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“I know I’m good.”
Seth nodded, his jaw rigid. “We don’t need the show. Henry’s is all good. But you aren’t. You’re searching, always searching. Once you get over this show, there’ll be something else you’ll go after, thinking it’ll make you happy, but it won’t. Whatever it is, it won’t.”
I leaned back and crossed my arms, hoping that would curtail the urge to punch his know-it-all face. “I suppose you’re gonna tell me what will?” I said with the utmost sarcasm.
Seth stared me down. His brows shot up, as if he really thought I had an idea of what he was thinking. His voice was quieter when he said, “You’ve been a different person for the past two or three weeks. Like, pleasant. I heard you whistling while you were working on the kitchen schedule, for fuck’s sake. You hate doing the schedule.”
He kept staring. Leaning forward, I planted my elbows on my desk, wove my fingers together, and brought both my hands in front of my chin, not meeting his gaze, waiting him out, refusing to acknowledge where I knew he was going.
“Three little letters,” he said, smug as fuck, and I snapped.
“Ava lives in California. Two thousand miles away. Living out her dream, and that doesn’t include me.”
“Did she say that?”
I scowled at the dense fucker. “She didn’t have to. She’s there, isn’t she?”
“Did you ever once ask her to stay?”
An acidic chuckle came out of me. “How would that go in your head? ‘Hey, Ava, I know you just got a once-in-a-lifetime offer for the job of your dreams, but how ’bout you skip that to be a small-town chef’s girlfriend.’” I scoffed and shook my head.
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be either/or.”
“Why are you in here playing counselor?” I snarled, pushing down the faintest spark of hope that ignited at what he’d just said.
“Just returning the favor from when you set me straight a few weeks ago.”
Obviously he meant when I’d told him to pull his head out about Everly. “Our situations have nothing in common.”
“Let’s see. I fell in love with a girl who lived somewhere else, had a career somewhere else, and I was too chickenshit to go after her and ask her to stay,” Seth rattled off, as if I hadn’t been there.
“Key differences: Everly was an hour away in Nashville; Ava’s on the opposite side of the country. Everly was already doing her dream job and could do it anywhere. Ava’s just about to get started and she has to report to the studio five days a week.”
“There are options. What if you tried long-distance for a while? Her show won’t last forever, right? No show ever has.”
“It could last for years.”
“They still have breaks between seasons,” Seth said. “And you’ve got Zinnia here. She’s not you but she does a decent impression, all but the perpetual grumpy snarl. She can hold the fort down if you spend half your time in LA.”
I stared him down. I wanted to fight. I wanted to bite his head off and tell him how stupid his idea was. But there was a part of me that wanted to believe it was possible.
“Look, this isn’t your first time around with Ava,” he carried on. “It seems to me that, regardless of whatever you did to fuck it up in the past, there’s something there. Something that might be worth fighting for instead of just throwing up your hands, walking away, and being a dick every day for the rest of your life.”
I bided my time, my jaw clenched, hands still fisted together in front of me, not making eye contact, not giving my brother any indication that anything he was saying might resonate. But there were parts of it that fucking resonated.
“If you’re good with letting it end the same way it did before, then I guess that’s safe, familiar territory for you and you should go with it. But if you want a different outcome”—Seth stood and shrugged—“then you’d have to do something different than before. Now I need to get some work done. We open in less than half an hour.”
Which meant I had shit to do.
But I also had a staff in the kitchen, prepping away, including Zin. I was screwed up enough at the moment that they’d do better without me.
After another three seconds of watching me to see what I’d do, he turned, walked out of my office, and shut the door calmly behind him.
A storm raged inside of my head, making me want to come out of my skin. It’d been stirring for two days, building, but then my brother had known the buttons to push to blow it up.
I was torn between needing to explode and wanting to curl up under my desk and cry like a fucking baby. Neither would be okay, so I stood and shoved my chair back so hard it crashed into the wall, then went to my office door, whipped it open, and marched the six feet or so to the side exit and thrust it open, not so much as glancing toward my staff.
The rain was coming down in sheets, but I didn’t fucking care. The beer patio was in front of me, so I took a right and stormed to the shore, not giving a shit where I wound up, just needing to clear the noise in my head.
