Page 6 of Crave

“So. You and Hayden.”

Closing down the screen, he dropped the phone on the tabletop, slowly rotating it back and forth with one finger. “Yup.”

Which was followed by possibly the weirdest minute of silence ever. Letting my head fall back, I stared out across The Spoke.

My dad always said there were two kinds of people in life. Those who never could seem to pull their shit together, and the ones who knew when they’d gotten a wake-up call.

I stopped drinking up in Calgary, got my GED, and wrote about a thousand apology letters to Lacey that she probably burned. Since my uncle’s rules didn’t include access to the phone or widescreen TV in the den, I busied myself when I wasn’t mending fencing or doing repair work out on the ranch by building a smoker.

Everyone was good at something. The trick in life was figuring out what your something was. Cal worked as a psychiatrist. Brody, in addition to serving as acting pack Alpha, had followed in our dad’s footsteps and become a deputy down at the sheriff’s department. West taught freshman English and creative writing over at the high school. And it turned out I had a knack for making sweet pork ribs so tender they fell off the bone, carne asada marinated in garlic and fresh-squeezed orange juice, and seared Angus cheeseburgers smothered with smoked cheddar and onion strings, which we served the third weekend of every month at The Spoke, always to a sold-out house. But our specialty was slow-smoked beef brisket, so juicy and tender it fell apart the moment you touched it with your fork.

I built The Spoke with my own two hands, from the dinged-up food truck I’d bought at auction to the brick and mortar restaurant that now drew tourists to our little town of Blood Moon from all over Central Texas. And even if there wasn’t much else in my life I could claim credit for, there was no denying my restaurant was a success.

I tipped my beer Ethan’s way. “Guess congratulations are in order.”

He fiddled with his bottle of Sprite, at last having the decency to look uncomfortable.

“Thanks.”

Instead of a ring, he’d gotten Hayden Crowe’s initials tattooed on his fourth finger, right above a tiny purple flower. Hayden was a local rock legend, lead guitarist for Daisy Addiction and one of my brother’s former baristas at Dark. Hard to miss the chemistry there, both of them into alternative music and indie rock, not to mention the goth thing, which wasn’t really my scene, but seemed to work for them if the cartoon hearts circling over my brother’s head any time Hayden entered a room were any indication.

I gestured with my beer. “So what’s with the iris?”

Ethan shifted in his chair, and for the first time all night, actually smiled.

“Oh, uh. It’s a violet.”

“That like a metal thing?”

He snorted. “Yeah. Metallica. Black Sabbath. Everyone’s doing it.”

I waited, because it was clear there was a story there, but he just kept staring up at ESPN like he gave a flip whether the Packers won. Or had even heard of them.

“Not exactly my scene.”

“Well, you’d know if you had bothered to show up.”

“So that’s all you’re going to say?”

For a minute Ethan just let his head hang, picking the label of his unopened Sprite to shreds so that no way would I be able to resell it tomorrow. And then—

“Meaning?”

I ground my teeth. “Meaning you’re not even going to apologize?”

“You skipped out on my wedding and you think I owe you a goddamn apology?”

I pegged my bottlecap across the room where it bounced off a framed aerial shot of Texas Memorial Stadium with the Longhorn Band out on the field at pregame.

“Hard to skip out on something you were never invited to in the first place.”

Ethan shoved his chair back, yanking at the leather cuff strapped around his wrist.

“You could have come to the reception.”

I took another pull off my beer. “Turns out I had other plans.”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “It’s always something with you, isn’t it?”