Chapter 1
2625 Words
one
BRINLEY
“No one has answered my ad for a roommate.” I push my laptop away from me after checking my email, and the saltshaker falls over.
Lance picks it up and shakes it over his left shoulder. “Left, right?” he asks our other cousin, Easton, who’s busy beside me on what I can see is another dating app.
“Nothing is gonna happen if you don’t throw salt over your shoulder.” Easton shakes his head but doesn’t look up.
“I think you’re the one who spilled it, Brin, so you should sprinkle it over your shoulder too.” Lance holds the saltshaker in front of me from across the table.
“A sprinkle of salt isn’t going to ward off anything bad happening to me. The dark cloud over my head for the past four years is proof of that.” I take the saltshaker and place it on the table.
“You’re tempting fate.” Lance straightens his tie and throws it over his shoulder when our waitress slides his tomato soup and salad in front of him. He almost always gets the same thing when we come to Lard Have Mercy.
I pick up the saltshaker and toss salt over my left shoulder to stop this ridiculous conversation and get back to the immediate problem I need to solve—finding a roommate.
“I don’t get it. You knew Calista was gonna move out.” Easton finally pockets his phone when his double-decker BLT slides in front of him.
Calista is our oldest cousin and was my roommate, but last year, she married the love of her life—a professional soccer player. Although she’s been living in Chicago, she’s been nice enough to pay the rent. But she’s returning to our small Alaskan town for the off-season this week, and they’ve found a house, which means I need to find another roommate.
“Hence the ad,” I deadpan.
“Maybe we should tweak it. It was a little…” Lance isn’t going to tell me what specifically is wrong, he’s too nice. Instead, he glances at Easton, who’s always happy to give his honest opinion, even when you don’t want it.
“Anal retentive,” Easton says. “Cold. It reads like you’ll have a chore chart on the fridge, and there will be consequences if you don’t get a gold star next to your name.”
I huff. “It was not that bad. I’m not ending up with some slob.”
Easton busies himself with taking the tomatoes out of his BLT.
“Why don’t you just tell them you don’t want tomatoes?” Lance asks but gets no answer.
“Don’t you ever look at your life and think… how did I get here?” I put my laptop in my messenger bag tucked between the wall and me.
They shovel food in their mouths so they don’t have to answer.
“My mom and dad want to help me with the rent or have me stay with them.” I roll my eyes.
Lance shakes his head, grabs his soda, and sucks down a third of his Coke before wiping his mouth. “That’s the worst thing you could do. I’m proud of you, Brin. You’re living on your own and learning to run Bailey Timber. Soon things will fall in place.” He notices I’ve yet to get a plate of food and points at the empty spot in front of me. “Where’s your food?”
“Hasn’t come yet.” I look to find the waitress, but Easton catches her attention first and she practically runs over. Of course she does.
“Hey, Mindy, my cousin here hasn’t gotten her food?”
She looks at my empty spot.
“The chopped salad?” I gently remind her.
Her eyes widen and she nods. “I’ll be right back.”
“Thanks, Mindy,” Easton says and winks.
I groan.
“Please tell me you haven’t scored with the waitress?” Lance says to Easton.
“No way, she’s jailbait.” He picks up half his sandwich and holds it out to me. “Have some of mine while you’re waiting.”
“No thanks.” I shake my head and blow out a breath. “I’m not really hungry anyway.”
He takes a bite and concentrates on his meal. They both do, and for the millionth time in my life, I wish one of them would’ve been born a girl. But no, I’m stuck being the only girl. All three of us were born within hours of one another, and we’ve been pegged with the nickname the Bailey Triplets our whole lives, after our family name. Even if Lance’s and my last name isn’t Bailey since it’s our moms’ maiden name.
Easton pinches my arm like our great-grandma Dori used to do.
“What the hell?” I glare at him.
“You’re too thin. You look better when your face is fuller,” he says.
