Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80892 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 324(@250wpm)___ 270(@300wpm)
I thought back to our meeting at the bank.
Nope. There really hadn’t been any clues that I could remember.
Sure, Will hadn’t dated much in high school, but he’d been busy with sports. Plus, he had always worked after school and during the summer. I had always just assumed he hadn’t had time to do much else.
No, if I hadn’t just met Jamie—just seen her with my own two eyes—I never would’ve guessed that Will in a relationship.
Looking down the table at my old friends, I wondered briefly if any of them would feel the same kind of shock and surprise if they found out I was in a relationship, too. I wondered if they’d be as accepting as they apparently had been with Will and Jamie.
It was really a moot point, though. It wasn’t like I really had any prospects for settling down with a girl.
Well, not really.
The one woman I was interested in certainly wasn’t going to beat a path to my door… not with everything that currently stood between us.
“Brady,” Will elbowed me in the side. “Raise your glass, buddy. They’re talking about you.”
I had been so wrapped up in my thoughts that I hadn’t even heard Ben start to make a toast.
“—a toast to old times and thank God for keeping you safe all those years,” Ben was saying. “To good friends, and cold beer. To all the shit we’ve been through together and all the fun we’ve had. And to the next ten years being just as great.”
“Cheers.”
I raised my glass and nodded to my friends with a smile, then took another long drink.
It wasn’t the first time I had wondered how my life might have been different if I’d stayed in Castle Falls with my dad and my friends.
Seeing Will and Jamie not even trying to hide their love or their feelings really was a stark contrast to everything I had known—or had thought I’d known—about Castle Falls.
Maybe the small town wasn’t just a place people got stuck and had awful lives.
Maybe I was wrong.
It was all too much to take in at once. But for the first time in my life, the thought occurred to me that things didn’t have to be the way I’d always assumed. Love didn’t mean I was going to disappoint someone.
Maybe the person who had been standing in my way and making me miserable and lonely for the past ten years hadn’t really been my dad, or the NFL.
Maybe the person who’d been keeping me from love for the past ten years was… myself.
Chapter Twenty-Two - Joanne
I looked up from the reports I’d gathered just in time to see Naomi fish a piece of candy out of the little dish by the register and pop it into her mouth.
“Did you even unwrap it first?”
“Jesus,” Naomi jumped and shot me a sheepish grin. “Do you have eyes in the back of your head or something? I thought I was being pretty sneaky that time.”
I laughed and rolled my eyes.
Even on her best days, Naomi was about as subtle as a freight train.
“What are you doing over there with all those papers, anyway?”
I gave a half-shrug as I glanced at the ever-growing stack of reports in front of me.
It had been just over twenty-four hours since Brady had asked me to start gathering the shop’s financial information. I had already made my way through most of the items on his list, but damn, it was tedious.
I’d finally moved from the office to the front desk to sort through everything, just for a change of scenery. I had been sort of hoping that Naomi wouldn’t ask too many questions, though. It wasn’t a job I particularly enjoyed doing, but I didn’t want to bitch about it too much. No sense in bringing her mood down with talk of the impending sale.
Still, I didn’t want to lie to my friend, either.
“It’s, um, some reports and stuff that Brady asked me to get together.” I nibbled at my lip, wondering how much I should say. “Sales numbers, expenses… stuff like that.”
There. It wasn’t a lie, but it sort of glossed over the unpleasant parts, too.
Good enough.
“Do you know if he’s heard anything back from those corporate guys?” Naomi’s voice had dropped to a whisper, even though we were the only two people in the building.
Brady had left to make a second trip to the bank—presumably to pick up the rest of the paperwork from his list—and had said he probably wouldn’t be back in the shop for the rest of the afternoon.
I understood why Naomi didn’t want to shout her questions from the rooftops, though. It felt like we shouldn’t be discussing the topic at all, much less while we were at work. It just felt… weird.
But Naomi was still looking at me, eyebrows raised, waiting for a response, and I knew from experience that the look she was giving meant she wouldn’t be put off for long, even if I had been inclined to try.