CHAPTER SIX
Three Years Ago
Her name is Summer.
The girl.
The one I went back to the bar looking for.
Turns out this is the bar I should have been coming to all along. Turns out it’s hard to pick up a woman when you’ve been sent to threaten her family. And with the talk from Cullen, it’s clear that Bianca is short on her payments. And she’ll continue to be.
There’s something about this girl—something that makes the prospect of burning down the bar where she lives or breaking her aunt’s fingers—that starts a pit of nausea in my gut. Cullen says she could be the lynchpin, the key to bleeding Bianca dry. I don’t know why he’s so hung up on this one woman, on the measly amount of interest she’s paying him each month. But he’s determined as fuck, and Bianca is directly in his crosshairs.
That means Summer is too.
I’m sitting in what qualifies as a park in this neighborhood, eyes on Bianca’s Pub. If I lean to the left, I can see Summer when she comes down the stairs to the bar and begins wiping down the tables for the night. She’s not there yet, but I check my phone and see that it’s five. She’ll be down in about thirty seconds. I close my eyes so that when I open them, she’ll be standing there and I can watch her for a moment before she sees me.
I imagine taking her back to my apartment again, slipping off one of those tight, white tops she wears while she’s tending bar, cupping those gravity-defying tits and taking them into my mouth until I hear her delicate whimper.
When I open my eyes, Summer Collington is standing across the street, arms crossed under her creamy tits. She’s drinking the remainder of a beer and staring at me with an expression that could turn boiling water to ice.
I grin at her in response and light a cigarette, taking a long drag. Her expression stays the same. Cullen once told me that Bianca had cut his arm down to the bone with a broken whiskey bottle—and I’d imagine B might have looked exactly how Summer does right now, right down to the pale golden freckles sprayed over her cheeks.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?” she shouts.
“No. This is my job.”
She slowly raises a middle finger, her gaze locked on mine.
“Fuck off. Go back where you came from, Jonathan Ash.”
Summer walks back inside and I sigh heavily, my breath making clouds of white mist in the air. Even though it’s technically spring, New York hasn’t gotten the message yet. The wind is still cold, the sun setting early. I find myself wishing I could watch Summer from inside the bar, but I’d probably get kicked right out on my ass by two freckled, Irish women. And I’m not quite ready to use firearms inside the premises.
I look back at the bar, hoping for another glance at Summer working the tables. But the few customers Bianca still gets will be here soon, and Summer’s about to start working the bar. When I squint, though, I see a glint of something in the fading evening light. It’s a bottle, and it wasn’t there before Summer came outside.
Against my better judgment, I sprint across the street and pick it up.
Jack Daniels, with four or five shots left inside.
I look inside to see Summer, breasts bouncing as she wipes down the bar. She looks up for a second and nods at me, very slightly, then points back to my bench with a frown.
I take a swig of whiskey as I walk back across the street.
This one, she might be conflicted. But she likes a little bit of danger.
There are ten texts on my phone right now, all from women less complicated than Summer Collington. But something about this woman, both devilish and pure, makes something inside of my chest clench tight.
No matter what debt my family owes to Cullen, no matter how bound together we are, I know now I won’t do anything to hurt her.
The realization is primal, like an instinct, something deeper than my ties to Cullen or anyone in the Family.
Present Day
“Coffee? Beer?” The waitress leans across the bar and places menus in front of us. “Got fried green tomatoes on special. And a peach cobbler for dessert.”
“Thanks,” Summer says. “I’ll take a coffee. And fried green tomatoes, I guess.”
“A coffee for me too. And grits for the girl. Fish and grits? Even though that’s totally disgusting—”
“Shut up, Ash, you’re lucky I came with you at all.” The waitress laughs and saunters off like we’re a normal couple just being playful with each other. Summer puts her head in her hands and leans against the wall, angling her body away from mine. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her face somehow more angular than it was when I knew her before. She was delicate back then, but her cheeks were fuller, her eyes more full of spark. I can’t believe I’m the thing she blames for all this growing up she’s done, but it would seem that’s the story she’s sticking to.
“Don’t go celebrating too much, Sunshine.”
“The only thing I’m celebrating right now is food and coffee. I’m not celebrating the fact that you’ve been in town waiting for me to come back for three years.”
