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“The quote?” Ramoun clipped his measuring tape onto his belt and stuck his stubby pencil back behind his ear, then clapped meon the shoulder. “Go get some sleep, buddy, and I’ll call you later with the numbers.”
I watched as he climbed into his truck and pulled out onto the road, then I followed the glow of his taillights as he disappeared down the street. The same three words floated through my brain in a nonsensical loop.
I kissed Abbie. I kissed Abbie. I kissed Abbie.
My phone rang again. Assuming it was my mother, I fished it out of my pocket and hit the green Accept button without checking the caller ID before holding it to my ear.
“I kissed Abbie.”
A deep grunt rumbled through the speaker. “Yeah, that’s the kind of shit that’ll get you in trouble.”
I frowned at the voice—and the accent—and checked the screen for the caller’s name.Dylan.
“Fuck, sorry, bro.” I glanced up and down the street to make sure nobody had been close enough to hear my confession. “Just give me a second. I need to get inside and hide.”
Dylan was my cousin on my mother’s side. He was my age, and he ran a restaurant on his family’s estate in California wine country. Even with the distance between Valentine Bay and the States, we’d travelled back and forth a lot over the years and managed to stay close. Ironically, Dylan was a single dad with a story not unlike my own, a fact only occurring to me now that he had me on the phone. It had been a fucking long time since we’d spoken.
Dylan waited while I unlocked the door to The Stop, and when I’d collapsed into the closest booth, I set the phone on the table and set it to loudspeaker. “You still there?”
“Yep.”
Intuition niggled, so I asked, “Did Mum call you?”
“About an hour ago,” Dylan confirmed. “She asked me to talk to you but said she’d let you know about it first.” He paused. “I take it from your silence this is news to you?”
I set my elbows on the table and stared at the whorls in the wood, dragging my hands through my hair. “She’s tried to reach me four times in the last hour, and I couldn’t pick up. But it’s cool. I’m glad you called.”
“Thought you might be.”
“Got any advice?”
Dylan huffed out a laugh. “Buckle up?”
I groaned and sank back against the leather of the booth. “Thanks, mate.”
“Sorry. I’m not trying to be a dick about it, but single fatherhood is a fucking ride.”
“I’m barely a week in, and I believe you.”
“Aunt Lori gave me her version of the story, but I wouldn’t mind hearing it from you.”
I sighed and explained everything. I was more transparent with my cousin about how I’d freaked out when Heather first showed up and the pressure I was under, given all the balls I had in the air: Seb, the bar, the loan, the poker tournament. If anyone could understand what I was going through, it was Dylan. And he wasn’t much of a talker, so I knew my secrets were safe with him.
16
Will
After I bared mysoul, I braced for whatever wisdom Dylan had to share. His little girl, Isobel, was three years old now, so he’d been doing the single-dad thing for a while, and he’d had a father of his own who was actually good at the job. Dylan had to have a few secrets to raising a kid and running a business without dying from sleep deprivation or losing your mind.
“That’s tough.” Dylan paused, then said, “But where does kissing Abbie fit into all this?”
I dropped my head onto the table and banged my forehead against the wood a few times. Maybe it’d knock some sense into me.
“I just fucked up the most important kiss of my life.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I didn’t even realise I’d kissed her until nearly an hour later. She was rushing in to take Seb off my hands. I was rushing out to meet the contractor. I’m sleeping on a couch that’s too short to be comfortable, and I’m too fucking exhausted to thinkstraight. And I just… did it. It wasn’t even a good kiss. It was rushed. Ordinary. A ‘ten-years-married-with-kids’ kind of kiss.Fuck. Does she think that’s how I kiss?” I straightened, pissed off by the thought that Abbie believed I was a bad kisser. “That’s not how I kiss, all right?”
