and ask yourself what you smell. Oak? Vanilla? Honey? Maple? Every whiskey is different, depending on how it’s aged, how the barrels are charred and toasted. See what notes you can detect first. And then,” I continued, taking my first sip. I let it linger in my mouth, swirling it a round before swallowing gently. “Taste it. I mean, really taste it. Does it give you different flavors on the tip of your tongue than it does on the back? Does it burn going down, or is it just warm? And what’s the aftertaste?”

  Ruby Grace watched me, fascinated, her lips parted softly, eyes falling to my bare chest where a small drop of whiskey had landed. I thumbed it away, handing her the glass again.

  “Now, you try.”

  She took a deep breath, like she needed to focus to really do it right, and then she repeated my steps. And this time, when she finished swallowing, she smiled.

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s different when you don’t just throw it back like a shot.”

  I chuckled. “Well, this isn’t shooting whiskey. It’s Tennessee Sippin’ Whiskey,” I said, tilting my imaginary hat. I tucked my hands in my pockets, nodding toward the next barrel. “Take a little from that one.”

  “I can pour it myself?”

  I nodded. “Just twist that spout a little, not too much. You don’t need a lot to taste it.”

  She was hesitant as she poured a sip into her glass, and her eyes lit up, a little squeal of joy popping from her mouth. “I did it!”

  And for the next ten minutes, I watched Ruby Grace be a girl.

  She was so far from the snotty woman who had offered me her hand like a prize when we first met. She was just a teenager, a soon-to-be sophomore in college, drinking whiskey, learning something new and having fun.

  I wondered when the last time was that she had fun.

  I wondered if she’d ever had fun at all.

  The way she looked when she laughed, I hoped she had. I hoped it wasn’t the first time that laugh had been genuine, the first time that sound had ma
de its way into the airwaves. She laughed the way the wind blew — softly, and then all at once, without an ounce of shame for how that sound might permanently shift the atmosphere around it.

  When she’d decided on the barrel she wanted, Ruby Grace regretfully slipped back into her heels, and I tugged my t-shirt on before leading us out of the warehouse and toward the welcome center.

  “So,” I said, walking slow so she didn’t kill her feet in the process of getting back to her car. “What are Anthony’s plans when you go back to school in the fall?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you guys moving in together and he’s getting a job there? Or are you guys doing long distance for a while or what?”

  She laughed, her hair falling over her face a little as she watched our feet. “I’m not going back to school.”

  “Oh…” I paused. “You don’t want to?”

  “I mean, I guess I do… but, there’s no point. You know? I’m getting married. I’ll be his wife now, and I’ll have so much to do. He’s already getting into the political arena, and he’ll need me to be by his side, campaigning and networking and all that.” She shrugged. “I don’t really need a degree to do that.”

  “Is that what you want to do?”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s what I want to do,” she said quickly. “It’s what I was bred to do.”

  “Bred?” I frowned. “You’re not a horse. You’re a human.”

  Ruby Grace stopped with an abrupt click of her heels once we reached the welcome center entrance, and she crossed her arms defiantly as her eyes found mine. She didn’t even have to say another word for me to know I’d pushed the wrong button, and I was about to get the same woman I met in this very spot an hour before.

  “Look, you don’t know anything about me, okay? Or my family, or what I want or what I don’t want, so just stop trying to presume whatever it is you’re presuming.”

  “Oh, look at you,” I chided, stepping into her space. “Using big words again.”

  She scoffed. “They say nothing changes when you leave this town and come back, I guess you just proved them right.”

  “Well, that’s my job,” I fired back. “Proving the ominous they right. Glad I’ve still got it.”

  Our chests were close again, the stains on my off-white t-shirt highlighting the crisp cleanness of her dress.

  “Lucy will take your money inside,” I said, nodding to the doors behind her. “Congratulations on your engagement.”

  I turned just as her mouth popped open, but I didn’t look back.

  “Thanks for the tasting,” she said, making sure her voice was loud and clear.

  “Go ahead and say it louder, princess,” I threw behind me. “You’d be in just as much shit as I would.”

  She didn’t respond to that, and when I chanced a glance back in her direction, there was steam rolling off that cute face of hers as she ripped the door to the welcome center open.

  And I couldn’t help it — I chuckled.

  I didn’t mean to ruffle her feathers, but damn if I didn’t like getting under that pretty bird’s skin.

  Ruby Grace

  “Ergh!”

  I gripped the steering wheel on my convertible tighter, not even attempting to tame my hair as it blew around in the wind. Mama would be upset that I’d messed it up after she fixed it that morning, but I didn’t care.

  I needed the wind to blow away my anger.

  “Look at you, using big words again,” I mocked in my best Noah Becker voice.

  I turned the wheel, making another tour through town. I wasn’t ready to go home yet, wasn’t ready for Mama to hit me with a thousand questions on what kind of flowers I wanted and whether I wanted ribbon or twine around the edges of the ceremony chairs. I hadn’t even been home from college for two full days and she was already driving me mad.

  My stomach sank at the thought of the University of North Carolina, of the university I’d wanted to attend ever since I took a road trip with my best friend there when we were sixteen. I’d gotten in, and my first year there had been everything I’d hoped it would be.

