“Hey,” he said. “I had a great time at the barbecue yesterday.”
“Good,” I said. “It was fun.”
He noticed my eyes flickering around. “Mason’s running late. He had to go back to your parents’ house and pick up his truck.”
“Ah,” I said. “Yeah, I thought I noticed it was still there when I left earlier.”
We went to work getting the bar ready for the evening, and about half an hour later, Mason showed up. I looked up at him and smiled, but he brushed past me and went into the office. When he came out a few minutes later, he greeted me, but it was short and distanced. He was weird for the rest of the time we were getting ready for the evening, and I decided to ignore it. I didn’t want to get into it with him while we were at work.
But damn was that man wishy-washy. I really thought our conversation on the front porch was going to have a different effect. That maybe things would have cleared up and we’d be able to move forward one way or another. Now I wasn’t so sure anymore. If anything, it seemed like our conversation had made him more awkward around me.
Compared to the event nights, the crowd that night was fairly low. I was feeling a bit let down by it, and it must have shown on my face. Jesse walked up to the bar after bringing out a plate of food and leaned over to look at me.
“What’s up?” he asked. “You look upset.”
I shook my head, forcing a smile. “I’m just bummed about the turnout tonight. It doesn’t seem very busy.”
He looked around with his eyebrows raised, then turned back to me with a scoff. “Are you kidding? We might not have people spilling out onto the patio like on the theme nights, but this is still a lot busier than before you came around.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah. This is great. You’ve done wonders, kid. You’re making all the difference.”
Grinning at me, he headed back into the kitchen. That gave me a bit of a boost, but it didn’t last long. I looked up and saw Mason across the bar. He looked at me for only a second before disappearing back into his office. It hurt more than I would have expected it to.
He avoided me for the rest of the night, and I tried hard not to think about it. After all, just like I told Stephanie, it wasn’t like the conversation was the start of anything. Maybe it was the opposite. Maybe we had been holding off on that talk for so long and it left things hanging. Finally talking everything through might have given us the closure we never had.
It was logical, but it didn’t convince me. At the end of the night, the rest of the brothers left while Mason and I stayed behind to close up. He didn’t say a word to me for the first forty minutes. Finally, we were behind the bar cleaning up, and he reached across me to grab a towel.
“Excuse me,” he said in a grumbling tone.
I let out an exasperated sigh and glared at him. “What is your problem?”
He looked at me like he was going to argue, then shook his head. “I just have a massive hangover. That’s all.”
I finished the work in front of me and left without saying anything else.16MasonThis was where talking to people got me in trouble. I talked to Tom, and that made things tense. Then I talked to Ava, and it managed to make everything both better and worse. It felt good to talk to her and finally open up about everything. And spending the rest of the get-together laughing and flirting was much better than the awkwardness. But then reality came back.
Now I was being weird toward Ava, and she definitely noticed. I was trying to stop it. Things really had gotten so much better between us after our conversation. But, in a way, that made it even weirder. Because as soon as I saw her again, I realized a wall between us had come down. And I’d promised Tom I’d stay professional. It was the one thing he’d asked me, the one thing he insisted on.
I’d made that promise to my older brother with all seriousness, and I fully intended to uphold it. It was just that I’d made it before Ava and I had our conversation. Now things were different between us. But I didn’t know how to explain it to her.
It wasn’t just about the awkwardness of admitting my brothers and I were talking about her behind her back. That could get uncomfortable really fast, but it was more than that. At this point, I didn’t even know how Ava was feeling about the situation. That made a major difference in how the conversation could go.