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I grabbed Alys’s wrist and nibbled on her index finger. “They are pretty sweet.”
Maddox draped his arms over my shoulders and hers, and urged us toward the door. “It’s possible I’ve been living off energy drinks and potato chips for the last two weeks.”
“Crunch time,” Alys said. Was that a hint of a frown?
Not that I needed a reminder of where they’d been. She was a developer and he was the composer for a newer idea game company, and the most recent reason I hadn’t seen them in weeks was because they were pushing hard for another deadline.
“When do you not live off potato chips and energy drinks?” I’d rather tease them than miss them while they were still here.
Maddox tried again to urge us toward the front door. “When Gage’s is nearby.”
I let him lead, with a short pause to grab the phone and call into the back. “Stepping out, keep an eye on the store.” My voice would carry over the speaker phone back there.
“On it.” A shout drifted up from the storage room.
“Seriously. Starved.” This time Maddox succeeded in pulling us out of the shop. “Why are we fucking around with stupid jokes?”
“They were your jokes.” I’d missed this. I missed it every time they vanished for weeks on end because of busy work schedules, and I was going to miss them even more when I was gone.
They didn’t need to know any of that yet, because they’d try to talk me out of it and I’d let them. Then it would be more of me missing them. At least this way, with me selling, moving out of state to take over another store and do the same thing to it that I had to mine, I was the one choosing when and how to make the break.
We walked up Main Street, passing the handful of other shops between my place and Gage’s Grub. Unlike a lot of the business owners here, I hadn’t inherited my store from family.
I’d worked at Cat’s in high school, and helped the original owner keep the place relevant. I saw the end of the various medias coming, but there was always a desire for nostalgia. I made sure we had enough of a presence, enough of a reputation, to keep people filtering in from miles away. The right kind of merchandise and collectibles helped too.
And when the owner decided he wanted to retire to Arizona, I bought him out.
We reached Gage’s and pushed inside what was still an empty restaurant. It wasn’t quite eleven in the morning on a Saturday, and this sleepy small town was only starting to wake up.
Inside, it was easy to see which parts Gage had remodeled and which he was still working on. The overall style was the same everywhere, but some parts of it were newer. Shinier.
Our food was waiting at the counter when we approached, and so was Gage.
I was impressed. “You fucking psychic, man?”
Gage snorted and shook his head. “Yeah, that’s it. So psychic I knew…” He trailed off with a frown. “Yeah. Let’s call it that.”
So psychic I knew my wife was sleeping with another man. That was where the sentence was going. The divorce was what brought Gage back to town after so many years. Haddarville wasn’t quite the kind of place that sucked people in and never let them go, but it did have a way of drawing them back.
Not Alys and Maddox though. And in a few months, not me.
“App is working then?” Alys asked.
“Like a charm. Drinks are on the house.” Gage popped the tops off three bottled Cokes and set them on our trays.
Alys nudged us toward one of the tables outside. “We’ve been locked indoors for weeks. It’s summer, it’s not too hot yet, I want to sit in the sunshine.”
“They’ll revoke my goth card for sitting in the sun,” I joked. “But okay. Just for you.”
Maddox dropped into one of the iron seats and stretched out his long legs. “Pretty sure they revoked your goth card years ago, for selling Ozzy.”
“Man cannot live on The Cure alone.” Though, I had a few customers who would argue that point with me.
“Pretty sure there’s a strange sort of metaphor in there.” Alys grabbed a few fries and dipped them in the small chocolate shake on her tray.
Maddox took a large bite of his burger, and the next sounds out of his mouth might have been words, but they were completely unintelligible.
Ridiculous. I loved it. “Swallow first.”