I turn in the booth and stare at him. It takes him three bites before he looks at Lance and then at me. Easton’s brown hair, with hints of auburn he inherited from his mom, is perfectly styled into a messy look, and it’s almost aggravating how it always looks so perfectly unkempt. He smiles and slides his tongue out to lick the mayo from the corner of his mouth.
With as much frost as I can put in my voice, I say, “Thanks for the advice. Should I trade in my chopped salad for a burger and fries?”
“I would,” he mumbles around his mouthful of food.
“Don’t listen to him.” Lance pushes his plate to the edge of the table, wipes his mouth with his paper napkin, and puts it on the plate. “You’re beautiful as always. I hate to cut this short, but I have to fly to New York this afternoon for a few days.”
“Lance, you didn’t even help me with the roommate ad.”
He straightens his tie down his shirt and slides out of the booth to put on the suit jacket he left hanging on the coat tree. “I’ll write something and email it to you on the plane.”
“Daddy’s plane… must be nice.” Easton pokes fun at the fact that Lance’s dad comes from an uber-wealthy Manhattan family that owns a chain of hotels. “Why don’t you just live in New York? You spend enough time there.”
“Do you have opinions on all of our lives?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “Suggestions. Mere suggestions.”
“Well, I have a few for you. The first is that you’re going to get someone pregnant or catch an STI if you don’t stop with those apps.” I look pointedly at the phone in his pocket.
He drops his sandwich and narrows his eyes at me. “I don’t think you’d like it if I slut-shamed you, so don’t do it to me.”
I look at Lance, who’s busy straightening his messenger bag. How on earth did my best friend, Kenzie, ever become torn between these two? They couldn’t be more opposite. “A little help here?”
Lance glances between the two of us. “Easton has a point. It’s his life, his d**k. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to get some too.”
I laugh. He’s crazy if he thinks I’d actually mess around with someone.
Lance stands to his full height, gives Easton a fist bump, and me a smile since I’m locked in the booth by Easton. “I’ll shoot you an email.”
He turns to leave, but he runs into a guy who’s just come into Lard Have Mercy.
“Excuse me,” the guy says.
He and Lance do a sidestep dance until they both stop. Lance laughs and the guy glances my way before nodding and heading to the back hallway toward the bathrooms.
After he’s gone, Lance looks at us. “Who’s that?”
I shrug. “How would I know?”
“Whoever he is, he’s huge. Not someone I’d wanna mess with.” Easton pushes his plate away and gulps down his water.
“Here you go.” Mindy puts a Caesar salad in front of me before walking away.
My cousins stare at me.
“This is my life.” I pick up my fork and stab at the lettuce because I don’t have time for them to prepare another one.
“See you two.” Lance waves and leaves, looking like the Wall Street guy he isn’t. But he doesn’t completely fit in in our small town either, because he spends so much time in New York. I have my suspicions as to why he doesn’t just move there, but I’ve never outright asked.
We say bye and I hip-check Easton, almost making him fall out of the booth. “What the—”
“Go to the other side now that Lance is gone.” I nod toward the empty side of the booth.
“Normal people just ask,” he says, sliding around to the other side.
I situate myself in the middle of the bench seat and start back in on my salad.
Meanwhile, the guy who almost ran into Lance comes out of the bathroom and sits at the table by the window. He plops down a duffel bag on the chair across from him and takes out the local paper.
“What are we looking at?” Easton whispers from across the table.
“Nothing.”
He glances over his shoulder, and I throw a crouton at him. “Don’t.”
He picks it up from his shirt and pops it into his mouth, chomping down dramatically and loudly. I narrow my eyes at him.
He shrugs after getting a good look at the guy. “I bet he’s here for your dad. Look at his tats.”
I saw his tattoos and how they go all the way up his arms. I also notice the bulging biceps, the dark hair styled short, the vibrant blue eyes. He’s definitely attractive. You’d have to be blind not to notice.
