Sidecar Crush - Page 2
Gibson snorted and took a drink of his water.
“But y’all,” she said, pointing to the rest of us sitting at the table. “You need to think about it. Finding somebody. Settling down. It’d be good for you.”
“Like coming out for a beer’d be good for me?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, poking me in the shoulder. “Just like that, only better. Come on, Jame, that girl you’ve been seeing doesn’t count if you can’t even bring her around to introduce to your family.”
“I ain’t seein’ her anymore,” I said.
“What?” Scarlett asked, her voice going up several octaves. Devlin paused behind her, like he wasn’t sure if he should come near or wait to see if it was safe. “Since when?”
I rolled my eyes and hunched down over my beer. Half the place was looking at us openly now. And the other half was straining to listen.
“Jesus, don’t make a scene,” I said. “It ended quite a while ago. It’s fine.”
I’d been seeing Willa Sawyer, a girl who lived over in Maryland, for a couple of years. It was an on-again, off-again type thing. Long distance. Sometimes she’d come out here and see me; other times I went to her. Wasn’t ever real serious, but we had a nice time when we were together. She’d decided she wanted more commitment than I could give her. Met someone else—planned to get married soon. Kinda left me without as much to look forward to, but I was glad for her. She was a nice girl—deserved that sort of thing.
“Well, you could have told us,” Scarlett said. “Here I thought you were keeping her a secret for a reason. Like maybe you were ashamed of us.”
Devlin seemed to have decided it was safe to come near. He stepped up next to Scarlett and slipped his arm around her waist.
“Don’t be dumb, Scar,” I said. “I wasn’t keeping secrets, and you know I’m not ashamed of y’all. It just wasn’t a big deal.”
“Too bad it’s over,” Gibson said. “Seemed like you had a good thing going. Got a little action when you wanted it, and none of the bullshit.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you have?” Scarlett asked, her disdain for Gibson’s dating habits—or lack thereof—evident in her tone. “Action when you want it. No bullshit… That is, no commitment or connection to anyone.”
“Scarlett, just because y’all are acting like lovesick puppies doesn’t mean the rest of us need to go out and get ourselves attached,” Gibson said.
Scarlett rolled her eyes and turned her back to him. “What about you, June? Got your eye on anyone special?”
June looked over the top of her book. “No.”
“Jonah?” she asked.
“Sorry, Scarlett,” Jonah said. “Not really.”
Scarlett huffed and grabbed Devlin’s arm. “Y’all are no fun. Come on, let’s go play pool.”
Our table quieted down considerably in the absence of Scarlett. She pranced around the pool table, shaking her backside at Devlin. The way he watched her still got my hackles up, and I had to remind myself that Scarlett was his girl now. He could look at her like that. Truth was, he should look at her like that.
I reckoned any guy in Scarlett’s life couldn’t win, not with us as her brothers. If he looked at her with those hungry eyes, we wanted to bust his face. But if he hadn’t been looking at her like that, we’d have hated him for not appreciating her enough.
The TV behind me caught my attention and the noise level in the bar went down a notch. Nicolette had just changed the channel to a reality TV show, Roughing It.
The premise wasn’t all that exciting. A bunch of minor celebrities stuck in a cabin out in the woods somewhere, expected to get by without a lot of modern conveniences. Mostly it was just a bunch of drama between the cast members while they fumbled around in the woods. Definitely not something I’d watch under normal circumstances.
But my interest—and the interest of everyone else in Bootleg—stemmed from the fact that Leah Mae Larkin was on the show.
Leah Mae was one of us. A Bootlegger. She’d lived here until she was twelve. Then her mama had divorced her daddy and moved her away. After that, she’d spent summers here for a while—at least until the rest of the world discovered how pretty she was and she became a model. She’d dropped the Mae—went by Leah Larkin now.
Source: readsnovelonline.net