Bitter Truth (Hawthorne Vines #1)

Page 88



His eyes flick across my face for a second before he steps into me, bringing his free hand to the back of my neck and pulling me in for a kiss.

I sink against him, my mouth opening and my tongue lightly grazing his.

Wes pulls back just a little bit, his eyes on my mouth, before pressing another kiss against my lips as his thumb strokes along my jaw.

“Don’t talk to Memphis yet,” he says, and that’s when I realize he looks far more serious in this moment than I do, a deep crease forming between his brows. “Just wait. I want us to talk first.”

I can feel my heart skip a beat at his words, something foreboding sinking low and hard to the bottom of my stomach.

“Is everything okay?”

He nods. “Yeah.”

But nothing about the way he looks inspires confidence that he’s being honest, and I can’t help but wonder what’s really going on in his mind.

This time, when he leans in and presses his lips against mine, I realize it tastes an awful lot like goodbye.

The dinner service goes by at a glacial pace, made even slower by the guitarist who seems dead set on playing incredibly slow, drawn-out covers of pop songs all night.

And even though I’m able to keep a smile on my face and do a decent job of handling guests and taking orders, I’m surprised I make it all the way through dinner without giving in to the desire to find Wes in the kitchen and demand we start speaking. Because part of my brain keeps reminding me how often I get so close to the things I want and how rarely they work out.

Memphis barely speaks to me and instead just kind of hovers all evening long, and honestly, I’m thankful I don’t really have to talk to him. I barely register his presence, the things he said earlier falling by the wayside as I try to deduce what Wes might want to talk to me about tonight.

I mean, the easy answer is that he’s calling things off. Right?

He’s made it clear to me that this job is incredibly important. We even talked about why we shouldn’t get involved, because he believed he’d be considered disposable if something went wrong.

My brain talks in circles all evening long as I try to convince myself that he cares about me too much to end things, and battle the fears I have that he might take the easy road and call things off to protect his job.

I’m a mess of uncertainty as we close the restaurant at the end of the night, and instead of lurking around the patio and waiting for Wes to finish in the kitchen, I return to the house for a long, hot shower to wash away not only the workday, but also my nerves.

It works for the former, but not the latter.

Once I’ve changed, I stand in front of my mirror, twisting my long, thick hair into a braid that hangs over my left shoulder. My mother used to braid my hair when I was a kid. It’s one of my few memories of her. I’d sit in the chair in front of her bathroom vanity and she’d do a long braid that hung perfectly down the center of my back.

After she died, I tried to teach myself how to do it. But when doing it on my own, it has always fallen off center because I pull all the hair to the left side to braid it.

I was always mad at her for that, even though it wasn’t her fault.

As I’m tying a rubber band around the end, I notice someone standing in the doorway.

“You doing okay?”

I can tell by the pitch of Aunt Sarah’s voice that she knows about my confrontation with Memphis.

“Memphis tell you?”

She shakes her head and crosses her arms, then leans against the doorjamb.

“Naomi and I were delivering a few boxes of wine to the restaurant when you and Wes pulled up.”

Of course that’s what happened.

“Honey, I didn’t realize anything was going on with you and Wes.”

I turn around, lean back against my dresser, and tuck my hands into the pockets of my sweater.

“Is it serious?”


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