Page 51 of Whiskey Proposal

“Elodie, hey.” I’m not dismayed, but she’s so at home. This is her place. Her hometown. I’m the odd duck out. I just cosplay as the swan.

At least I’m clean, and I brushed out my hair until it shone. As if I could get sent to the school nurse again for my hair being in a rat’s nest.

She puts her fingertips on the table. “Mind if I sit?”

It’s her business. Her thriving, successful business. She always seemed like she had her shit together in school. “Go ahead.”

She hesitates as if she senses that I’m not in the mood for company.

The thought that she might leave, that I’ve severed my contact with one of the few people I still know in town, bothers me.

“It’s fine, really. I’m just in my head. Please.” I gesture to the other side of the booth. “Join me.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes and no.” Mostly no. I’m married, and I want my husband at home so I can ignore him. So he knows that he doesn’t have a say over my life. That this thing between us is just my dad’s idiotic trust. “It’s everything, you know. Moving home.”

“Yeah, that can be weird.”

“Was it for you?”

Her gaze skates around the bakery, but it’s not smug pride filling her eyes. Not that I expected it. That was never Elodie’s way, but she should be brimming with confidence. “I came home with my tail between my legs, and I made it my goal that no one knew why.” Her smile is straightforward. “Bad relationship, bad decisions, and a history I didn’t want anyone to know about. They still don’t really know. My parents do. Clem.” Her lips curve up, and this time, the happiness reflects in her eyes. “Cruz, of course.”

“Of course,” I echo and take a bite of my muffin. That’s not envy heating the back of my neck. “Lane doesn’t know what it was like. Before I moved.” Ah, hell. Why’d I say that?

“Have you talked to him about it?” Elodie could’ve played obtuse. She could’ve pretended she had no idea what I meant. But she was there. She saw me, and she probably heard what others were saying. They wanted to be heard.

“Lane and I aren’t really married.” Why would I tell him his wife used to be teased for being dirty and smelly? For having a dad who didn’t think to buy his little girl deodorant or period supplies?

“I thought maybe you were friends.”

“Not that either.” Do friends lick each other? “I’m striking out on my own, and I pitched to the distillery. I used to love their marketing campaigns, especially around the holidays.” It really called to me. Family and gatherings. Celebrations. “Then I didn’t, and I figured out why. He had me come in and give my spiel, knowing that they weren’t going to work with me. Knowing that my dad made the trust the way he did.”

Her gaze flickers, but I can’t tell how much of the specifics she knows. “That can’t have felt good.”

It did when I ended up kissing him.

“I think with the guys, what you see is what you get.” She chews on the inside of her cheek. “It’s just that we don’t always trust it because we know it goes so much deeper, and that’s what scares us.”

I stare at her. What the hell is she talking about? Yet nothing has resonated more since I arrived in this damn town. “We aren’t exactly in a place to be a real anything, and I’m leaving as soon as Brooks sells his house and buys mine. It’s not a relationship.”

“Mmm.” She gives me a look that digs underneath this veneer I’ve donned. The shine I put on myself isn’t protecting me in this moment. “I think the Foster brothers are like muffins.”

I tick up a brow and look at my muffin. It’s not a guy who makes my toes curl when he’s in a pair of grungy mechanic’s overalls. This muffin doesn’t make me think of joining him in the shower and asking him to show me what he does when he thinks of me. The muffin is crumbly, and Lane has every facet of his life put together.

“I know it sounds like I’ve been drinking the whiskey I use for my banana bread glaze,” she continues. “But they’re muffins. People get them and think they’ll be just like cupcakes, sweet and rich and pretty on the outside, but muffins are so much more. They can be glazed, they can have a filling, and they can be any flavor. They’re a muffin, and no matter what box we want to put them in, they’re a goddamn muffin and they’re going to do muffin things.”

I narrow my eyes at her. Why am I following this conversation? And what does it have to do with me?

She gives herself a shake. “Sorry, sometimes the mornings are really early, and I get stuck in my head, think wild things. Anyway, I don’t know Myles as well, but Lane and Cruz? They know who they are and what they want, and they read the world around them really well.” She doesn’t say why, but because of Cruz, she likely knows more about Lane’s past than what he’s shared with me. “They won’t go around shouting to everyone that they’re muffins even when they’re iced or filled. Bavarian cream or not, they just know, and they can be so unflinchingly unapologetic about it that it’s hard to trust that they’re not just another person trying to play us.”

I almost get whiplash from that last statement. Lane is playing me though. He has to be. There is no other reason for him to enter into a marriage with some girl he doesn’t know. He says he does, but those were just a few stories about a scrappy kid from an alcoholic strung out with guilt. Lane saw my social media feed, not the ten pictures I took of myself in that bikini that didn’t make the cut. I showed up all polished in his office, and he thinks he met the real me.

I’m Emerson Langley. “That poor girl,” who got left by her mother. “That dirty girl,” Hutch didn’t want. “That sister of yours” who needs to move out.

I don’t know how I play into Lane’s game, but he’s not as straightforward as Elodie seems to think he is. She’s not married to him. I am.

Lane thinks he knows me? So maybe I’ll show him the real me.