“You like him,” Easton says.
“Um. I don’t know him. How could I like him?” I fork my salad, keeping my eyes down.
“Look at your cheeks. You’re blushing.”
I glance up at Easton through my eyelashes. “Stop it.”
“It’d be good for you. I know you think I’m some manwhore, but come on, Brin, it’s been years since Sawyer died and I know you haven’t gotten any. Maybe s*x would make that dark cloud over your head disappear.”
Hearing Sawyer’s name feels like a blow to the chest. It’s been three and a half years, so it doesn’t happen a lot anymore, but it still catches me off guard.
“Having s*x is not going to make the cloud disappear.” I shake my head.
“Judge all you want, but I live a happy life.” He shrugs.
“I don’t remember it being under my control that I became a widow as a newlywed.”
Sawyer’s death set off a chain of events that led me to where I am today. After he died, I had to sell the house we’d paid too much for, so I ended up in the hole. Once I made good on that, I didn’t have any money left and had to move in with Calista, who’s now married and left me to cover the rent myself. Needless to say, this is not where I expected to end up after I said “I do” at twenty years old.
Easton leans back in the booth, one arm stretched out, the other on the table and fiddling with his water, his gaze on me. “Eventually you need to pick yourself up out of this funk. We’ve all tried to help, and we’ve all failed. I know it sucks having your husband die shortly after you got married. You think because I don’t want a commitment in my life right now that I don’t understand how awful it is?”
I drop my fork in my salad and it’s so loud that I swear the entire restaurant stares at me, including that guy by the window. Our eyes briefly connect, and he lifts his lips in a welcoming smile, but I turn away before it can affect me.
“It’s my life. You can imagine, but you don’t live it. And I’m not going to sleep my way through our small town with the hopes that one day Sawyer will be erased from my memory.”
How did our conversation turn to Sawyer once again? We’re supposed to be talking about the roommate ad and how I’ve had no responses.
He holds up his hands. “Truce, okay?”
I nod, exasperated. “Okay.”
He pulls out his wallet, so I guess he’s about to leave too. “I just miss you. I miss the old Brinley who enjoyed life. I feel like, after the accident, you just stopped living.” He slides out of the booth and drops some bills on the table. “I have to go. My dad wants me to talk to a few of his players. I’ll call you later.”
My uncle Austin is the high school baseball coach, and since Easton is a professional baseball player, he’ll often chat with the team during his off-season.
“Okay.”
He kisses my forehead. “Sorry,” he says because he never wants to leave anything unfinished.
I shake my head. “It’s okay. I know I have to move on.”
And that’s the truth. I do know I can’t mourn Sawyer forever, and I need to move on with my life, but that’s a scary prospect to think of, let alone actually do it.
“Maybe you need more time.” I shake my head and he chuckles.
“Now you want to say the right thing.”
“I’m an asshole. What can I say? I’m not good at sugarcoating.”
“Bye, Easton,” I say and push him away.
“Love you!” he screams as he leaves the restaurant.
The sound makes tat boy glance up from the paper he’s reading. When he sees Easton, he buries his head in the paper again.
I finish my salad and I’m about to pull out my money when I see Easton left enough for the entire bill.
“Excuse me?”
I peer up toward the deep voice at the end of the table. The deep voice is attached to the tatted-up guy, and I realize that the distance did not do him justice. My heart beats and my stomach somersaults. Holy s**t, he’s so good-looking, he has to be a model.
“Hi?” I say way too mouselike. My mom would lecture me about it if she heard it.
“Could you point me in the direction of Lucky’s? I have to see a guy about a job.” He smiles, and it kind of feels like being in a tractor beam—I can’t look away.
“Um…”
Easton’s words ring in my head. Maybe I need to jump back into something. This guy is definitely not someone I’d ever fall for—he’s a stranger in town. Who knows how long he’ll stick around.
“How about I show you?”
- Writer
