Page 32 of Never Let You Go

She has a magic touch with Skye.

She’s a gem of a woman.

I’m fucked, right?

Yeah. I’m fucked.

“Something wrong with the pulled pork?” Justin says, interrupting my thoughts.

I zap out of it. “It’s delicious.” I take another bite and then another before it gets cold.

He frowns and leaves, shaking his head. When he comes back a few minutes later with a tall glass of iced tea, he talks my head off about an outdoor restaurant section he wants to put together for the fair this summer.

At the mention of the summer fair, I have an image of Alexandra in a sundress, the gentle breeze showing her thighs, the sunlight playing in her hair, her laughter cascading down my body. But she’ll be gone by summer. I tune him out and agree to whatever he thinks I should be doing on my end.

“So… Alex, huh?” Justin says after a long pull on his drink.

“What about her.”

His eyes stay zoned in on me. “She’s hot.”

My jaw clenches.

“You don’t think so?” He says when I don’t answer.

I force a shrug. “She’s my employee.”

“So?”

“So what?”

He looks her way. “Where’s she staying?”

I narrow my eyes on him. “How so.”

“Where does she live? She from around here? Never seen her before.”

“You know where she’s staying.”

“Won’t believe it until I hear it from you.”

Justin and I go way back. We have that kind of friendship where I don’t need to tell him anything. He knows when something’s up with me, and what’s up, without me needing to tell him. It’s half because we go way back, half because this is a small town, and half because he’s the pub owner and bartender on top of having grown up on a local farm.

I know, that’s more halves than you need to make a whole, but it doesn’t even begin to cover everything that Justin is.

He produces a notebook. “I’m taking bets on how long it’ll take you to get in her bed. Wanna see the odds?”

Yeah, he’s also half asshole.

I pretend to grab the notebook, expecting him to keep it out of my reach, but he lets me take it. I flip it open to make my point that no one cares but him, but there it is. Three neat columns, with the names of my friends on the left, a date in the middle, and a dollar amount on the right.

Make that total asshole. “You gotta be kidding me,” I say as I throw the notebook on the counter like I don’t care. “You guys need to get a life.”

“We need to get a life?”

I nod. “You guys are sad.”

He smacks his lips. “You know what’s sad? Let me tell you. That girl over there has been looking at nothing but you since you got here, and you’re not going to do a goddamn thing about it.”

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