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“What?” Lola asked. There was blackened marshmallow stuck to her lip. The fire flickered in the night, casting her face in temporary bursts of orange light.
“I’m just enjoying you,” I said.
Termite scurried under my legs. She was chasing after a firefly, apparently.
She smiled and leaned in to kiss me. I tasted burnt sugar on her lips, but I didn’t care.
“Oh how fucking cute,” Cassie said. She sat down on the log across from the fire and eyed Lola’s marshmallow warily. “You know when you burn food like that it increases your risk of cancer, right? Even cooking stuff on the grill like people do isn’t good for you. It–”
I raised a hand, shaking my head at her. “It’s better if you don’t try to talk her out of it. She might stab you with that skewer.”
Cassie raised her eyebrows and nodded silently. “Okay, then. Has anybody seen Paisley?”
“Yeah,” Lola said around a mouthful of food. She’d somehow acquired a plate of pulled pork and I had no idea where it came from. “She was here with some guy. It looked like a date.”
“Of course it looked like a date. If Paisley isn’t on a date, she’s getting ready for one.”
“Wow, don’t flatter me,” Paisley said. She’d come up from behind Cassie as she was talking. A kind of nerdy looking guy in a button-down was holding her hand. He smiled, reaching to shake Cassie’s hand.
“Hi, I’m Ted. Wow, that’s quite the grip.”
“Yeah,” Cassie said. “And I’ll use that grip on your neck if you treat her badly.”
“Noted,” Ted said with an easy laugh. “Hi,” he said, waving to Lola as he sat and then looking towards me. “Hi to you, too.”
I grunted. I’d gotten to know Lola’s friends from Cassie and Paisley and even some of the Fairhope locals. Now that we were living together just outside town on our little farm, I was on a first-name basis with most of the town. I felt a little protective towards Paisley, too, because I knew how important her friendship was to Lola.
“What kind of work do you do?” I asked Ted.
“Oh. I’m a software engineer. It’s boring, really, but I get to work from home. That’s why I came out here. I was driving through a few months ago and just kind of fell in love with the place. What about you?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. Honestly, it was. I’d tried to step down last year but the board made me a counter-offer. With Adrian gone, new leadership had stepped forward on the board and agreed it was best for the company if I was still involved to some extent. They suggested I could stay on in a reduced, advisory role. Trisha Frost was willing to stand in as the acting CEO, so long as I promised to advise her. I got the sense the change of heart was partly to do with guilt for not realizing what kind of snake Adrian Bellamo was and partly because of the trajectory I had the company moving in when I tried to step down. I still had to deal with David Cullum from time to time, but you couldn’t win them all.
Lola encouraged me to stay on because she thought I’d enjoy getting to stay partly in the loop with Stone Financial, and she’d been right. It also meant Lola got to keep her job, even if she was now working more for Trisha than she was for me, but she got to stay on with Cassie and Paisley, which she deeply enjoyed.
“Alright, then,” Ted said.
“There’s Greyson,” I said, standing.
Lola rolled her eyes, but got up with a very pregnant grunt and a helping hand from me. “If you keep getting so excited to see him, I might start getting jealous.”
I glared. “I wasn’t excited. I just wanted to ask him something.”
“Mhm,” Lola said, but I knew she got along really well with Harper, too. Ever since her kids had stepped in as dog-sitters, the two of them became close.
Greyson and I started a town football league, and I wanted to find out if he’d finished filling out the roster for the weekend’s coming game. I knew he’d managed to get his brother, Zack, on our team with some last-minute begging. It was a good thing, because Zack was just as big and imposing as his brother. With the three of us, we’d be virtually unstoppable.
“Hey, man,” Greyson said, clapping me on the shoulder.
“Any good news?” I asked.
He smiled broadly. “We’re full. The game is on.”
“Fuck yeah,” I said, pumping my fist.
Lola and Harper gave us both a look like we were acting childish, but they were also smiling. They may roll their eyes and give us sideways glances, but they were still there on the sidelines cheering for us as loud as anybody when we played.
