I UNLOCK the side door to the brewery, step inside, and take a deep breath. Instantly, it relaxes me: the smell of grain and malt, the sweet bready aroma that comes from boiling wort, the sharp tangy afternotes of hops.
It smells like work, and thank God for that. Loveless Brewing feels like the one area of my life that’s going well right now: we’re increasing production and expanding perfectly in line with Seth’s business plan. Whatever he’s doing, in terms of advertising and distribution and all that, it’s working.
I pretty much just make the beer, talk us up to potential vendors, and stay out of his way.
I head to my office, checking the pressure gauges and thermometers on the huge, upside down cone stainless steel tanks as I do.
In my office, I fire up my computer, put on some coffee in the break room, then come back and open the brewery’s spreadsheet.
Beer operates on a very specific schedule — even more so if you want to maximize efficiency and profit, like we obviously do. The master spreadsheet is half me (the beer schedules) and half Seth (the profit maximizing). It’s also complicated, color-coded, partly automated, and a thing of beauty.
Today I’m dry-hopping a batch of IPA, filtering and bottling a lager, and making a very small batch of an experimental amber ale that I’ve been wanting to try. Easy. Straightforward. Beer can’t protest. It’s not my seven-year-old daughter waking up late and then stomping off to the bus, furious at me because she couldn’t find the right glittery headband.
I offered her a different, shiny headband, but did she want it? No. No, she did not.
It’s not my best friend wearing my great-grandmother’s ring and kissing me outside my mom’s house and… no.
I’m not thinking about that this morning. I’m not wondering if I really buried the past as well as I thought I did.
I’m thinking about beer and nothing else. I pull my to-do list for the day up on my screen, give it a quick read over, and then head for my office door so I can get started.
Just as I’m almost there, the phone on my desk rings. I frown and check the caller ID, because it’s just past nine in the morning and beer people don’t tend to call that early.
SETH LOVELESS, reads the small, blocky screen. I roll my eyes.
“WHAT?” I shout, not bothering to pick up the receiver.
“COME OVER HERE!” a voice shouts back. “PLEASE.”
The phone stops ringing. I walk the seven feet from my office door to Seth’s and lean against his doorway. He’s in his office chair, leaning back, hands laced across his midsection like he’s a movie villain about to say I’ve been expecting you.
“I called because I was trying to be polite,” he says.
“You could’ve just walked over,” I point out. “I just did that and I’m fine.”
“Yeah, but I needed you in here,” he says, and shifts his computer screen toward me.
It’s… a spreadsheet? A flow chart? There’s also a graph.
“Tell me you didn’t redo the brewery spreadsheet,” I say, darting a glance at my younger brother. “You can’t just do that without—”
“Chill, I didn’t,” he says. “Take a closer look.”
I lean in until I can read the small text on the screen, and I realize something: the spreadsheet is full of names and times. Up in one corner, the only two things in that column, are DANIEL LOVELESS and CHARLOTTE MCMANUS.
“What is this?” I ask, though I half-suspect the answer.
“This is my analysis of your engagement announcement,” he says, swiveling in his seat to face his screen. He looks incredibly smug right now.
I fold my arms and wait, because apparently, he thinks he really is a Bond villain and wants to explain his entire evil scheme to me.
“I thought the timing and manner of your engagement announcement was kind of strange,” he says.
“I explained that,” I say, patiently, readying the story that Charlie came up with. “We weren’t going to tell anyone yet, but then at the hearing—”
“Nah, that’s not it,” Seth says, waving one hand at me. “Because that happened at what, approximately eleven-thirty in the morning? Yet the first confirmation of the engagement from you is hours and hours later, at Mom’s house, at approximately eight p.m.”
“Why do you know this?”
“I asked Eli and Levi.”
I want him to get to the point, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking questions, so I continue to wait.
“On the other hand, it seems that Mavis Bresley had heard the news and was informing others of it by approximately twelve-thirty that day. I myself heard it from Patricia Yardley—’
“Did you?” I smirk. “Does Trixie know where you’re hearing rumors from?”
