Sweet

Her older colleague, Kaameh, looked back and forth between us, but I held my straight face and pretended not to notice her studying my reaction. Near unbearable when I wanted to stalk up to that stage, pick Pearl up, take her straight through the back door, and press her up against the wall outside. I wanted to untie and unravel the folds of that white shirt until I freed her from it, push that little skirt just high enough to get my hands underneath, and tell her to wrap her shapely legs around me, boots and all. I wanted to kiss her until she couldn’t think. Until I couldn’t think. Which wouldn’t take more than two seconds of her pretty little mouth under mine.

By the third bar, Pearl was drunker than I’d ever seen her. I shouldn’t have liked that, but damn, I did. She giggled and leaned against me and said, “Hiiiiii, Boyce.”

She pulled me out on the floor to dance, something I wasn’t fond of doing until right then, with her. Under the light of a disco ball, we two-stepped to Lonestar and slow-danced to Green River Ordinance, and she twirled around me to some damned boy band I was happy not to know the name of while I made sure she stayed upright.

At the end of the night when I drove her home, she curled in the passenger seat with a silly smile on her face and fell asleep. I carried her to the front door and her stepdad let me in, chuckled at the pint-sized snores coming from her, and led the way to her bedroom. I didn’t let on that I knew and remembered exactly where her bedroom was.

“I take it she had a good time tonight,” he said.

“She sure did. She may regret it in the morning, but she enjoyed it fully.”

She came to when I laid her on the bed. I took her boots off and set them out of the way and moved the wastebasket closer. I wanted to help her out of that shirt and skirt—neither of which would be comfortable to sleep in—but I reckoned that was inadvisable under the circumstances of parents hovering just down the hall, waiting for me to leave.

Then she told me I was sweet, which was a cockeyed, harebrained, undeniably drunk thing to say. “That’s why I love you,” she added before nodding off, and everything tangled and froze—the heart in my chest, the breath in my lungs, the thoughts in my head.

I stumbled into the hallway and down the staircase like I was the one who’d downed margaritas and shooters like they were going out of style.

Before I reached the front door, Dr. Frank came out of the kitchen and pressed a bottle of water into my hand. “Thought you could use some rehydration for the road. Listen, I know it’s late, but if you’ve got a minute, I had a question or two about the garage.”

Still dazed, I mumbled, “Um, sure,” and followed him into the kitchen. We passed the table and sat at the granite bar on a couple of barstools like we were just two guys shooting the shit instead of me and Pearl’s stepfather at near three o’clock in the morning. I twisted the cap off the bottle of water and swallowed half of it.

That’s why I love you.

Dr. Frank knit his hands together on the bar, pointing his index fingers toward me as he spoke. “Pearl says your mama’s taken ownership of the garage and intends to sell it off. That accurate?”

I nodded once, knocked catawampus by Pearl’s drunken confession. Would she mean it sober? “Yes, sir. She’s just waiting for the official transfer to go through.”

“Have you—or has she—had a business valuation done on the garage? To know its worth as a going concern versus auctioned liquidation of the property, tools, and equipment?”

Auctioned liquidation. That jerked me right back to earth. I had no damned intention of hanging around to witness that and didn’t particularly want to discuss the likelihood. “I handed the spreadsheets over to Mr. Amos, her attorney, but I have a decent idea of it since I’ve been doing the accounting for a couple of years now.”

He rubbed his chin and then said, “The probability that your mama will find a taker for that place without you at the helm is low. She’s more likely to break everything up and unload it piecemeal, I’d guess.”

Meaning liquidation. Yeah. Got it. “I reckon so,” I said. I liked the man well enough based on how Pearl felt about him, but there was only so much of this rubbing-salt-in-the-wound shit I could take.

“So she might be interested in selling the whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel, to a singular entity.” He laid this statement down like he was placing a hand of cards faceup on a table and watched as the purpose of his questions hit me.

“To you?”

“Possibly. I’m always on the lookout for investments, especially here on the island, particularly small, locally owned businesses. It’s good for my personal property value and my practice that this place maintains its laidback, small-town image. That said, you, as the current key employee, would have to be part of the deal—that’d be an associated agreement. If you’re not game, I’m not game.”

“Are you… suggesting that you’d buy Wynn’s and I’d work for you?”

“I’m planting the idea in your head. We probably don’t have a whole lotta time, but we’ve got a few days. Mull it over. If you are interested, I’ll get my CPA in touch with your mama’s attorney and get a look at those numbers. There’s due diligence that’d have to happen before any deal, you understand, handshake or paper.”

I drove home in a stupor, as unprepared for the next shock of the night as I was for the first two.

• • • • • • • • • •