Page 42 of Bad & Bossy

He went quiet for a minute, his eyes focused on the road in front of him. “Yeah, we’ve only got one that’s zero percent at the moment, and to be honest, it tastes like shit.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “Yeah, it does.”

He chuckled lightly, a little less stiffly than he did back at Lottie’s. “I want to make a good one. One that people will actively reach for instead of Bud Light zero, or the Peroni zero, or any other zero, for that matter.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “Probably better for you to drink that other than the shit you used to drink.”

He hit his brakes, stopping far more violently than a normal person at a red light. Why the fuck did you say that?

Silence hung over us for a moment, charged and angry, but when he finally spoke, it was as if the question hadn’t even phased him. “I like what I drink. I’m not picky, but I prefer shit that tastes good instead of having to mask it with juices and syrups. I wouldn’t say the non-alcoholic option would be better for me.”

I stared at him. Openly. “You wouldn’t get violently drunk on non-alcoholic beer,” I retorted, the words falling from my lips before I could even process them.

“I wouldn’t get violently drunk anyway,” he said. The words were spoken so fucking casually that I thought I’d misunderstood.

“What?” I blurted, turning in my seat and wincing from the seat belt digging into my rib cage. The light turned green and he took off, the car revving in anger as he picked up speed far more quickly than necessary. “You can’t apologize for what happened last year and then try to say that you didn’t get insanely drunk. You were drinking fistfuls at seven in the morning?—”

“Yeah, because my friends had just gotten married and I wanted to keep celebrating into the next day,” he interrupted, glancing at me briefly with a warning in his eyes. “I wasn’t proud of that. But you don’t have to make it sound like I did that all the time.”

I stared at him in disbelief, my lips parted, my nostrils flaring. Why was he avoiding the obvious? Or worse, was he being truthful? Was that genuinely just a one-time thing that got out of control, and all the talk about him being an alcoholic was completely unfounded?

“Why did you stop drinking then?” I asked, deciding that confronting him head-on was the best solution.

Another glance, another warning. “Who said I stopped?”

“Like, half the girls at work,” I snapped. “They think you’ve either been in rehab or went on a binge in Vegas for six months.”

His nose scrunched, a scoff echoing in the small space, but I caught how white his knuckles were as they gripped the steering wheel. “And you honestly believe there’s truth in their gossip?”

I didn’t know what to say. A part of me wanted to push him more, tell him how I’d heard story after story about how he’d shown up drunk to work on more than one occasion. Or the time he tried to lead a tour when he could barely walk. But there was a part of me that wanted to trust him, wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But I also knew how fucking good alcoholics were at hiding their addiction.

“Can you drop me off at Safeway?” I asked, killing the conversation. “I’ve got to pick up a few things then I can Uber home afterward.”

He glanced at me again, that air of warning wiped away. “I’ll just go with you.”

————

“Since when is milk this expensive?”

I glared at him as I leaned over the handle of the cart. The casual conversations going on around us while we communicated in tight, irritated sentences was definitely odd. It felt like we were some old married couple that hated each other’s guts, forced to work together on a grocery trip before spending the next week avoiding one another in our own house.

Either that or just two people who almost dated and had a baby together but one of them didn’t know.

Guess which one?

“Do you not do your own shopping?” I grunted, plucking the gallon with the latest expiration date off the shelf and dropping it in the cart.

“Not really.”

“Shocking,” I mumbled. I glanced down at the list in my hand, filled with necessities, and knew damn well that this would leave me strapped for cash until the end of the month. Exhaling an annoyed sigh, I noticed him looking at it before pulling the front of the cart toward the meat section.

“Is all of that just for you?” he asked, glancing back at me warily before staring down at the selection of ground beef I had placed in the cart.

“No, my sister’s staying with me at the moment.”

“To watch your son?”

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