“THANK YOU SOOOO much for having us, Pete,” I said as I pulled her into a
hug in the foyer.
She patted my back. “Any time. Any Monday, especially! Heck, every
Monday. Red, White Russians, and Blue could use fresh blood. You see
how things get stale in there. Maggie likes to humor me, but she’s not much
of a fiction person, and I think Lauren comes for the socializing. She’s
another faculty wife, like me.”
“Faculty wife?” I said.
Pete nodded. “Maggie works at the university with Lauren’s husband,”
she answered quickly, then said, “How are you getting home, dear?”
I wasn’t feeling the wine nearly as much as I would’ve liked to at that
point, but I knew I shouldn’t risk driving anyway.
“I’ll take her,” Gus said, stern and unamused.
“I’ll Uber,” I said.
“Uber?” Pete repeated. “Not in North Bear Shores, you won’t. We’ve got
about one of those, and I doubt he’s out driving around after ten o’clock!”
I pretended to look at my phone. “Actually, he’s here, so I should go.
Thanks again, Pete. Really, it was … extremely interesting.”
She patted my arm and I slipped out into the rain, opening the Uber app
as I went. Beneath the rain, I heard Gus and Pete exchanging quiet
goodbyes on the porch behind me, and then the door shut and I knew he and
I were alone in the garden.So I walked very fast, through the gate and down the length of the fence,
as I stared at the blank map on my Uber app. I closed the app and opened it
again.
“Let me guess,” Gus drawled. “It’s exactly as the person who actually
lives here says: there aren’t any Ubers.”
“Four minutes away,” I lied. He stared at me. I pulled my hood up and
turned away.
“What is it?” he said. “Are you worried it’s a slippery slope from getting
into my car to going down the Slip ’N Slide on my roof and competing in
my heavily publicized Jell-O wrestling matches?”
I folded my arms. “I don’t know you.”
“Unlike the North Bear Shores Uber driver, with whom you’re quite
close.”
I said nothing, and after a moment, Gus climbed into his car, its engine
sputtering awake, but he didn’t pull away. I busied myself with my phone.
Why wasn’t he leaving? I did my best not to look at his car, though it was
looking more appealing every moment I stood there in the cold rain.
I checked the app again. Still nothing.
The passenger window rolled down, and Gus leaned across the seat,
ducking his head to see me. “January.” He sighed.
“Augustus.”
“It’s been four minutes. No Uber’s coming. Would you please get in the
car?”
“I’ll walk.”
“Why?”
“Because I need the exercise,” I said.
“Not to mention the pneumonia.”
“It’s like sixty-five degrees out,” I said.
“You’re literally shivering.”
“Maybe I’m trembling with the anticipation of an exhilarating walk
home.”
“Maybe your body temperature is plummeting and your blood pressure
and heart rate are dropping and your skin tissue is breaking up as it
freezes.”
“Are you kidding? My heart is positively racing. I just sat in on a threehour-long book club meeting about spy novels. I need to run some of this
adrenaline off.” I started down the sidewalk.“Wrong way,” Gus called.
I spun on my heel and started in the other direction, back past Gus’s car.
His mouth twisted in the dim light of the console. “You do realize we live
seven miles from here. At your current pace that puts your arrival at about
… never. You’re going to walk into a bush and quite possibly spend the rest
of your life there.”
“That’s actually the perfect amount of time I’ll need to sober up,” I said.
Gus pulled slowly down the road alongside me. “Besides, I cannot risk
waking up with another hangover tomorrow. I’d rather walk into traffic.”
“Yeah, well, I’m worried you’re going to do both. Let me take you
home.”
“I’ll fall asleep tipsy. Not good.”
“Fine, I won’t take you home until you’re sober, then. I know the best
trick for that in all of North Bear Shores.”
I stopped walking and faced his car. He stopped too, waiting.
“Just to be clear,” I said, “you’re not talking about sex stuff, are you?”
His smile twisted. “No, January, I’m not talking about sex stuff.”
“You’d better not be.” I opened the passenger door and slid onto the seat,
pressing my fingers to the warm vents. “Because I carry pepper spray in
this tote. And a gun.”
“What the fuck,” he cried, putting the car in park. “You’re drunk with a
gun flopping around in your wine bag?”
I buckled my seat belt. “It was a joke. The gun part, not the ‘killing you if
you try something’ part. I meant that.”
His laugh was more shocked than amused. Even in the dark of the car, I
could see his eyes were wide and his crooked mouth was tensed. He shook
his head, wiped the rain off his forehead with the back of his hand, and put
the car back into drive.
“THIS IS THE trick?” I said, when we pulled into the parking lot. The rain had
slowed but the puddles in the cracking asphalt’s potholes glowed with the
reflection of the neon sign over the low, rectangular building. “The trick for
sobering up is … donuts.” That was all the sign said. For all intents and
purposes, it was the diner’s name.
“What did you expect?” Gus asked. “Was I supposed to almost drive off
a cliff, or hire someone to fake-kidnap you? Or wait, was that sex-stuff
comment sarcastic? Did you want me to seduce you?”“No, I’m just saying, next time you’re trying to convince me to get in
your car, you’ll save a lot of time if you cut right to donuts.”
