The Grump Who Stole Summer, page 2
“Partly,” I corrected and slumped into the armchair behind the counter while digging for a cigarette.
“You paid for half with your inheritance—inheritance you received from your mother and me.”
“Your point?” I lit the cigarette and tossed the lighter onto the paper-flooded countertop, kicking a leg over my knee.
He made a noise of frustration. The sound drew my eyes as I exhaled, and my father stopped before the counter. He hadn’t changed in all the years I’d been alive, so I hadn’t expected anything different since he last soiled the doorway to my shop three months ago.
The mop of thick dark hair combed like a helmet over his head still ate the light, and his plaid-lined blazer still looked as though it’d been run over by a truck half a dozen times. It’d been pressed so ridiculously thoroughly.
“You said you would quit.”
“You said I should quit,” I replied. “I don’t recall giving you a response.”
“Charles,” he started with that aggravating tone that alluded to disapproval and depressing suggestions on how to better myself.
My jaw clenched. “What do you want?”
He sighed, and my teeth gritted. I sucked in a drag strong enough to eradicate nearly half the cigarette, then leaned forward to flick ash into an empty takeout box. “I know you’re going to say no, and I know you’re going to hate it, but well, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter.” His shoulders lifted slightly. “The decision is final.”
Already fed up, I stabbed out the cigarette on the noodle box. “Get to the point.”
“You have a new employee. She starts today.” He gazed around. “She should already be here, actually.”
“Excuse me?” I almost lurched to my feet and would have if my head wasn’t pounding like a motherfucker. I laughed. “I don’t fucking think so, old man. We’ve been over this. My shop. My rules.”
“It’s a favor for a friend in a very high place. I’ve already promised her it’s okay.”
“I don’t care if it’s a favor for the fucking queen. The answer is, and will always be,” I enunciated the last two words slowly and through my teeth, “fuck no.”
“Half my shop, half my rules, Charles,” he said with a shocking burst of anger that was backed up by the reddening of his cheeks. “The matter is already settled.” He poked the air with his finger. “It’s final. Done.”
“Yeah? Are you going to pay her wages then?” It sure as shit wasn’t coming from what remained of my inheritance. No fucking thank you. That money was to see me through until I eventually crawled into a hole and carked it.
Mr. Moneybags over here, though? Well, he could go right ahead and pay her. I’d just send her home as soon as she showed up. Win, win for the both of us.
“It’s my understanding she is willing to volunteer her time. You barely make enough to keep the lights on.” His tone lost some of its bite. “So you will accept her, play nice, and have her help you get this place back to rights, or”—his voice rose when I began to protest again—“you can find the money to buy me out because unlike you, I’m done allowing ghosts to haunt me.”
With that, he gave me a sharp sweep of his dark eyes, then shook his head without upsetting one single strand of his slicked-back hair as he made his way to the door. “I’ll check in to make sure you haven’t frightened her away.”
“I’d rather you didn’t bother,” I grumbled, but the door slammed closed.
That fucking pompous shit was missing more than half his brain if he thought anyone was working in this fucking shop. He didn’t really care what happened to it. He hadn’t cared for years. It had been hers, and if it weren’t for me, he’d have sold it years and years ago without ever once looking back.
I couldn’t let him do that—even if I never envisioned myself winding up a hermit in a bookstore. I could never let him erase this last piece of her. This place had meant everything to her, her third love after me and the lousy fuck who’d just ruined my vibe.
Sure, it was a little… run-down. But I had my seasons just like everything and everyone fucking else. I didn’t need someone sticking their filthy mitts all over my shit and changing—
The door opened. I pushed to my feet, already glaring death their way and ready to send them straight back out onto the street in tears.
Words dissolved into acidic ash over my tongue.
The platinum blonde bombshell draped those clear summer-sky eyes over my home, my ghosts, my insecurities, my safe haven.
The cursory inspection felt as though she’d ripped my chest open to peer inside and finally confirm I was lacking.
That I would always be lacking.
She couldn’t be here. She lived in the next state over with her preppy pricks and tit-flashing friends. She no longer lived in Eloise. She could no longer threaten me with her mere existence.
Yet here she was.
In the fucking cave I’d pilfered to hide from the likes of her.
Slowly, her eyes crawled back over the aisles, and in a purple dress that was better suited as a swimsuit with a barely there skirt and matching death-trap heels adorning her feet, she took a hesitant step forward.
Then froze.
I grinned, infusing it with enough malice to warrant the fear that stampeded into those eyes and slackened those bow-shaped, crimson-painted lips. “Wonderland, I do believe you’ve taken a very wrong turn.”
Alice
Four years ago
There were better places to hide out, but the tree house I’d spent endless days in as a kid was my current favorite for smoking.
Not only due to its position at the very back of our property, half curtained by the woods, but because there was no noise. There was only the nightlife. The bass of the music slamming against the walls of the pool house containing my sister and her friends barely reached me.
Usually, I’d be with them, or at least trying to be while my parents were out of town on one of my mother’s many business trips. Not tonight. Not likely this summer at all.
