So True

by Serena Bell

  “And your brothers and sisters are here. So why would you want to work for someone else, and in Seattle?”

  “I never meant to freelance forever. It was a way to be here for Hannah when she was growing up. Decent money, flexible hours—but it was never the dream.”

  “I remember when I first met you back in high school you said you wanted to be—what was it again? The business brains for a big company. The one who makes the numbers add up.”

  “CFO.”

  “But then I thought you changed your mind. You weren’t sure. You thought you wanted to do something more creative.”

  She’d almost forgotten that. There had been a time. When she’d thought maybe she would be happier doing something with illustration or animation or storyboarding. But that had really just been a teenaged fantasy. Just because you liked to draw didn’t make you an artist.

  “It takes creativity to be a CFO.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m not knocking it. Obviously it takes all kinds of skills, or they wouldn’t get paid the big bucks. I’m not saying you wouldn’t be great at it, either. I’m just wondering if it’s what you love.”

  “Do you love being a general contractor?” she countered.

  He nodded. “I do, actually. I love being able to take what someone wants for a project and make it real in the world. And I love being hands-on with stuff. I could never sit in an office.”

  Jax had a way of looking at her like he could see what she was thinking. “Not everyone’s like that, though.”

  “Well, sure, no, but—you have this creative streak—” He gestured down at the counter in front of them, where she’d been doodling again. Refining designs. Unable to stop herself, she flipped over the paper, hiding it from his eyes.

  “That’s just messing around,” she said. “It’s nothing that could ever be anything. I’m good with numbers. Great with numbers. And Buyathon apparently thinks I could make a competent director of finance and planning. You know what?” she said. She was suddenly, unexpectedly, irritated with the direction of this conversation. “This is none of your business. You blew your chance to express any opinion about my life a long time ago.”

  He stiffened. “You’re—” He took a breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry. And—” He sighed, this time. “Actually, you know what? I’ve been meaning to do this, and it’s never the perfect moment, but I—I’m sorry, period. I know it’s too little too late, but I’ve been realizing I owe you a big apology. For what I did. For leaving with no explanation. There’s no excuse. I’m sorry.”

  She froze. Of all the things she’d been expecting, this was the last. An honest-to-God apology.

  And by most standards, it was perfect. No excuses, no explanations, just: apology. And God, he really sounded like he meant it. The expression on his face was open, contrite. Almost—pained. He was sorry.

  “I—”

  She tried. She opened her mouth, and she tried to say something that made sense. Maybe, “It’s okay”—although it wasn’t. Or “I forgive you”—which at some level, she did, because she believed in forgiveness. She really did.

  But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just let him off the hook. Because she still needed to understand. She wanted to know why he’d done it.

  That explanation, the one he’d left without offering? She still craved it.

  But she didn’t want him to know how much.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” he said. The silence had dragged on long enough that it was clear she wasn’t going to fill it. “I just needed to say that. But don’t feel like you have to say anything back. I know there’s nothing to say.”

  Finally, she found her voice. “No,” she said. “There isn’t.”

  10

  He shut up for a while after that, because she was one hundred percent right: Her life was none of his business. But he stayed aware of her—where she was, what she was doing—even when he was busy with other things. He checked to make sure there wasn’t wallpaper buried under the layers of peeling interior paint, prodded the subfloor to make sure it was all sound, tried to figure out how much of the trim and built-ins he could reuse or repurpose.

  Inspired by Chiara’s sketches and enthusiasm, he’d spent the week filling Evan’s apartment with tools and materials and working every free moment when he wasn’t at the hospital with Evan. He’d drawn plans, built racks and shelves, started in on the parts of the counter he could do off site, sketched out to-do lists. He’d caught himself whistling as he worked—which wasn’t something he’d done in years. Something about this project had gotten under his skin, and he liked it.

  A few minutes later, a paying customer came in—a mom and her son, who looked like he was around eight or nine. They were visiting family in Arch Cape, and whenever they went on vacation anywhere, they always checked out all the game and toy stores, the mom explained.

  “Sorry about the chaos,” Chiara said. “It’s temporary. We’re renovating.”

  The mom waved a hand. “We’re just happy to be here. But just so you know, your store didn’t pop up in our online search for board game shops. We would have missed it completely except that Cade wanted to check out the playground, and we happened to spot you guys.”

  Chiara sighed. Another thing Evan needed to remedy. “So you guys like game stores?”

  “We love game stores. I’m Sadie,” the woman said.

  “I’m Chiara.”

  “Do you have demo games? That’s our favorite thing to do, sit and play demo games. We left our non-gamer family members home so they wouldn’t rush us.”

  “We do,” Chiara said.

  Jax was basically done with his inspection. He should leave. He should go back to Evan’s apartment and dig in again. He wanted to be able to have most of the built-ins ready to install by Friday, so he could do it while she was gone.

  Instead, he began a careful—and mostly unnecessary—inspection of the interior trim.

  “So, Cade, you’re, what, ten?” Chiara asked the boy.

  “Nine.” He wore square-framed black-rimmed glasses and his hair hung in his eyes.

  “Tell me what games you guys usually play together.”

  “Catan,” the boy replied.

  Even Jax had heard of that game.

  “Agricola. Puerto Rico. Dominion.”

  “Okay,” Chiara said. “That helps. So you’re not a typical nine-year-old gamer.”

  Sadie laughed at that. “No. He’s pretty advanced.”