“I’m hoping I won’t have to coax you into my car very often,” he said.
“No, not very often,” I said. “Just on Mondays.”
He cracked another smile, faint, like he’d rather not reveal it. It instantly
made the car feel too small, him a little too close. I tore my gaze away and
got out of the car, head clearing immediately. The building glowed like a
bug zapper, its empty, seventies-orange booths visible through the windows
along with a fish tank full of koi.
“You know, you should consider driving for Uber,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, your heat works great. I bet your air-conditioning’s decent too.
You don’t smell like Axe, and you didn’t say a word to me the whole way
here. Five stars. Six stars. Better than any Uber driver I’ve had before.”
“Hm.” Gus pulled the smudgy door open for me, bells jangling overhead.
“Maybe next time you get into an Uber, you should try announcing that you
have a loaded gun. You might get better service.”
“Truly.”
“Now don’t be alarmed,” he said under his breath as I stepped past him.
“What?” I turned back to ask.
“Hello!” a voice called brightly over the Bee Gees song crackling
through the place.
I spun to face the man behind the illuminated display case. The radio sat
there on the counter, producing at least as much static fuzz as crooning
disco. “Hi,” I replied.
“Howdy,” the man said with a deep nod. He was at least as old as my
parents and wire-thin, his thick glasses held to his face with neon-yellow
Croakies.
“Hi,” I said again. My brain was caught in a hamster wheel, the same
realization playing over and over: this elderly gentleman was in his
underwear.
“Welllll, hello there!” he chirped, apparently determined not to lose this
game. He leaned his elbows on top of the case. His underwear, thankfully,
included a white T-shirt, and he had mercifully opted for white boxers
rather than briefs.
“Hi,” I said one last time.Gus sidestepped between my open jaw and the counter. “Can we just do a
dozen day-olds?”
“Shore!” The underwear-baker grapevined down the length of the display
and grabbed a to-go box from the stack on top of it. He carried it back to the
old-school register and tapped out a couple of numbers. “Five dollars flat,
my man.”
“And coffee?” Gus said.
“Can’t in good conscience charge you for that stuff.” The man jerked his
head toward the carafe. “That shit’s been sitting in there sizzling for three
good hours. Want me to make you the new stuff?”
Gus looked to me pointedly.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s for you. What do you think? Free and bad? Or a dollar and …” He
couldn’t bring himself to say good, which told me everything I needed to
know.
“That shit” was always sitting in there, sizzling.
“Free,” I said.
“Five flat, then, as discussed,” the man said.
I reached for my wallet, but Gus headed me off, slapping five dollar bills
down on the counter. He tipped his head, gesturing for me to accept the
foam cup and box of donuts the man was holding. To fit twelve into this
box, they’d been compacted into one box-shaped mash of fried dough. I
grabbed them and plopped into a booth.
Gus sat across from me, leaned across the table, and pried the box open.
He stared down at the donut guts between us. “God, those look disgusting.”
“Finally,” I said. “Something we agree on.”
“I bet we agree on a lot.” He plucked a mangled maple-nut donut out and
sat back, examining it in the fluorescent light.
“Such as?”
“All the important stuff,” Gus said. “The chemical composition of Earth’s
atmosphere, whether the world needs six Pirates of the Caribbean movies,
that White Russians should only be drunk when you’re already sure you’re
going to vomit anyway.”
He managed to fit the whole donut into his mouth. Then, without an
ounce of irony, he made eye contact with me. I burst out laughing.
“Fffwaht?” he said.
I shook my head. “Can I ask you something?”He chewed and swallowed enough to answer. “No, January, I’m not
going to tell this guy to turn his music down.” He reached over and
snatched another donut clump from the box. “Now I have a question for
you, Andrews. Why’d you move here?”
I rolled my eyes and ignored his question. “If I were going to ask you to
encourage this guy to make one small change to his business practices, it
would definitely not be the radio volume.”
Gus’s grin split wide, and even now, my stomach flipped traitorously. I
wasn’t sure I’d seen him smile like that before, and there was something
intoxicating about it. His dark eyes flitted toward the counter and I followed
his gaze. The underwear-clad man was positively boogying back and forth
between his ovens. Gus’s eyes came back to mine, hyperfocused. “Are you
going to tell me why you moved here?”
I stuffed a donut chunk into my mouth and shook my head.
He half shrugged. “Then I can’t answer your question.”
“That’s not how conversations work,” I told him. “They’re not just even
trades.”
“That’s exactly what they are,” he said. “At least, when you’re not into
foot jobs.”
I covered my face with my hands, embarrassed, even as I said, “You were
extremely rude to me, by the way.”
He was silent for a minute. I flinched as his rough fingers caught my
wrists and tugged my hands away from my face. His teasing smile had
faded, and his brow was creased, his gaze inky-dark and serious. “I know.
I’m sorry. It was a bad day.”