I nod at the waitress when she sets down our coffees and a plate of fried green tomatoes. I knew the only way I’d have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting this woman to come with me was to involve food in the equation. If she’s anything like the girl I met back in New York, she probably still uses salty food and a hot, ultra-caffeinated coffee to calm her down when she’s nervous. And by the way she’s acting, I’ve made her as nervous as shit. I should feel guilty. But there’s something in me that takes a perverse pleasure in watching her sullenly shovel fried green tomatoes in her mouth while she cuts her eyes at me again and again. Her blush is getting deeper and deeper, the red blossoming across her cheeks like it always did when I got close to her. She was so closed off in so many ways, but when it came to me, she became an open book.
At least, I thought so.
“Who said I was waiting for you?” I ask her.
She takes a sip of her coffee and groans. “That’s what you said before.” She takes a few more angry bites of tomato.
“I said I knew you’d be back. That’s different.” I was waiting at first, but after a year, I wasn’t anymore. It’s not like I saw other women. I was seeing fighters, and recovery, and a new way to make money that didn’t involve slicing people’s fingers off at the second knuckle.
“It sounds like you’ve moved on, Ash. Doesn’t it?” Summer pushes her plate of fried green tomatoes away, empty now except for a pile of the remoulade sauce. She looks around, like she’s searching for an escape, or like she wants to call the waitress over to ask for the damn check. But just in the nick of time, the waitress brings more food, and she tucks into her grits, still leaning away from me.
I haven’t moved on. Not by a mile.
I don’t say anything. Sitting here, like this, it doesn’t feel like there’s a solution, at least not a simple one. I wanted to go to the hospital today and tell her I loved her then, that I didn’t want to leave her, it wasn’t my choice. The words are on the tip of my tongue.
Summer turns to look at me. “Ash, do you know what I went through?”
I sigh heavily and run my fingers through my hair. “I—”
“No you don’t. You don’t have a damn clue. I cried every night for the first month I was in Syria. Because I felt stupid, because I felt angry at myself and at you for letting me believe you cared about me. You didn’t. Not even enough to say goodbye. Not enough to sign the divorce papers.” She toys with her grits and polishes off the rest of her coffee, looking angry and red. “Not enough to do anything.”
“That’s not why—”
“I’m not asking you why anything.” Her accent seemed so flat to me back in New York, but on her home turf, her twang turns up to a fever pitch. “I’m telling you how it felt. I know there was a reason. There had to be.”
“There was, Summer. I couldn’t—”
She looks straight at me. “I don’t want an explanation. I’m not letting you suck me back into the past. I came with you to show you I can be a reasonable adult and get you to sign the papers.”
“The papers—”
“Divorce papers. We need to get this shit over with.”
“I know damn well which papers. I was going to say that the papers aren’t what I want.”
Her face goes pale, and she turns to me slowly. “You can’t—you can’t mean that—”
“I mean it.”
“You have to—” Her voice nearly breaks, and I reach to take her hand in mine. She pulls it away. “My job. My life here. Ash—you can’t be serious.”
“A divorce has to be agreed on by both parties, from what I understand, Summer. That’s why it didn’t go through in the first place. You were abroad. We owe this relationship a chance—”
“We owe it exactly zero chances,” she mutters. I might be imagining it, but there’s a hint of uncertainty in her voice, and she’s getting more and more flustered.
“At the end of the day, I’ll do what you want, Sunshine.”
“I want a divorce.” She hisses that last word, teeth clenched, all eyes in the bar turning to us. Several of the pink-shirted frat boys by the door go silent, just watching us.
“Summer—”
“Waitress?” Summer leans forward and signals for the woman behind the bar. The place is starting to get crowded with tourists, their voices drowning everything out so that I can’t think. “I’ll take the check. And the rest of the grits to go.” The waitress looks at the two of us and then turns away with a shrug. “This is settled, Ash.”
A well of rage bubbles up from deep in my gut. “Summer, you think shit’s settled? It’s not.”
The waitress returns and Summer takes the to-go box. She mutters a quick thank you, then throws ten dollars down on the bar.
“Shit’s settled,” she says, turning to me. A flash of that girl I used to know looks back at me. “You were a bad decision then, Ash. And I’m not making the same fucking decision all over again.”
She pushes through the three frat boys, and walks right out of the door.