I lit the end of the blunt. One of a handful I’d stolen from a guy I hadn’t recognized who’d snuck into the house on my way out. Just another stranger my sister had collected since arriving home from college. I’d been thankful he hadn’t known me, that many of them wouldn’t. Not because he could rat me out to my sister, she wouldn’t care, but because I’d suffered enough embarrassment this past month.
Finally, my reprieve—summer—had arrived. Yet I felt no relief. The bitter taste of regret and that residual hurt lingered like a virus I couldn’t kick.
It didn’t help that Brooklyn’s sister, Desiree, was here. I’d seen her car in the drive. I’d heard that laughter so familiar to her sister’s. It didn’t matter that most of those getting drunk and high in our pool house might not know me—she did. She knew me.
And she’d know everything, whether it be the truth or otherwise.
I startled when a thud broke the evening cicada song and moved to peer out the rotting doorway when a head breached it.
The intruder paused, long dark lashes curling slowly over moss-green eyes, and then frowned. “Who are you?”
“That depends on who’s asking,” I said, smiling coyly.
He was cute, but when he squeezed his giant frame, his leather jacket scrubbing against an exposed nail, into my safe haven, I discovered that was far too meager a word.
He smelled both extremely fresh and a little musty, like pine and cigarettes. I’d have never thought such a combination would be anything other than gross until he folded himself across from me and flicked the mess of dense black hair back from his face.
He smelled delicious—like he’d make a tasty distraction.
I sucked back another drag of the forgotten blunt, my eyes upon the stranger as he brought his knees up to his chest, then let them fall apart slightly. His jaw was peppered with dark bristle. Not thick enough to be called a beard, but dark enough that only tiny patches of his marble-hewn jaw could be seen.
Smoke wafted over his black jeans as I exhaled. “Want my fingers on your face?”
He coughed, then glared. “What?”
“Your facial hair,” I said, still smiling. “I kind of want to run my nails over it.”
He eyed the blunt in my fingers. “How many of those have you smoked?”
“Two,” I said, thinking out loud. “No, three.”
“Do you make a habit of asking strange dudes if you can molest their faces?”
“Only the ones who steal into my safe house.”
“Safe house?” he asked, leaning back against the wall between the window and a long-faded painting of a sun above a three-story home.
“Yes. What brings you here?”
He gestured to the blunt. “I was hunting for that and some fucking quiet.”
“You’ve got quite the nose then,” I joked.
He didn’t laugh, didn’t so much as smile. He just leaned forward and took the weed from me before leaning back and inhaling two deep drags. His eyes closed, and he turned his face toward the cobweb-smattered ceiling. I felt myself relax further while watching his body visibly melt into the wood.
“That’ll be ten dollars.”
Watching his throat move with his caustic voice woke something inside me. “Add it to my tab.”
“Where are you from?” He was American, but some of his words were sharp, polished with just enough of an edge to suggest a nearly deceased English accent.
“London. Darling Dad dragged us here when I was six. So”—he burped and pointed the blunt at me—“before you ask, I haven’t met the royals. I don’t remember and can’t tell you shit about the place.”
“Don’t care much for royalty.”
“Suppose you and your family are close enough to it in this pissing contest of a town that you wouldn’t.”
“Ha, no.” When he just kept on smoking, I asked, “How do you know Tiana?”
“Same way most of these assholes probably do.”
I detected some annoyance, but that didn’t stop me from prodding. “You like her.”
He flicked the roach through the door, then handed me another glare. It wasn’t as effective as the first, being that his eyes were now hooded. “What’s it to you, weirdo?”
I snorted. “That’s the best you’ve got?”
He lifted a shoulder and let it slump as though it had been a tremendous effort, then looked outside to the trees.
“You know she’s my sister.”
He looked back at me then and tilted his head. Those eyes roamed over me, a cold assessment that unintentionally warmed, and his brows furrowed. “Yeah, but you don’t look like her.”
“I do a little.” I gestured to my face. “Just not the hair and eyes.”
He blinked. “Why are you hanging out down here instead of filling your underage organs with more illegal substances?”
“How do you know I’m younger?” A mere internet search would prove that I was, but I wanted to poke him.
“You’re in a fucking tree house.”
I raised a brow, then decided I didn’t much care about his opinion of me and my maturity—or lack thereof. “It’s not just a tree house. It’s a safe house.”
He stared at me for what felt like endless moments, then nodded. “Cool story.” With an alarming display of sudden agility, he leaped out of the tree house and left without another word.
Alone once more, but now with the scent of an intriguing stranger permeating the heat of my enclosure, I decided I’d wait a little while longer before smoking more and closed my eyes.
They opened when that same memory reappeared, and I reached for the notebook and pen I kept tucked on a shelf near the ceiling.
Crickets and cicadas continued with their screaming. My bare toes rubbed over the worn wood, and the pen hovered. It hovered, and then, it clanked to the floor, lost through a gap to the grass far below when he came back.
