Page 9 of His Hot Mess

Sadie.

Because she’d looked so damn sexy all flustered over her stuff spread out over the counter; snatching the well-worn piece of paper with her business design on it back from me like it was the pages from her diary.

Being around her made me feel something. Like I was alive again.

Stupid.

Even though it was just an estimate—perfectly professional—I shouldn’t want to be near someone who reminded me of even a fraction of the kind of pain Jessica had put me through again.

Never mind that if I had a beer too many I’d pull out our old photo album and flip through the pages of a life that could have been. Me and Jessica on vacation. Me and Jessica playing with her nieces. Me and Jessica with Mom at our place for Christmas Dinner.

I thought about my mother crying to me on what should have been the night Jessica and I would make more memories—our honeymoon.

“I just don’t understand! Why would she do that?”

“What do you want me to tell you, Mom?” I’d hurled back. “I sure as hell don’t get it either.”

Not my finest moment.

I’d put a lot of space between then and now. I’d done some traveling before settling down here in Jewel Lakes. My life was set for the most part—a fulfilling job, a little cottage out on the hills overlooking Sapphire Lake. My truck. Voicemails from my mom asking when I was going to come home for a visit.

Never, Mom. I can’t ever go back there.

But for the briefest moment today, sitting in Aubrey’s next to Sadie, I’d felt different. Like air as fresh as the breeze on my face right now had filled my lungs, giving me new life.

It was new. Good.

Despite everything screaming at me to stay away, I wanted to feel it again.

* * *

I got back downto Barkley Falls a little after three-thirty. Graydon had texted me that the landlord was suddenly available to meet Sadie at the store that afternoon.

The door to Debbie’s Place was wedged open with a little wooden doorstop when I arrived, and I slipped through into the dim room, my palms unexpectedly sweaty.

There was no one there. But I could hear the murmur of voices in the back.

The space was bigger than it appeared on the outside—wide, with a couple of pedestals on either end of the open room where old mannequins were arranged on top in various action poses. On the one to my left, a pair of them were posed together, one on an eighties-style chrome and leather chair, the other standing haughty, hands on hips. On the far pedestal was a lone mannequin with its hand up against its forehead as if it were looking out over the lake.

I pictured Sadie standing next to these mannequins, arranging them, dressing them in clothes and jewelry, humming a song. Turning, when she saw me, and smiling.

Laughing.

For a second I was confused. Then I realized she actually had laughed, from wherever she was in the back. A deep male voice laughed too and, inexplicably, I felt a jab of something like jealousy hit me.

I cut through to the door on the far wall.

There was a biggish room back there, with a tired looking wood-paneled desk on one side and a cluster of empty clothes racks on the other. Sadie and a tall guy with black hair and an expensive-looking suit stood with their backs to me, looking out the rear door opened to the alley.

“That’s what he told me,” the man said, his voice deep, with a little gravel to it like some kind of old-timey radio announcer.

Sadie laughed again, her hair seeming to shimmer as she tipped her head back.

I swallowed, feeling like an interloper. A pissed-off-for-no-good-reason interloper.

“Hey,” I said.

The two of them turned around. Sadie’s face was full of something like radiance, making my stomach go loose. The man was older, in his late forties maybe. But he looked like a well-aged superman. Dark hair, silver at the temples. A wedge in his chin.

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