Page 28 of Pour Decisions
“I guess I’ll get sweet too. The peach cobbler waffles sound super good.” I close my menu too. “With some bacon.”
The waiter comes by and we put in our orders. She fills up our coffee and I take a long sip, immediately burning my tongue.
“Shit.” I wrinkle my nose and pour a small pod of creamer into my drink, as if that’ll cool it down at all. “When will I learn to let it cool down?”
“The coffee here is always super-hot,” he says, adding creamer to his too. “But I think you would have burned yourself either way.”
“And yet you didn’t at least try to warn me.”
“You would have tasted it just to see if I was right.”
I catch the slight teasing lilt in his tone, so subtle that I would have missed it if I hadn’t known him, and it makes me smile despite myself. Experiencing glimpses of the old JD is like looking back in time. My stomach twists and turns, unsure of whether to like that or not.
“You come here a lot?” I ask. “Enough to know the coffee is super-hot?”
“Yeah. I usually come to work with Wes in the mornings we have check-ins for work.” He stirs a packet of sugar into his coffee.
“He works for the company?” JD talks about his brothers sometimes, but he’s not super close to them on a friend level. All I remember about Wes is him driving JD nuts when he was a bar back on JD’s shifts.
“Yeah, he’s the manager now, but he helps his wife, Rose, with our canned drinks. They’ve really taken off.”
“God, he’smarried?” He flirted with basically any woman who was in his vicinity back then. He was charming enough to get a lot of numbers, too, even though he wasn’t even allowed to drink yet at twenty years old. “Wow.”
“Yeah. She’s good for him, though. Keeps him on the straight and narrow.”
JD shrugs, busying himself with straightening the sugar packets. I’ve always gotten the sense that he cares about his brothers—even Ash, who he butted heads with even from afar—but they never hung out or anything.
It doesn’t seem like an age gap thing. JD is four years older than the twins, and two years older than Ash. Maybe he spends more time with them now.
I bite my lip and hold back the barrage of questions I want to ask about the past ten years. I never thought I’d find out about where he ended up. A lot of times I wondered about him in a bitter way, thinking about how immersed he must have been in his work to have dumped me for it. But now that I’m here, I want to know all of it the way I want to know the ending of a TV series I had to stop watching halfway through.
Y’know what? Fuck it. I can ask questions all I want unless he’s not into answering them. Liquid courage.
“What about Waylon?” I ask. I only met him once, when he came to pick up Wes at the bar at shift change. He looks more like JD than Wes does. “And Ash?”
“Waylon is the town’s veterinarian now. He’s engaged. The wedding is next fall, I think,” he says. “And Ash? I don’t know. He was randomly in town for Wes and Waylon’s birthday and then he left.”
“You didn’t talk to him? Or ask him where he’d been?”
JD scoffs. “Nope. The last interaction we had before he showed up for the twins’ birthday was around Christmas when we did the big family Secret Santa. Usually people get gag gifts, but he got me a neon orange t-shirt that said,‘Live Fast, Eat Ass’on it. I haven’t quite forgiven him for it.”
I can’t help but laugh at the image of JD holding a shirt like that. “Oh my god.”
“Our mom wasn’t thrilled.” JD runs his hand through his hair. “But she was happy to see him anyway.”
The waiter comes and drops off our food. I made the right choice with the waffles. From the first bite I have to hold in a groan of pleasure—they’re that good. And the bacon is thick and just greasy enough to take the edge off my buzz. We eat in silence for a while.
“I didn’t want to break up back then,” JD says, shattering the silence.
“JD…” I close my eyes, the delicious food churning in my gut. “Now? Really?”
“Please.” His eyes are pleading, almost desperate. I’ve never seen that look on his face before. “I need to get it off my chest because I should have said something back then. And if we’re going to try to clear the air, it needs to be said.”
He’s right. And it’s never going to be comfortable to talk about, so might as well do it with good food to soften the blow.
“You know how things went down with your mom’s husband back then,” he says. “The fight.”
“Yeah.” Unfortunately.