“All right,” he said, hauling himself inside to occupy the seat he’d vacated maybe twenty minutes ago. “To be clear, I don’t fucking care, but just tell me why you’re hiding.”
My lips parted. “Why?”
Settling with a slight groan, he muttered, “Let’s just say you’d be doing me a favor.”
“And what if I don’t want to?”
“You’re smiling.” He released a yawn, then cursed as if hating the interruption. “A real smile. You want to.”
“You’re very sure of yourself,” I said, wondering what had happened that’d made him walk all the way back down here into the dark to sit with the weirdo who’d declared her desire to scratch his face.
“It’s a gift,” he said with so much apathy that I withheld a laugh. “So”—he clasped his fingers between his bent knees—“what is it? Did some guy scare you off? Or,” he said with feigned delight. “Could it be that the guy you like is currently in that pool house, dry humping some other girl, and you’re lamenting your shit timing and fate?”
I did laugh then, sobering quickly as I decided to knock him down a few precious pegs. “Not a guy, wiseass. A girl, actually.”
His brows jumped. “Oh.” He seemed to mull that over for a moment before saying, “She’s here then?”
“Her sister is,” I admitted but opted to say no more. Though, really, I didn’t know why I cared. Half of this stupid town probably knew about it anyway. Especially those from Eloise Prep or with family attending.
I wasn’t embarrassed for the reasons people might enjoy thinking and talking shit about. But I couldn’t deny that I was embarrassed. Anyone who’d been shunned after having their heart dismantled and put on display so publicly would feel some form of embarrassment.
But it was more than that. So much more than that.
“What happened?” he asked, resting his head back against the wood, sharp eyes gazing at me down the strong, unblemished bridge of his nose.
Staring back at him, I smiled, then reached for the last blunt beside me and lit it.
He waited, presumably for an answer. After inhaling a few drags, I said, “Here,” and handed the weed over as I slid to the ladder. “Your wounds appear fresher than mine.”
I avoided the pool house by walking behind the miniature orchard and breathed in the scent of citrus staining the air. The three-story mansion was silent and vacant save for two souls stealing away into a bedroom down the hall from mine on the second floor.
Tiana closed her door with a low laugh, and I slipped soundlessly inside my room.
I crossed it to the window behind my bed that gave view to the woods in the distance—to yet another boy who’d had his hopes crushed by Tiana Corvall.
Alice
Downtown was awake and thriving in a way that made my stomach protest.
Sunshine bounced off the windows of cafés, clothing boutiques, salons, and the European cars parked before them all at the curb. People mingled and gossiped while others walked their expensive little dogs and listened to the latest trends via music and podcasts.
Nothing had changed in this coastal town half-circled by the sea, yet everything seemed different.
Maybe it was just me.
I’d long thought of myself as an introvert. That was until I’d discovered that drowning myself in the presence of others helped drown the nauseating ache of heartbreak.
Perhaps I’m just somewhere in the middle, I thought, as I turned down my own favorite podcast, lowered my oversized sunglasses to shield half my face, and opted for the drive-through around the block.
An extroverted introvert. It was that or acknowledge that perhaps I had no fucking idea who I was anymore.
Unacceptable.
I was Alice fucking Corvall, and all I had to do was survive this miserable summer while somehow convincing my dear mother to find me another school—any school away from here—to see out my final year of study.
I drove through to the last window, where a young blonde snapped her gum and studied my Range Rover before barking at the barista. A second later, my large takeout cup was all but thrown at me with a, “That’s a lot of bird shit on your back window,” that effortlessly knocked me down about five thousand pegs.
“Thanks to you, too,” I muttered with a brief glance at the mentioned window. “Fucking seagulls.”
Whatever. Neither stopped me from immediately inhaling the liquid gold while accidentally jumping the curb on my way back out to Main Street. If there was one thing Eloise did get right, it was coffee.
My phone beeped as I sped through a yellow light. I ignored it, squinting at the directions on the dash, and headed toward the docks to the warehouse district.
Where it officially became impossible to wonder how this could get any worse.
No one ventured to this side of town unless they were fucking someone they shouldn’t be or working there.
Unfortunately, I was the latter.
With a helpless whine, I took my time pulling over upon spying a swaying sign that said something about books, but I couldn’t force myself to make any kind of haste.
Instead, I checked my hair, my mascara, and then, leaning against my car, I replied to Zoey’s text while I finished my latte. I was late. Like really late. So, of course, I was stalling even more to avoid having to face the repercussions.
This joke needs to end, Zoey’s next text read. Srsly, not funny anymore.
Gazing up at the old two-story home with its peeling butter-yellow paint and white-wrapped verandas, I muttered, “Don’t I know it.”
I’d pleaded with the woman who was supposed to be my mother via text and voicemail, being that I was now twenty-fucking-one, to no avail. This insanity was real. I actually had to do this. Live back at home, attend a lower-level college, and work here… in this house that was apparently a bookstore.
In all my years living in Eloise, I’d never known it existed. I’d always visited Barnes & Noble on Main Street. Again, no one ventured into the warehouse district for a little retail therapy. There was none to be had.
