Page 39 of Under My Skin
“Well?” Simon prompts, but I don’t know how much I want to tell him. Lucy opened up to me, and if she hasn’t told Simon how she’s feeling, maybe there’s a reason for it.
“Have you asked her about it?”
The bartender sets down Simon’s stout before assuring us she’ll be right back with the blueberry mule.
“Not yet. I will once there aren’t so many people around.” He looks over at Lucy again to see her let out a burst of laughter at something Troy must have said. “She looks like she’s having fun. I don’t want to ruin it.”
She does look like she’s having fun, and I hate the tightness in my chest at the sight of it.
I kind of wish I had stayed with them just so I could be the one to make her laugh like that.
Toni stares at me from the table. As soon as I meet her gaze, her head tilts, those sharp eyes silently appraising me. Whatever she sees in me, I know I’m busted. I can’t be jealous of Troy. Seeing Lucy in this new light is bad enough without giving me a reason to envy the guy with a dead owl in his station. I have to draw the line somewhere.
“She’s cute,” Simon says as he nudges my elbow.
My face pales. Does he know I’ve been thinking about Lucy? How the hell would he know that? I haven’t done anything to act on it. My panic lasts a solid second before I bring myself to meet his stare. He isn’t looking at me, though. His eyes are trained on the bartender as she sets down our final drink.
I anxiously scratch the side of my head and try to recover. “Yeah. You mentioned that when we walked up here. What about Toni?”
I hand the girl my card for the tab and thank her. Grabbing the drinks from the bar top, I turn to make my way back toward the table, but Simon doesn’t follow. When I pause to look back at him, he’s still eyeing the bartender who has now moved on to helpinganother customer. “Toni doesn’t take me seriously. Do you think I should ask for her number?” When he finally does look at me, he backtracks. “Wait. Did you want to ask for her number?”
It takes everything in me not to glance at Lucy before shaking my head. “I’m good.”
“Cool,” Simon says to himself with a nod. His gaze drops to the two drinks in his hands. “I’ll circle back before we leave.”
When we reach the table again, Lucy beams at us. Her shoulders drop, and she sits up straight as she reaches for her copper mug from Simon’s hand. She may have been laughing with Troy, but she’s not comfortable with him. Not yet anyway. I wonder if she would have relaxed the same way if it had been me. If Simon had stayed at the bar to ask for that girl’s number, would she have immediately softened? I kind of wish Simon would have stayed away so I could find out.
Simon’s little sister.
Why is such a simple fact having trouble staying in my thick skull? It doesn’t matter if she’d look to me. She’s off-limits. It doesn’t matter that I can’t stop staring at her lips as she takes her first sip, or that I’d give anything for her to stop giving her attention to Troy.
I take a sip to help clear my head. My eyes dart to Toni, but I look away before she has the chance to read me.
Lucy is off limits.
Simon’s little sister.
Lucy looks directly at me, and I almost choke on my beer. “Everett,” she says with a subtle lift to her lips. “Who did your logo for the shop?”
Setting down my glass, I try to remember. “I don’t know. It was a few years ago. I was broke and found someone online.” Our logo isn’t anything special, but it gets the job done. I don’t even think I had a good idea for what I wanted at the time, but the guy threw together something, and I went with it.
“I was thinking,” she says as she reaches for a napkin and arogue pen left by the last customer. “What if you did something like this?”
She starts to sketch letters. “The design you have now is fine, but it’s busy. There’s a lot going on in the font, and you don’t need the added graphic of a tattoo gun. I was thinking about the flooring you have upstairs, and if those floors are hidden downstairs too, it might be cool to lean into an industrial vibe.” She pauses her sketch to look up at me. “You can tell me to shut up anytime.”
I love hearing her talk like this. She’s passionate, and the fact that she has a vision for the shop has me feeling more awake than I did a moment ago. With a raise of my eyebrows, I shake my head. “I’m all ears.”
She grins and gets back to work. “If you simplify your logo, you could do a lot more with your branding in the shop itself. Make the aesthetic carry the brand.” She looks around On the Rock. “Kind of like this place does.” When her eyes land back on me, I see the spark of creativity behind them. “Think about it. Dark colors, industrial décor, copper accents. People would want to stop in based on the aesthetic alone. You wouldn’t need a logo with pictures and clutter. You’d stand out in other ways.”
I have to admit, I like everything she’s saying. Is this what she’s been thinking about while she’s been talking to Troy? There’s no way she came up with this on the ride over here. She was too busy panicking over Simon’s driving.
She stares at me expectantly, waiting for some type of reaction, so I nod toward the napkin still shielded by her hand. “Let’s see it.”
“There isn’t much to the design, but this is my poor attempt at showing you what I’m thinking.”
“I promise not to judge your napkin logo too harshly.”
She locks her eyes on me, a hint of warning before she turns the napkin and slides it across the table like some sort of payoff offer.
