Chapter 3
Destiny
“Who stuck a burr under her saddle?”
~ Grandma Dixie
“You could’a warned me,” I snapped at my best friend as she stepped into Gram’s kitchen.
Harmony’s face instantly morphed into a confused-slash-alarmed look. “About what?”
“About your brother. He just showed up at the Spoon.” I couldn’t help the tension in my tone. My nerves were bouncing around my brain like a silver pinball pinging the high-score flaps.
Drawing her head back, the lines in Harmony’s forehead grew deep as her brows raised. “Sawyer?”
“Nope.”
“Wyatt?”
“No.”
“Jackson?”
“Try again.”
Dang, we could be here for a while. Harmony had eight older brothers. None of them were as annoying, frustrating, infuriating or…sexy as JJ.
“Beau?”
I shook my head.
“Cooper?”
“Ehhh.” I answered, making a buzzer sound affect.
“Trace?”
“Uh uh.”
“Travis?”
“Negatory, morning glory.”
Harmony stared at me, emerald-green eyes clearly communicating she was at a total loss. Her long, chestnut hair swung around her shoulders as she shook her head in confusion. I stared back, waiting for her to realize she did, indeed, have one more brother. When her eyes widened and she flung her hand over her mouth, I knew she’d had her light bulb moment.
“JJ?” Her voice was muffled behind her palm.
“Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner.”
“What is he doing here? Is he here for the party? How long is he staying?”
“All good questions. Ones you should probably ask your brother.”
Leaning close, she whispered, “Did you talk to him?”
It wasn’t that she’d needed to whisper. Grandma Dixie was volunteering at the hospital two towns over in Parish Creek and we were the only two at her house. She’d whispered because she was afraid of saying the words out loud. I had told both her and Cara, who was our third “Angel” (we’d called ourselves Charlie’s Angels since the first grade) what had happened the night of prom. Yes, Harmony was JJ’s little sister, but she was also my best friend. Plus, with eight older brothers, she’d heard plenty of stories about them being jerks.
“As little as I possibly could,” I answered, handing her a pastry bag.
With a stunned expression frozen on her pretty face, she pulled a chair up and began piping frosting onto the tops of the cupcakes, which was why she’d come over to Gram’s in the first place.
When I had big orders to fill, I baked there and not at my apartment because Gram had double ovens and massive counter and table space. Five hundred cupcakes needed to be frosted before the next morning. I was taking two hundred out to Briggs Farm that night for the party, and then I needed three hundred for the Fourth of July fair in town square. I had saved up enough money to have a booth this year, and I had even had a sign made that said Sugar Rush, which was the name I’d chosen for my bakery.
Right now, my Sugar Rush clientele was limited to catering gigs since I didn’t have a storefront. But, I hoped all of that would change sooner rather than later. I had put in a loan application at the bank, and if it got approved, I could open before Thanksgiving.
The stationery store in town square had just gone out of business, which was sad, but it had left the perfect vacancy for my bakery. All I needed now was the cash to get started, and then everything I’d been dreaming about since I was little would finally come true. Well, not everything. But close enough for this girl.
“I thought he was still in Illinois, doing PT.” Harmony sounded just as shocked as I had felt when JJ showed up at the Spoon like he owned the place.
I shrugged, piping red frosting onto the cupcakes in front of me while Harmony worked with the white frosting.
For the display tomorrow, I was making the American flag. It had taken me longer than I’d expected to design and plan out how many of each cupcake color I would need. Still, it would be worth it. The presentation would get people talking. Even though I’d only minored in marketing, I knew that word of mouth was the best kind of advertising you could get.
“But you saw him, right? How long was he at the diner?” Harmony kept digging for more but I didn’t have any more info on her brother. Specifically what he was doing in town and how long he’d be there.
“A few hours.”
He’d sat there, at the lunch counter, for my entire shift. I’d done my best to ignore him, but that had been about as easy as putting a square peg in a round hole.
“And you didn’t talk to him?” She set the pastry bag and the cupcake down.
“Not really.”
“What did he do for hours at the Spoon?”
