Page 2 of Slash & Burn

The collective exhale from the rest of the café had my brother puffing out his chest. He lived for moments like that.

“Joey Jordan, our hero,” I teased, stepping up to place my order. “What do you want?” I asked as Rhys gave him an appreciative smile.

“Nothing, thanks. I had breakfast with LeAnn this morning and she’s keeping me to one cup a day.”

I laughed at the scowl on his face as I handed Rhys my loyalty card. My sister-in-law was good.

“The usual?” Rhys asked, their blue hair falling into their face before they swiped it away. It was a blue week, I noticed. Blue hair, blue eye shadow, and blue nail polish on alternating fingers. The shade was a little bright for my taste, but it brought out their eyes.

“Yes, please. And if you have any of those mini Muddy cream pies, can I have one of those for later?”

Rhys chuckled knowingly. “Everything okay?”

Joey’s expression had narrowed on me too. “Yeah, you all right? Adam call you again?”

It was the hazard of never having left the small town I grew up in, that everyone knew I only craved sugar when I was stressed. Some might call it heartwarming. I called it troublesome. Invasive. Ridiculous. Every girl deserved a little private freak out from time to time.

“No.” I eyed Joey, annoyed he’d brought up my ex so early in the morning. “I’m fine,” I told them both, my tone strong enough to send Rhys scurrying away with a sheepish look.

“Now, I know you’re not.” Joey eyed me with his annoying investigator face. The one he’d perfected when we were still kids, long before he got paid to put his mean-mugging to work patrolling the county.

“It’s nothing.” He wasn’t going to drop it, so I sighed and added, “Just work.”

“$2.7 million in town funding isn’t exactly nothing.” He held up the paper, the local budget discussions dominating the headlines.

When Rhys handed me my drink and sugar therapy, they gave me a sympathetic look and I thanked them before turning to head for the door with Joey hot on my tail.

“It’ll be fine,” he said as we spilled out onto the sidewalk, before I even had a chance to turn around.

“I know it will.” I tried to sound upbeat, convincing. But fooling my brother was impossible on a good day. And today was not even close.

“The vote is months away. It’s a little early for you to be this worried.”

I sat my coffee on top of the metal gazette box out front of the Muddy Grounds coffee shop. The broken glass-front caught my brother’s eye and I could almost see him making a mental note to check if any of the other free gazette boxes had been vandalized.

“It’s not just the vote.”

“Then what?”

I groaned. The real reason I’d gotten my Muddy pie was almost too awful to speak out loud.

“They’ve given me a special assignment for the summer.”

His eyebrows rose. “That sounds like a good thing.”

“It’s not,” I mumbled, picking at the tab on my coffee lid. “Cleo made it clear the success of this project will directly impact the outcome of the budget allocations.”

“Then it’s definitely a good thing. You can crush this project and keep your job. What’s the matter?”

With my eyes on the crisp clear blue of the morning sky, I let out a long breath.

“It’s a summer reading collaboration with some professional sports team or something. And it would mean I’d have to speak in front of way too many people.”

Understanding lit up my brother’s face, and for a split second I thought he was going to say something sympathetic and supportive.

“Ah, gotcha. So, you’re worried you’re going to pee your pants in public?”

Should have known better.

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