My stomach flipped right side up again. I hadn’t expected an apology. I’d
certainly never gotten an apology for that happily ever after comment. “You
were hosting a raging party,” I said, recovering. “I’d love to see what a
good day looks like for you.”
The corner of his mouth twitched uncertainly. “If you removed the party,
you’d be a lot closer. Anyway, will you forgive me? I’ve been told I make a
bad first impression.”
I crossed my arms, and, emboldened by the wine or his apology, I said,
“That wasn’t my first impression.”
Something inscrutable passed across his face, vanishing before I could
place it. “What was your question?” he said. “If I answer it, will you forgive
me?”“Not how forgiveness works either,” I said. When he began to rub his
forehead, I added, “But yes.”
“Fine. One question,” he said.
I leaned across the table. “You thought they were doing your book, didn’t
you?”
His brows knit together. “‘They’?”
“Spies and Liquified Pies,” I said.
He pretended to be aghast. “Do you perhaps mean Red, White Russians,
and Blue Book Club? Because that nickname you just gave it is an affront
to literature salons everywhere, not to mention Freedom and America.”
I felt the smile break out across my face. I sat back, satisfied. “You totally
did. You thought they were reading The Revelatories.”
“First of all,” Gus said, “I’ve lived here five years and Pete’s never
invited me to that book club, so yeah, it seemed like a fairly reasonable
assumption at the time. Secondly”—he snatched a glazed cake donut from
the box—“you might want to be careful, January Andrews. You just
revealed you know the title of my book. Who knows what other secrets are
on the verge of spilling out of you?”
“How do you know I didn’t just Google it?” I countered. “Maybe I’d
never heard of it before.”
“How do you know that your Googling me wouldn’t be even more
amusing to me?” Gus said.
“How do you know I wasn’t Googling you out of suspicion you had a
criminal background?”
Gus replied, “How do you know I won’t keep answering your questions
with other questions until we both die?”
“How do you know I’ll care?”
Gus shook his head, smiling, and took another bite. “Wow, this is
terrible.”
“The donuts or this conversation?” I asked.
“This conversation, definitely. The donuts are good. I Googled you too,
by the way. You should consider getting a rarer name.”
“I’ll pass that suggestion along to the higher-ups, but I can’t make any
promises,” I said. “There’s all kinds of red tape and bureaucratic bullshit to
go through.”
“Southern Comfort sounds pretty sexy,” he said. “You have a thing for
Southern boys? No teeth and overalls really rev your engine?” rolled my eyes. “I’m led to believe you’ve never been to the South and
possibly couldn’t locate ‘south’ on a compass. Besides, why does everyone
try to make women’s writing semiautobiographical? Do people generally
assume your lonely, white, male—”
“Coldly horny,” Gus inserted.
“—coldly horny protagonists are you?”
He nodded thoughtfully, his dark eyes intent on me. “Good question. Do
you assume I’m coldly horny?”
“Definitely.”
This seemed to amuse him and his crooked mouth.
I glanced out the window. “If Pete wasn’t planning on using either of our
books, how did she just forget to tell us what the book club’s pick was? I
mean, if she just wanted us to join, you’d think she’d give us a chance to
actually read the book.”
“This wasn’t an accident,” Gus said. “It was an intentional manipulation
of the truth. She knows there’s no way I would’ve come tonight if I’d
known what was really happening.”
I snorted. “And what was the end goal of this nefarious plan? To become
an eccentric side character in the next Augustus Everett novel?”
“What exactly do you have against my books, which you have allegedly
not read?” he asked.
“What do you have against my books,” I said, “which you have certainly
not read?”
“What makes you so sure?”
“The pirate reference.” I dug in to a strawberry frosted covered in
sprinkles. “That’s not the kind of romance I write. In fact, my books aren’t
even shelved as romance, technically. They’re shelved as women’s fiction.”
Gus slumped against the booth and stretched his lean olive arms over his
head, rolling his wrists to make them crack. “I don’t understand why there’d
need to be a full genre that’s just books for women.”
I scoffed. Here it was, that always-ready anger rising like it had been
waiting for an excuse. “Yeah, well, you’re not the only one who doesn’t
understand it,” I said. “I know how to tell a story, Gus, and I know how to
string a sentence together. If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do
you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be
read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women,
I’ve eliminated half the Earth’s population from my potential readers, and you know what? I don’t feel ashamed of that. I feel pissed. That people like
you will assume my books couldn’t possibly be worth your time, while
meanwhile you could shart on live TV and the New York Times would
praise your bold display of humanity.”
Gus was staring at me seriously, head cocked, rigid line between his
eyebrows.
“Now can you take me home?” I said. “I’m feeling nice and sober.”
This scene crackles with wit, tension, and honesty—your dialogue breathes like real life and bites like truth.
The humor disarms, but the emotional intelligence underneath is what lingers long after the donuts are gone.
I’d love for you to visit my blog as well and share your thoughts—conversations this sharp deserve to travel.
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I really enjoyed your chapter. 🩷🌺
So good!
Excellent writing and an entertaining narrative. Thanks, I enjoyed reading.