Page 93 of Brewbies
“Make it as interesting as possible.”
“Okay. Um…” He did his best to annotate in his mind before speaking up. “Sheriff Turnstalk was the county sheriff for a handful of decades. As long as I was alive, at least. His mother was Salish, so he held a lot of weight on the rez and kept things between their town and ours prosperous and peaceful. When he died in office, they held a special election and, even though I’d only been a deputy for a handful of years, the other officers and deputies talked me into running. So here we are. Two unopposed terms under my belt. One boring story.”
“Helps that the town is your namesake,” she said, bending down to extract a white feather drifting through the tall grasses on the riverbank.
“Doesn’t hurt. But it’s not why I ran.”
“Why did you?”
“Someone needed to. The town council was out of control, establishing insane zoning and business laws. The police were overrun with tourist issues, noise complaints, and bar fights, and the people in the outlying rural areas were being overlooked because of a deputy shortage. We didn’t have enough firefighters or EMTs. Turnstalk was a good man, but he did things his way. He didn’t listen to people. To the people he served. That’s what I promised I would do.”
“Which is why you shut me down?” she asked, keeping her voice even.
“Partly.” He winced, regretting the entire situation like hell. “I’m realizing…that those who bark the loudest don’t necessarily speak for the rest of the pack.” He ran an uneasy hand over his hair.
“Meaning what?”
“The world out there is so full of everything. Fear, mostly. Hatred. Division. Marginalization. One of the things that kept Townsend Harbor so special was the fact that all that bullshit seemed to leave itself at the tree tunnel.”
Noticing a slight shiver and goosepimples on her moonlit flesh, he wrapped his jacket around her shoulders, pleased when she nestled into it as he continued.
“For a while, it seemed like the place was truly frozen in time, and I guess I believed the illusion that the outside world didn’t need to…dilute it. Water Street barely survived the pandemic, and our town was almost brought to its knees by supply shortages and the loss of tourist dollars. Then something magic happened. Everyone pooled together to keep this town alive. In every way. The citizens here were generous with funds. With volunteer work. They were careful with each other’s health and safety and comfort levels. So many people who give their hearts and souls to this place are terrified it’ll give over to strip malls and Walmart. That the magic of this community will disappear into the depressing isolation we’ve become accustomed to these days. I guess some felt as though your shop was a portent of other things…”
She nodded, chewing on her lip. “I can understand that.”
“I realize now how myopic that was… Because change, though uncomfortable, is inevitable, and people in this town need to be dumped on their heads more often.” He paused at a bend in the river, catching at her hand and drawing her into the heat of his body. “Especially me.”
Ethan moved her to a large, flat stone slab shaped like an altar. He would sun himself here as a boy after fishing in the creek. “This is maybe my favorite place in the world.”
A liminal place. One neither here nor there.
A place in between. Just for them.
Music and laughter and lights were far over there, and couldn’t compete with the laughter of the water over stones and moss.
“Can I ask you something?” She tilted her head back, and her skin gleamed like the center of a moonstone. “You’ve never said a thing aboutwantingto be sheriff. I mean, you have a Stanford education and then you became a deputy?”
He shrugged. “What else would I be?”
“A trust fund douche?”
Perching on the rock, he opened his thighs, and she moved between them, pressing their bodies together more intimately than sexually. “I tried that for a week,” he said against her hair. “Got really bored. I’m not good at video games, and fishing is only relaxing if you’renotrelaxing from your relaxing life. If I’m not useful, I don’t feel like anything at all.”
“That’s sad.” She pulled her head back to regard him with melancholy eyes.
He cocked his head in puzzlement. “Why? It’s good to be useful.”
“Yeah, but you don’t want your worth to only be tied up into what you can do for others.”
“You don’t—er, I don’t?”
Elegant fingers charted a course down his jaw line to cup it in her hands. “What would you do for yourself? If you had no impediment to your dreams, what did little Ethan the fourth dream about on this rock?”
“Beer.” At her laugh, he said, “No. Seriously. When I was nine, my grandpa gave me my first sip of beer as a deterrent. I loved it so much, I snuck a whole glass and broke my toe on this very rock. Since then, he taught me about the mainstays of ale. How to brew it. The ingredients. How to grow your own hops and barley. The fermentation process. Even the history of it. Did you know that the earliest evidence of brewing beer dates back to about 3500-2900 BC? In ancient Iran, of all places. That’s just wild. I’d have loved to taste it.”
“I was not aware,” she breathed quietly.
“I lost you already.” He pulled her tighter.
