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Despite how easy Charlie was to talk to, he was there to give me a tour of the place. I needed to understand the property in order to do good work for Bruce Ames and earn back some of the respect the man had lost for me after the fiasco with his daughter. “So, that’s the brewery building up ahead?” I asked.
Charlie cleared his throat before responding. “Yes. That’s where we make the beer. We currently distribute to four countries in Europe besides delivery to most of the UK.”
“Seems a lot for such a small facility,” I said without thinking.
“The building is much bigger than what you see there.” With that, he continued the tour as if we hadn’t just shared pieces of our past and revealed vulnerabilities we had in common in the form of our parents. As he spoke of the history of the facility and how the company had started brewing its own beer, I noticed a new comfort between us, as if we were no longer strangers but something a little more than that. When the natural silences came into our conversation, they were easy rather than awkward, and for the first time in a long time, I felt at ease like I usually only did with family and close friends. It made me wonder if my attraction to him, which hadn’t waned in the least despite my brain now being alcohol free, was because of this ease between us, rather than his physical presence.
That was it.
He was a kind human. I was naturally drawn to him because of his gentle and interesting personality, not because he was sexy. I must have sensed his magnetic personality the night before when we’d first met. Charisma. That’s what it was called when certain people drew others to them so effortlessly.
Charlie was charismatic. That was all.
It was a relief to finally understand I wasn’t actually attracted to him physically… it was a different kind of attraction all together. I didn’t have a problem with men being attracted to each other of course, but if I was feeling attraction to a man for the first time in my midthirties, it sure as hell would be confusing. I should have felt relief at the realization, but all I felt was my stomach rolling around like it did on the few occasions I got a calculation wrong in my reports at work.
I tried to ignore the sensation, but as we approached the brewery building, Charlie leaned over to pick up a cigarette butt off the ground. His shirt rode up to expose a strip of pale, creamy skin above a colorful, rainbow striped waistband peeking out from his jeans.
My dick went straight for it, filling and jutting out so quickly, it reminded me of the time one of the girls in my biology class in high school leaned over to pick up a dropped pencil and showed half the class her thong. The sudden blood rush left me dizzy with want.
Oh god.
It wasn’t just his sweet personality after all. I was pretty sure I wanted to see him naked, to touch his bare skin and kiss his full lips. Could it really have taken me thirty-four years of life and thousands of miles from home to realize maybe I wasn’t as straight as I’d thought? No. That couldn’t be right.
Surely my confusion was simply a combination of jet lag and a hangover.
I hated traveling.
When we entered the brewery, Devlin Murray called out from across the reception area.
“Oy. Over here then. I was wondering if you wanted to test out that ring bit you was telling me about earlier.”
I glanced at Charlie who clearly had no idea what his boss was referring to.
“I do have a sample of the, ah…” I took a deep breath and tried to get my shit together. “I brought several samples of the device I came up with in case you wanted to play around with it.”
Devlin stood up from behind the reception desk. “Let’s go put that little yoke to work, shall we?”
I wasn’t sure what a yoke was, but I had to assume it was my head regulator.
The older man winked at me before leading us down the hallway through a doorway to a big open warehouse space where I immediately saw a long bar set-up with several different sets of taps.
I pulled out the constrictors sample I kept in my pocket. Bruce had suggested the doohickey might make for a good ice-breaker. I didn’t expect the thing to actually interest anyone beyond the novelty of it, but I was happy to have a chance to let him play around with it and see what he thought.
Devlin went around behind the bar where he gestured toward a single tower tap. “Hudson, you’re up. This one’s Beamish unless you want something else?”
