Page 78 of Here We Go Again
“You look like you just performed oral sex on a Belgian waffle.”
Rosemary blushes. She delicately tongues the corner of her mouth. “Is that better?”
“Come here, Hale.” Logan grabs a napkin and swipes the sugar off Rosemary’s chin, the tip of her nose, her cheek. “Can’t take you anywhere, I swear…”
Rosemary licks her lips and blinks those long, pale lashes. “Did you get it all?” Rosemary asks.
“Hard to tell when your skin is the same color as the powdered sugar.”
Joe, who’s been quiet on his side of the table, suddenly looks at Rosemary and Logan. “Dammit, you girls had sex, didn’t you?”
As she pulls the Gay Mobile into Ocean Springs, Mississippi, Logan realizes she has no idea what day of the week it is. She asks Rosemary, who looks equally befuddled. “Tuesday?”
“The day of my humiliation!” Joe languishes.
“Oh, it’s Monday.” Rosemary sounds pleasantly surprised as he checks her phone. Everything has been a blur since the Grand Canyon, excitement and exhaustion converging to smear the trip into an indistinguishable series of events. Have they been on the road aweek? A month? And in the name of Shay Mitchell’s triceps, how the hell did they end up in the Deep South?
“It’s five o’clock,” Rosemary announces.
“In what time zone?”
Rosemary squints. “Eastern? Central? One of those two. Anyway, the gallery closes at six, so we should hurry.”
As they drive through the streets of Ocean Springs, she notices how different the Gulf Coast feels from everywhere else they’ve been so far. The whole town is flat and low to the ground. It isn’t only the lack of mountains or hills or literally any incline that makes it feel this way; the buildings themselves are hunkered down, as if the entire town is always braced for an incoming storm.
Downtown Ocean Springs is quiet and quaint on first impression, and Logan parallel parks the van a block from the gallery. She turns around in her seat, and Joe touches his jowly chin. “How do I look, girls?”
“Like a man with a fully functioning cock,” Logan answers.
“Are you ready, Joe?”
“Absolutely not.” Joe sighs. “But are we ever ready to face our greatest mistakes?”
Logan climbs out of the van, and holy shit. It’s like stepping into a dishwasher at the end of the heated dry cycle. Her sunglasses immediately fog, and she pushes them into her hair. She yanks the back door of the van open. “It’s as humid as Joe’s sweaty underpants out here.”
“And why does it feel like the sun is punching me in the face?” Rosemary demands as she pries the collar of her dress away from her throat.
In the five minutes it takes to get Joe out of the car, Logan sweats through her T-shirt. Rosemary has beads of sweat along her hairline, and her cheeks are bright pink. “How do I already have swamp ass?” she curses, and Logan smiles at the knowledge that she got prim Rosemary Hale to sayswamp ass.
Logan pushes Joe’s wheelchair over the uneven, inaccessible sidewalk while Rosemary keeps a firm grip on Odie’s leash. The dog finds it critical to pee on the trunk of every Magnolia tree between the van and the gallery. The Heather on the Hill is sandwiched between an antique store and a brewery, the brick facade painted white with purple flower accents. Heather.
“No dogs.” Rosemary points to a sign in the window. “I’ll go sit on that bench in the shade with Odie.”
“No, wait!” Joe reaches for her. “I want the nice one!”
“Haleis the nice one?” Logan screeches.
“Odie likes me better,” Rosemary says simply. “Sorry, Joe, but Logan will be with you. You can do this. Just like we practiced in the car.”
“He might not even be here,” Logan attempts to reassure him.
A bell jingles when Logan shoves a reluctant Joe through the door of the Heather on the Hill gallery. The whole place is bathed in natural light, creating a glowing path inside. Logan barely has time to take in the art on the walls before a man at the front counter raises his head to greet them, and it’s Remy St. Patin. Logan justknows.
Partly because the man looks like a Black Harrison Ford. She can tell he was gorgeous in his youth, and he’s still gorgeous, in a hot dad sort of way. His dark eyes look rimmed with liner, his lashes are full, and his smile is easy. He is short and weedy, whereas Joe is tall and broad, and Logan can perfectly imagine how beautiful they must have looked together all those years ago.
But Remy has also aged. Gracefully, yes, but aged all the same, like Joe. There are lines around his eyes and mouth, a receding hairline that pushes his close-cropped black curls halfway back his forehead. There’s something altogether droopy about him, like the branches of Southern trees.
“Welcome in today, folks!” He beams until his eyes fall upon the customers in question. Then his entire face changes, until he looks twenty years old, somehow, the way he probably did that day he plucked a ride-share flyer off a college bulletin board. Remy’s facebrightens as he steps out from behind the counter. He’s wearing a pair of paint-stained corduroys and a Henley.
