She rests her chin on her hand, eyes laughing.
“That’s our backstory now?” I ask. I feel like I should be taking notes. “Good to know.”
Charlie looks down at her notes.
“Sorry, I got put on the spot,” she says. “Also, you always have to let me win at horseshoes.”
“But you’re terrible at horseshoes,” I point out.
She just shrugs.
“That’s the price of my acceptance,” she says.
I glance around us, but no one is listening. We’re sitting at the only table against a wall in the back, and the rest of the Mountain Grind is bustling, the ambient noise too loud for anyone to overhear.
“Okay, you can win at horseshoes,” I say, begrudging. “What else?”
She glances down at her notes.
“Wait, is that your list of demands?” I ask, grabbing for a piece of paper. She pulls it away.
“It’s not all a list of demands,” she says, shuffling. “There’s other thoughts in here too.”
“How much is demands?” I ask. “What am I getting myself into?”
Charlie ignores my question and continues on.
“Next, I want first crack at your mom’s strawberry pie,” she says.
“Not blackberry?”
“Nope. Strawberry,” she says. “Any time a strawberry pie appears, you will save me a piece.”
I swallow some more coffee.
“All right,” I say.
“Third, free beer for life from Loveless Brewing.”
“For life?”
Charlie just nods very seriously. I narrow my eyes, like I’m thinking about negotiating.
In reality, I don’t remember the last time she paid for a beer from my brewery. This pretty much just formalizes the arrangement.
“Ten years,” I say.
She presses her lips together, thinking, and I don’t notice the way it gives her a slight, soft, supple pout, nor do I think again about the fact that we’re going to have to kiss.
My stomach does a little flip.
“All right,” she says, shrugging, and flips over a page. “Meatballs upon request from your brother Eli.”
“I can’t guarantee that,” I protest. “You know I have zero say in what Eli does.”
“Didn’t you talk him into infiltrating his own place of work to get a security video last year?” she asks, tilting her head to one side.
“I didn’t talk him into that,” I say.
“You just suggested it and he did it?”
“I didn’t even suggest it!” I say. “I just… gave him advice when Violet was pissed at him.”
She’s looking at me with those eyes, tapping her fingers on the side of her coffee cup. We lock eyes for a long moment.
“Fine,” I finally say. “Meatballs.”
“I want Seth to do my taxes.”
Seth’s my next-youngest brother. We co-own Loveless Brewing; I do the beer parts, he does the business parts.
“How many more of these demands do you have?” I ask.
“Two after this one,” she says.
I take a deep breath, drink some more coffee.
“All I can do is ask,” I point out. “You do know my brothers are separate entities from me, right? We’re not all branches of the same massive organism, like an aspen stand or something.”
She gives me a puzzled look.
“Aspen trees are actually all shoots of one massive root system,” I explain. “There’s one in Colorado named Pando that’s the world’s heaviest living organism. Levi got real excited about it once.”
My eldest brother is the chief arborist of the Cumberland National Forest. The man knows a lot about trees.
“Yes, I know you’re not an aspen,” she says. “But I bet you’ve got some influence with them, my taxes are going to be hell once my LLC is formed, and I know Seth does the brewery’s.”
“Fine,” I say. “What are the last two?”
“A backpacking trip with Caleb to the best secret spot he knows in the Blue Ridge,” she says, and I’m already frowning before she finishes the sentence.
“You want to go backpacking with my little brother?” I ask, already imagining the two of them, alone together on the trail for a few days. Laughing over a campfire. Sharing one of those tiny backpacking tents, sleeping inches away from each other.
Caleb’s the youngest, currently getting his Ph.D. in Mathematics, and when he’s not in school he’s usually hiking some very long trail. He did the Appalachian Trail while he was in college, and he finished the Pacific Crest Trail last summer.
At least it’s not Seth, I tell myself. Caleb knows how to keep his hands to himself. I think.
I still don’t like it. I don’t care that this engagement is fake. I don’t like it one bit, and I frown into my coffee.
“You can come if you want,” she says, shrugging.
“I will,” I mutter. “What’s the last one?”
Charlie takes a deep breath, holding the envelope in her hands, and my heart does a little hop inside my chest.
She wants to practice kissing, I think, feeling the blood rise to my face. She thinks that I should start sleeping over sometimes, in the same bed, to make it more believable—
“Our fake breakup has to be mutual and amicable,” she says, still not meeting my eyes. “However we decide to end it, it has to be the nicest, most civil breakup in the history of Sprucevale. You can’t tell people I cheated on you or something, I can’t claim that you stole my credit card and bought ten thousand bouncy balls, you can’t run down Main Street posting flyers of my face that say ‘this woman is a jerk,’ et cetera.”