“Irritated me.” There was no question in my mind that that had been JJ’s intent. And, just like with everything else in his life, he excelled at it.
“I gotta tell Mama.” She pulled her phone out and started typing as the kitchen door swung open.
“Sorry I’m late.” Cara rushed in and dropped her bags. “Traffic was crazy. I think everyone is heading out of the city for the holiday weekend.”
After a cursory glance at what we were doing, Cara sat at the large, wooden kitchen table and picked up the pastry bag full of blue frosting.
“Mama said he just walked in but that she’s been getting messages all day that he was home,” Harmony announced like she was broadcasting a news report as she stared at her phone.
Cara looked up from the cupcake she was icing. “Who’s home?”
“JJ,” Harmony and I answered at the same time.
“What?” Cara gasped, her eyes darting to mine. “Have you seen him?”
I nodded as I caught her up. “He came into the Spoon around eleven and stayed until I got off at three.”
“Are you okay?” Her eyes filled with concern.
Cara, the blonde “Angel,” was interning at a magazine in Dallas, so she drove into the city a couple of times a week. She also happened to be in remission after a battle with leukemia that lasted from the time she was twelve to seventeen. We all worried that she was doing too much. Among the three of us, though, Cara was the nurturing one, which had made seeing her go through everything she had while battling cancer, constantly in and out of the hospital sometimes having to stay for months, that much more heart wrenching.
One time, when I’d been driving her to one of her treatments, I broke down and told her how bad I felt that she was going through what she was, and that I couldn’t be the kind of friend I was sure she would be if I were the one in her shoes. She would have made T-shirts and cookies. Made sure I felt supported but distracted. Basically, I’d lost it because I’d never be the kind of friend she was.
She’d just smiled and told me that she loved me and I was exactly the friend she needed—an entertaining one who made sarcastic comments about the not-so-nice nurses not behind their backs, but to their faces.
Hey, everyone has their gifts. Gram had raised me never to say anything behind someone’s back that I wouldn’t say to their face.
“Oh yeah. How are you?” Harmony put her phone down and looked at me. “Sorry. I should have asked that sooner.”
“I’m fine,” I assured her. I probably wouldn’t have asked either, after gettin’ swept up in the drama of it all. “JJ’s back. It’s fine. Honestly, it was a lifetime ago. I never even think about it anymore. It’s no big deal,” I lied through my teeth.
It was a good thing I was wearing shorts. If I’d had pants on, they would’a caught on fire, ’cause I was a liar, liar.
“How did he look?” Cara asked out of genuine concern and not idle gossip.
“Fine, I guess.” I shrugged. “I didn’t really notice.”
Yep, Pinocchio had nothing on me.
“Sooo…when you saw him, you didn’t feel anything?” Harmony’s question sounded more like a challenge than an inquiry.
“You mean other than annoyance? Nope.”
Boy, oh boy. For someone who prided themselves on being honest, I had lies shooting out of my mouth like they were oiled pigs on a greased-up Slip’N Slide.
Cara quietly went back to frosting, but Harmony—being Harmony—did not drop things so easily.
“So, if you didn’t feel anything, why were you madder than a mule chewing on bumblebees when I walked in and you asked why I hadn’t warned you?”
Well, hadn’t I just painted myself into a cozy little corner? This was why I hated lying. One lie led to two, which led to three. Then four. It wasn’t long until you’d weaved a web o’ deceit.
“I just would’ve appreciated a heads-up. That’s all,” I answered in a less-than-gracious tone. Why I was taking my frustration at this situation out on my friends, I had no idea.
Luckily, they were real friends, and instead of getting upset at my undeserved irritation, they did what any good friends would do. Ignored it.
I glanced at the clock. If we finished these within the hour, I would have time to squeeze in my evening three-mile run, which would hopefully alleviate some of the pent-up anxiety, frustration, and something JJ’s homecoming had caused that I sure as heck didn’t want to name.
After I burned off all of this excess energy, all I had to do was ignore JJ for as long as he was in town, and then, when he left, everything would go back to normal. Which was exactly what I wanted.
Yep. That was what I wanted.