“Trixie and I were never exclusive, and besides, we’re no longer seeing each other,” he says, like he’s impatient to move on.
“Doesn’t mean she’s not mad,” I point out. “When do I get to start tracking your rumors?”
My brother Seth is tall, charming, good-looking, and on account of those qualities, he’s been to bed with a sizeable chunk of Sprucevale’s female population.
As this spreadsheet proves, he’s also a huge dork.
“—anyway, I heard it from Patricia around two, still long before either you or Charlie had broken the news to anyone.”
“Congratulations,” I deadpan. “You’ve got the insider track on town gossip.”
“Except I should have known long before that,” Seth says, raising his eyebrows.
He temples his fingers together, really getting into this whole Bond villain thing.
“Even if what you’re saying about keeping it a secret and informing the court due to extenuating circumstances is true, you should have been on the phone telling your family the moment you stepped out of there,” he says. “Not saying anything for hours is highly atypical for you.”
“I’ve never accidentally shared news of a secret engagement before,” I protest.
“Even so, not the sort of behavior I’d normally expect,” he says. “Anyway, I did some analysis, and it turned out that the primary vector of the news was Pete Bresley, who just so happens to be a bailiff at the Burnley County Courthouse.”
“Yes, he was there,” I say.
“Furthermore, this regression suggests that Charlie herself was unaware of her own news until mid-afternoon, though it’s more difficult to pin down an exact time,” he goes on.
“She had her phone off.”
“And finally, there’s the most important data of all,” he says, swiveling back to me. “And that’s that the two of you haven’t been in a goddamn relationship this whole time and I don’t know who the hell you think you’re kidding, Daniel.”
There it is. Frankly, I’m surprised that he waited this long to confront me about it. I can fool a lot of people, but fooling my brothers is difficult, to say the least.
Doesn’t mean I won’t make him earn it.
“Yeah, that’s what secret means,” I tell him. “That people didn’t know.”
“I’m not saying people didn’t know,” he says. “I’m saying that maybe you can tell everyone else you and Charlie have been together for ages, but you can’t tell me that. So would you like to tell me what’s really going on?”
I look at the spreadsheet one more time, and I admit I feel a little bad that he’s clearly spent hours on this.
On the other hand, Seth really loves spreadsheets and formulas. Maybe he had fun. I don’t pretend to understand any of my brothers.
“Fine,” I admit, uncrossing my arms, sitting in the chair opposite him.
He leans forward, both elbows on his desk, satisfaction written across his face.
“I lied to a judge,” I start.
“ALL RIGHT, KID,” I say into the rear-view mirror. “You got any questions?”
Rusty kicks her booster seat a few times, like she always does when she’s thinking.
“Can I tell people I’m the flower girl?” she asks.
“Sure.”
“What if a police officer asks me whether you’re really engaged?”
I put my car into park, sigh internally, and turn around to face her. It’s the next day, Saturday, and we’re picking Charlie up before we go to RiverFest.
Everyone I know will be at RiverFest. Everyone. It’s the event of the year in Sprucevale.
I’m somewhat apprehensive about it, but it is what it is and there’s no going back now.
“If a police officer asks, tell them the truth,” I say, as seriously as I can muster. I wonder if I’m going to regret telling her that, but on the other hand, I don’t want to be the dad who asks his kid to lie to the police.
Just everyone else she knows, that’s all.
“What about a fire fighter? Or a doctor? Or my principal? Or—”
“Do you think any of them are going to ask you?” I say.
I thought we’d covered this, since I took her out to lunch for burgers and fries today and had a long talk about the fake engagement. She’s surprisingly excited about getting to play pretend for an extended period of time, but she made me promise again and again that Charlie would still like her afterwards, and that we wouldn’t really break up.
As usual, I felt awful. Rusty adores Charlie, and even though I reassured her a thousand times that Charlie’s not going anywhere, I think she’s still a little worried.
