I chuckled, walking through the leash and collar aisle toward the back room. Someone turned the corner, and I walked directly into them, having to step back and apologize. He wasn’t the same bubbly guy I’d just seen with the cardboard box. This guy was different.
He was fucking breathtaking.
I had to crane my head a little so I could see all of him. He was tall, with a machete-sharp jawline and big lips that fit perfectly underneath a strong nose, all crowned by a thick set of dark bushy brows sitting over a pair of hazel-green eyes that seemed like the absolute rarest blooming flora someone could find. Like, the type of green only found deep in the fucking Amazonian jungle.
“Hi,” I said, managing to get my brain working again.
“Charlie? Are you fucking kidding me?”
Oh… shit.
Turned out that this handsome, drool-inducing, and absolutely climbable slab of hazel-eyed man meat wasn’t only breathtakingly boner-inducing.
He was also someone from my past.
And I had no idea who he was.
Great. Just fucking great.
I sighed, unsure of how this would all play out.
God, I really hate mornings.
3
Austin Romero
This had to be a fucking joke. Charlie probably had cameras set up around the pet store so that he could catch my reaction. He always loved doing that stupid shit back when we were in college, no matter how much it annoyed me.
“You seriously don’t remember me?” I asked again when Charlie’s confused expression didn’t clear.
His blond brows drew up as something clicked in his head.
Shit, have we really not talked in that long?
At least he remembered me. Now we could go back to acting like dicks to each other, and then everything would be completely back to normal—
“Sir, I think we have to talk.”
“Sir?” Since when did Charlie ever call me “sir”? Well, besides that one time we had both drank an entire bottle of Everclear together and decided to drunkenly role-play some fantasies together.
That was a great night.
And morning.
And afternoon.
“Sorry, you said your name was Tristan?”
“Austin,” I said, short and clipped and confused as all fuck. If this was a joke, it was legitimately terrible. As much as I hated Charlie and everything that happened between us, I found myself wishing he’d just drop the facade and get back to the regularly scheduled programming: the two of us shooting daggers at each other and avoiding ever being in the same room together for longer than five minutes.
And this was already pushing into four.
“Austin, right. Listen, I’m assuming we met at some point in the past. I’ve been through a, uh… You know what, maybe we should talk after my shift?”
I cocked my head. This was beyond bizarre. I certainly wasn’t expecting to meet Charlie within the first day of me being back in Blue Creek. I only had a few connections left in the town and hadn’t used any of them to figure out if Charlie was still around or if he’d taken his sunshine-blond head and matching golden smile somewhere else.
I hadn’t cared. I told myself I wouldn’t give a fuck. What happened between us was enough for me to cross him off my list with bold red pen. Done and dead to me.
“Sure,” I answered, crossing my arms. Charlie nodded and turned to start working, his manager already looming over some unorganized bags of bird food. I watched him walk away, a thousand different memories slamming into me all at once. He still looked the same to me. Still had that same bounce in his step, the same fucking glow that drew me in like a moth to a bonfire, the flames burning so hot that I floated away with what felt like first-degree burns.
What happened between us was a visceral slash to the gut that I still wasn’t sure I had recovered from, so how in the fuck could Charlie have forgotten about me? If this wasn’t a joke, then… shit.
What the hell happened to Charlie after I left?
The wait for Charlie’s shift to finish didn’t feel long. I still had tons of shit to move up into our office, and then once that was all done, I had to start unpacking everything. Thankfully I had Darien’s help for most of it, until we got to the desk-building portion of the evening, when Darien opened up about his potent allergy to any terribly illustrated instruction manual.
“Seriously,” he said, taking a few steps backward, away from the box of desk parts as if the screws were about to leap up and bite him. “I once built a bed upside down and somehow attached it to the wall. Can you even imagine that Frankenstein of a creature I made? No, ma’am. I’m going to have to go and file papers or something.”
That got me laughing. “It’s fine,” I replied, trying to ease Darien’s wide-eyed fear. “I’ll save this for tomorrow. I’ve got a meeting to make in fifteen.”