  But I wouldn’t be going back.

  “Oh, you don’t want to?”

  Noah’s voice hit me again, like it was the ping pong ball and I was the paddle beating it against the wall.

  I sighed, another grunt of frustration rolling through me as I let my left hand hang over the edge of my door. I slowed the car down as I hit the Main Street drag, not wanting to give any of the small town cops a reason to give me a ticket.

  Lord knows they were bored enough that it didn’t take much.

  I wasn’t even sure why I was so annoyed and frustrated with Noah. He was just making conversation, just asking questions — but they were questions no one else had asked. And, to make it worse, they were questions I didn’t have answers to — at least, not reasonable answers.

  I had the ones I’d been told, the ones I’d rehearsed, the ones I’d repeated to myself night after night until they stuck, until I believed them, too.

  But it wasn’t just his questions that had thrown me, it was the man, himself.

  I think I recognized him even before he told me his name. Maybe that was why I’d been so insistent that he tell me. It was hard to forget the boy I crushed on as a young girl, and continued to fantasize about up until the very day I left Stratford.

  The first time I’d laid eyes on him, I was only nine years old, and he was the cute boy who sat in the pew in front of me in church.

  The last time I’d seen him, he was a drunken mess, yelling at his older brother at a farm house party about who was man of the house now that their dad had passed away.

  That was five years ago, when I was fourteen and sneaking into my first party. I remembered I didn’t drink a drop that night because I was afraid I’d end up just like Noah Becker.

  But five years had changed him.

  He wasn’t a mess anymore.

  That pecan brown hair of his that used to curl around his ears was cut clean and short now, making his strong jaw stand out even more than it had when he was a boy. Those eyes that had tipped me off to who he was before he’d offered his last name were the same as they were the last time I’d seen him — cobalt blue, almost gray around the pupil — but now, they were a little less haunted, and a little more determined, like he had something to prove, just like I did. His arms and chest were fuller — a sight I got to inspect quite closely after he stripped his shirt off — and he was tan the way only a man who works outside can be.

  He’d grown up, from a boy to a man, and everything about him was just bigger. His presence was larger than life.

  More than anything, his confidence poured off him in waves, or maybe it was cockiness. Either way, he’d thrown me. I’d walked into that distillery with my head as high as my heels, and I was prepared to show this town that I was the new Ruby Grace Barnett — polished and poised just like my mother, ready to take on this town with my husband-to-be as the future State House Representative of North Carolina. I’d left that knobby-legged, freckle-faced little girl behind and come back as a well-to-do woman.

  At least, that was the plan.

  In reality, I’d stood barefoot on Noah’s dirty old t-shirt and giggled as I poured whiskey from a barrel for the first time.

  Classy. Mama would be proud.

  And maybe that was the most frustrating part — that not only had I strayed from the plan, from the woman I wanted others to see me as, but that I’d also had fun in the process.

  The truth was, I could have stayed in that old, grimy warehouse full of whiskey barrels with Noah Becker all day. He made me laugh, and for that one hour in time, I wasn’t just Anthony Caldwell’s future wife. I wasn’t a smile and a handshake and a side kick.

  I was just me.

  But Noah’s questions at the end of our tour had whipped me back into reality real fast, and here I was, finally making the turn toward home.

  Back to the real world for
Ruby Grace Barnett.

  My phone rang as I pulled down our long driveway, the familiar white house stretching out before me. It was two stories, completely symmetrical, with a porch that wrapped all the way around. Like any southern belle’s dream, there was a swing on the porch, and a garden Mama had cared for as her own pride and joy for my entire life. An American flag hung proudly from above our stairs, waving in the gentle, Tennessee breeze.

  I kept my eyes on that flag until I dug my phone out of my bag, smiling at the picture on the screen. It was Anthony’s smiling face, his arms around me in one of my favorite dresses, the picture one we snapped at his parents’ lake house that spring.

  “Hey, you,” I answered.

  “Hey, yourself. How’s my beautiful fiancé today?”

  “Tired,” I answered on a sigh, putting the car in park. I held the button to bring the convertible top back up, the sun fading from my shoulders.

  “More wedding planning?”

  “All the wedding planning. But, the good news is, I have your wedding gift taken care of.”

  “Oh, is that so? What’dya get me?”

  I smiled. “Well, I can’t tell you, now can I? It wouldn’t be a surprise, then.”

  Anthony laughed, and I let my head fall back against the head rest, picturing what he looked like then. I missed his laugh, his smile, his arms around me.

  More than anything, I missed our conversations.

  Before he proposed, we would talk for hours — about everything. We’d talk about our dreams, our plans for the future, our pasts, our families, our deepest fears. But after the proposal, all of our conversation shifted to the wedding, to me becoming his wife.

  “Fair enough. I can’t talk long, but I wanted to see how you were doing. Dad’s got me working with this media crew covering my first run for State House Representative. It’s been madness over here.”

  “I’m sure it has, but you’ve wanted this forever,” I reminded him. “Your dreams are starting to come true.”