“Probably not,” she admits.
“Then how about we talk about that if it happens?” I ask, and she nods.
It’s Saturday afternoon, and we’re parked outside Charlie’s apartment, here to pick her up for our first date.
Sort of. It’s our first public appearance, so I offered to pick her up and she said yes. I’m not sure if it’s a date if my entire family, her family, and my kid are all going to be there with us, but it’ll sure be something.
I get out, get Rusty out of her booster seat, and head up Charlie’s stairs. She shouts to come on in when I knock, so we do.
Rusty goes instantly to her corner of Charlie’s living room that Charlie set up for her and regularly stocks with cool new stuff. I don’t think there’s anything new over there today, but within seconds Rusty is wearing enormous purple sunglasses, sitting on a fuzzy blue pillow, and reading a chapter book with a mermaid on the front.
“Sorry, give me a few,” Charlie calls. “I was about to get into the shower but then my mom called, and she wanted to know what our plans were for tonight, and then she started grilling me again about…”
She keeps explaining herself, but Charlie’s running late because that’s what Charlie does. It’s annoying sometimes, but I learned to deal with it long ago, so I lean to one side and glance at her bedroom door, wondering if it’s okay for me to go in.
It’s open about six inches. I lean more, and then I see her.
It’s not okay for me to go in, because Charlie’s not dressed yet.
Her back is to me. She’s wearing a bra and panties, and I should definitely turn around and look at something else, but I don’t.
In fact, I do absolutely nothing besides stand perfectly still. My mouth might fall open.
Charlie looks good almost naked. Even with her back to me, her body’s feminine and powerful all at once, a combination of curves and muscle that appeals directly to my lizard brain and shuts any higher functioning down completely.
Half a second later she slides something over her head, and then all of a sudden she’s decent, wearing a sleeveless mint-green dress that comes down to her knees, but the image of her undressed is already burned into my mind: the way her muscles flex lightly under her skin as she arranged her dress over her head, the gentle curve of her waist, the way she cocked one hip and then the other.
Furthermore?
The bra and panties matched. They were both black, but even in the half-second I saw them, I could tell they both had the same lace around the edges, and that simple fact makes my heart race like nothing else.
“Hey, Daniel?” she calls.
I take a quick step to the side and jam my hands into my pockets, glancing over at Rusty. She’s completely absorbed in her mermaid book.
“Yeah?” I ask, pretending I’m Mister Casual as Fuck.
“Can you come tie this for me? I’m completely incapable of tying bows behind myself,” she says.
“Sure,” I say, and walk into her bedroom. It’s controlled chaos as usual: laundry in big piles, but only in one corner. A precarious stack of books on her bedside table. Her bedside light sitting atop another, smaller, stack of books, also precarious. Her bed unmade, but cozy-looking.
“Thanks,” she says as I take one end of her sash in each hand. “Whenever I do it myself, I wind up looking like a Christmas present wrapped by a blind toddler.”
I focus every ounce of concentration I can muster on tying the mint green sash, because otherwise I might think more thoughts about unwrapping Charlie, and my daughter’s in the other room so I will not be thinking those thoughts today.
Not even some.
Her hair smells tropical, like coconut and pineapple.
None of those thoughts, I remind myself.
I finish the bow, adjust it, and step back. Charlie looks over her shoulder at herself in a full-length mirror.
“Holy shit,” she says.
“She’s right outside,” I remind her.
Charlie wrinkles her nose in apology.
“Sorry,” she says. “But every time I need a bow tied, I’m coming to you from now on.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice,” I say, nodding my head toward the seven-year-old in her living room, and Charlie just laughs.
“Right,” she says. “Maybe you can teach me how to French braid, too.”
“You might be surprised.”
“You guys ready?” she asks, dropping to her hands and knees.
