Page 3 of Love Fast

As I get into the elevator, I press the down button a thousand times in the hopes it will get me to the lobby faster. After all this, I don’t want Polly to have driven off, but as I get to the first floor, I see the amber plastic light of her cab over the flower arrangement in the lobby. I take in a breath. This is it. I made it.

I keep my head down, like anyone’s going to miss the girl in the white dress sprinting toward the exit.

“Excuse me!” someone calls behind me, but I pretend I haven’t heard them. I need to get to Polly. I need to get out of here.

Polly must see me coming, because she opens the passenger door. I’m just a couple of yards from the exit when I feel a hand on my arm and my heart sinks.

I stop and turn, accepting defeat.

I’ve been caught.

When I look up, I expect to see Frank staring back at me—but it’s a small man with jet-black hair who I don’t recognize. “You dropped this,” he says, handing me Lydia’s hoodie.

I laugh. I’m still free. “Thank you!” I say, beaming at him.

I forget any pretense of making a graceful exit. I run to the cab, to Polly, to freedom.

Nothing, not even God, is going to stop me.

TWO

Byron

When I left my hometown of Star Falls, Colorado, nearly fifteen years ago, I never thought I’d be back. Not even for the holidays. I knew I didn’t belong here. Which is why it’s so surprising that being back feels… not as strange as I expected it to. And the plaid shirt I’m wearing feels oddly comfortable. I don’t know why I kept it all these years. I found it at the back of my closet in New York and stuffed it in my luggage, reasoning that I’d seen eighteen Januarys in Star Falls and none of them were warm.

I upend my suitcase on the floor and start to unpack. Every time I’ve been back here over the last two years, I’ve always lived out of my luggage. But this trip feels more permanent. Not that I’m back for good—hell no—but I’ll be staying longer than I have on any of my previous trips. Eventually, I’ll move from the cabin I’ve rented into one of the lodges at the Colorado Club—the billionaires’ playground I’m constructing on the edge of town, a little way up the mountain. I want the construction workers to focus on the lodges that will be bought or rented by the centimillionaires and billionaires who will attend the Club’s grand opening at the end of next month.

My personal accommodations can wait.

I can’t bring myself to put on the cowboy hat and boots that are almost mandatory in Star Falls, but I put on the steel-toe boots I had couriered fromSafety With Usin Brooklyn to my apartment in Tribeca, and my Colorado Rockies baseball hat I’ve had since I was a kid. I make a mental note to scuff my shoes up a little before I go into Grizzly’s tonight. The leather practically gleams, they’re so new.

Going to the only bar in town, if you don’t count the Snowdrop Inn—which I don’t—isn’t something I’ve done since I’ve been back in town. And apparently, it’sbeen noticed. I should have known my every move in Star Falls would be carefully catalogued, but I’ve had other things on my mind—like the fact I’m sinking my entire fortune into the Colorado Club.

When I asked Hart McEvoy, the Club’s general manager, why we weren’t getting more local applicants for all the jobs we’re advertising, he informed me that there’s stilllocal hostilitytoward the Club. We have hundreds of positions to fill, and although many of them have been taken by people from across the state who will live in staff housing, I need local people to be part of the Club, too. They’ll be more reliable and less likely to leave.

It irritates the shit out of me that people are being so short-sighted.

I’m here, bringing jobs, bringinglifeto the town, and people still find a reason to bitch and moan. I need to win them over. My worn jeans and new boots are part of my I’m-a-local-guy persona. I grew up here. Iamlocal. It just doesn’t feel like it, since I’ve been away almost half my life. New York feels like it’s always been home. Star Falls is just the name of a place on my passport that reminds me where I was born.

I lace up my shoes, lock up. Not that there’s any danger of a burglary in Star Falls. It’s dark out and I can only just see the tops of the familiar mountains I know cut through the clear sky all around me.

The one thing New York City doesn’t have is a sky like the one over Star Falls. The fucking stars always get to me. Every time. Even when I lived here and had never seen another sky, I knew the one I was born under was special. It never gets fully dark here because of all the goddamn stars. There’s no doubt it’s beautiful.

I slide into my truck and head the mile into town toward Grizzly’s. I just want to show my face. And maybe accidently run into a few people. Star Falls understood what an influencer was long before social media was born. I figure if I can get certain big personalities in town on board with the Colorado Club, the “local resistance” will melt away and Hart will have people lining up for all the jobs we have to fill.

My first target is Jim Johnson. Or more specifically, his wife, Sue. She’s the most influential person in Star Falls. But I need Jim on board first. I need him to soften up the ground for me before I try to get Sue to change her mind about the Colorado Club.

I pull up outside Grizzly’s and realize I haven’t scuffed up my shoes. People are going to clock my spotless boots as soon as I walk in the place and label me a city boy. Which I am. Except tonight, I’m trying to win people over. Or at least not alienate more of them.

The ground is frozen, and there’s not much boot-dirtying mud around, but after kicking my tires and stepping on my own feet, the leather no longer gleams like a flashlight with new batteries. Hopefully no one saw me. I hate to think of the rumors this town could invent if anyone saw me trying to scuff my own boots.

I left town before I could legally drink, so I only ever went into Grizzly’s to look for my father. I open the door and am instantly transported back twenty years. The scent of stale beer and the crack of pool balls brings me to fourteen again, desperate to find my father. My mom had collapsed and I’d gone to fetch Dad. But he hadn’t been at Grizzly’s. Or maybe he’d been in the back playing poker. Losing at poker, knowing him.

I head straight to the bar, slide onto one of the tan leather stools and order a beer. The bartender is young, skinny with a tattoo of what could be a Chinese dragon in red ink on his arm. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him. Suits me just fine.

One of the reasons I haven’t come into town over the last couple of years when I’ve been back overseeing things at the Colorado Club is because I don’t have any connections in this place. My dad was found dead a couple of towns away after a bar fight. My mother remarried three years later while I was in New York and moved to Southern California with my sister, Mary. There’s nothing here for me.

“One beer coming right up, Byron,” the bartender says. Maybe I don’t know him, but apparently he knows me.

---