“Yep,” I confirm. I don’t point out that yes, we’re ready, of course we’re ready, we showed up to her apartment exactly when we said we would and she was the one still getting dressed. Pointing that sort of thing out to Charlie doesn’t make any kind of long-term difference, and mostly just makes her feel worse.
“All right,” she says, lowering her head to the floor. “Let me grab my shoes and we can head out.”
I look away.
It takes all my willpower, but Charlie’s clearly not used to wearing a dress — I didn’t even know she owned one — and so instead of memorizing the way she looks with her ass in the air while she searches for her shoes under her bed, I look away.
I deserve a medal.
“I’ll let Rusty know,” I say, and saunter out of the room. She’s still sitting on the pillow, wearing huge purple sunglasses and reading her book. I don’t know how she can see to read, but it’s not my problem.
“You ready to hit the road again, kiddo?” I ask.
“Can I take the book with me?”
“Sure,” calls Charlie from her room.
“Thank you!” Rusty calls back.
A few seconds later, Charlie comes out. She’s wearing sandals, her hair down and cascading around her neck and shoulders. I think she’s got lip gloss or something on, and my great-grandmother’s ring is sparkling away on her finger.
And her bra and panties match.
I wish I didn’t know that last part. It’s not helping anything.
“You’re wearing a dress?” Rusty says. She sits up, cross-legged, and lifts her giant sunglasses up to get a better look at Charlie, who grins at the gesture.
“Yup,” says Charlie. “You’re wearing shorts.”
“Yeah, that’s normal,” Rusty says. “I didn’t know you had a dress.”
“I didn’t know that either,” I say, casually.
So, so casually.
I also didn’t know that she had matching—
Jesus, stop it.
“Betsy took me shopping yesterday after work,” she admits.
Then she twirls once. The skirt flares out briefly, then swishes around her legs when she stops.
I’ve never seen Charlie look like this. I’ve seen her in coveralls and jeans and cutoffs and cargo pants and swimsuits and dressed as the planet Saturn, once, but never in a sundress that nips in at the waist and flares at the hips, that accentuates her breasts like this or that shows off her upper back—
“You look pretty,” Rusty says.
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, you look nice,” I offer.
“Thanks,” she says, one eyebrow raised, and I regret it immediately. Is there a lamer compliment than you look nice?
Fuck no, there is not.
“It’s a good dress,” I try again. “It’s got. You know. It twirls, and it’s good on your skin.”
Good on your skin. I sound like a serial killer.
What I’m really thinking is that she looks beautiful, breathtaking, that she’s always been pretty but there’s something about this simple summer dress that’s knocked me on my ass and all I can think of is the word nice.
I want to touch her. The feeling isn’t new but it’s surprisingly intense right now, the urge to brush my fingers along her arm, slide my hand around her waist, plant my lips on one sun-kissed shoulder.
“We should go,” I say, before I can accidentally say something like your eyeballs look delicious. “Ladies first.”
Rusty gets off the floor, puts the sunglasses back where she got them, and heads for the door in front of Charlie.
“Do I look okay?” Charlie asks under her breath when Rusty’s out of earshot. “I feel kind of weird—”
“You look incredible,” I say, the truth rolling off my tongue before I can think it through.
“Oh,” she says.
“I meant it. You look really nice,” I say, using that awful word nice again.
She looks down at herself, like she’s forgotten what she was wearing, and when she looks up, her cheeks are faintly pink.
“Thanks,” she says. “But you have to promise me that you’ll tell me if I come out of the bathroom with my skirt tucked into my underpants or something.”
It takes a heroic effort, but I don’t visualize Charlie, her skirt tucked up inappropriately, black panties with lace edge on partial display.
Nope. Not at all, and definitely not while my seven-year-old daughter is impatiently waiting for us on Charlie’s steps.
“As long as you tell me if Rusty dumps glitter in my hair again,” I say, and Charlie laughs.
“Deal,” she says, just as Rusty’s face pops back around the door frame.
“Are you coming?” she asks, and I hold the door for Charlie as we leave her apartment.