  Chiara went to the shelves and pulled out a game. “This is my current favorite,” she said conspiratorially. “In this one, each of you is a corporation, trying to make the most money on Mars. The game is exactly what it sounds like. You’re literally terraforming Mars—raising the temperature, upping the oxygen levels, and creating oceans. And meanwhile, you have these cards that let you earn money and other resources, and you build an empire that way.”

  “Ohhh, that sounds cool,” Cade said.

  Jax felt that way, too. It was the enthusiasm in Chiara’s voice. It was infectious. He hadn’t played a board game since—well, since the last one he’d played at the Campbell kitchen table—and he was ready to sit down and join in.

  Chiara got the mom and son seated at the table and set up the game for them. It was immediately obvious that the table was too small, but Chiara managed to fit it all, somehow. Things looked precariously balanced, and Jax couldn’t help thinking that one swipe of that kid’s sleeve would send pieces everywhere.

  Leaving the mother and son to their game, Chiara went back behind the counter.

  Jax came over. “Table’s way too small, huh?”

  She nodded. “When I play with Auburn we sometimes use muffin tins to hold the pieces, but there’s not even room for that.”

  “Muffin tins,” he repeated. “Clever.”

  She was watching her customers with a thoughtful look on her face. “You know,” she said. “I think that’s the key.”

  “Muffin tins?�
��

  “No. Demos. Events. Getting people in here. And not at teeny tiny tables, either. God. It could be great. We could—Evan could—have Magic the Gathering Nights. D&D. But also family game nights. Math game nights. And weekend stuff, for tourist traffic. Beach games and puzzles…”

  She was bouncing a little, on the tips of her toes, with excitement. He tried not to notice the way the bounce vibrated through her curves, but hell; he noticed. He noticed the flush in her cheeks, too.

  Focus, Jax.

  “You work on the events,” he told her. “Leave the tables to me.”

  The chimes over the door rang again and they both looked over. “Two customers at once?” Chiara whispered. “Say it isn’t so.”

  But it wasn’t. It was Chiara’s siblings, minus Mason, plus a man Jax had never seen before. They came through the door with typical Campbell energy, like a litter of puppies, chattering and jostling.

  “Keeeee,” Auburn sang. “It is perfect kite-flying weather and these lunatics just convinced me to play hooky and leave Beachcrest in Carl’s capable hands for an hour so we can get down on the beach. You have to come, too. You can leave the store with Jax,” she said, turning to him. “Good to see you.”

  Her tone managed to convey the exact opposite of her words. “You, too,” he said. Only he actually meant it. He’d always liked Auburn. She was a louder, curvier, curlier, more extravagant Chiara, minus whatever chemical ingredient made Chiara irresistible to him.

  Levi gave him a look that conveyed more or less what Auburn’s tone had—plus a helping of watch out—and he didn’t bother with the niceties. But Hannah, who looked a hell of a lot like her sisters had at sixteen, came forward and held her arms out for a hug.

  He hugged her. Her hair still smelled like strawberry shampoo, like it had when she was six, and he was suddenly in the Campbell’s kitchen, watching Hannah on the floor with her dolls spread out.

  He let Hannah go, and she stepped back, telling him she’d missed him and was glad he was here, even if her dumbass brother and sister wouldn’t say so—

  But the memory didn’t want to let go.

  Maggie, the Campbell siblings’ mom, would have been at the stove, cooking something that smelled amazing, usually a stew or chili or spaghetti sauce. One of the kids would be helping her out—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes because she’d enlisted them against their will to chop onions for her, which made her cry too hard. Someone would have cued up a playlist, and everyone whose playlist it wasn’t would be griping about the music. At least one sibling would be doing homework at the table, often accompanied by him and Chiara.

  Despite the bickering over music, the siblings were super close. He loved watching them together. The way they cared for each other and worked together and, yes, even fought, made him feel good and bad at the same time. Good because for this moment, just this moment, he felt part of it. Bad because this wasn’t really his.

  At his house, he cooked—not like Mrs. Campbell, but enough to get by; he could boil water for pasta, bake chicken, grill burgers, and scramble eggs. He cleaned up—after dinner and after his mother, who sometimes disappeared at dinnertime or afterwards on dates, and other times passed out in the early evening, leaving a wake behind her—empties and cigarettes, mail she’d opened and left, books she’d started but never finished, clothes she’d shed, wrappers, dishes.… He drove Evan where he needed to go because he didn’t trust his mother to drive, and he helped Evan with his homework because his mother…well, most nights, somewhere between didn’t and couldn’t.

  “This is Trey,” Auburn was saying, gesturing at the unfamiliar man, and Trey, with an easy smile, stuck a hand out. Jax took it; the guy had a firm shake, but not asshole-firm, and Jax liked him on sight.

  “Where’s Mace?” Chiara asked.

  “Some work thing. We couldn’t spring him.”

  Chiara was looking at him, a question on her face, and he got himself grounded back in the moment and said, “Yeah. Go.”

  “You sure? This, and Friday, you don’t mind?”

  “Nah,” he said. It was less than an hour till closing. “But what if they want to buy that?” He gestured to where the mom and kid were still—happily—terraforming Mars.

  She showed him how to ring it up—he wrote it down so he’d have it for Friday, too. “It’ll be your first sale,” she said.

  “You’re very sure of yourself,” he said.

  “I just know that if I can get them in here, I can sell them games,” she said.

  That made him smile.

  “Go,” he said. “Fly your kite. Hang with your family. I’ll hold down the fort.”

  11

  It was perfect kite-flying weather, and because it was midweek and almost dinnertime, the beach was crowded but not mobbed. Levi had brought along his favorite kite, a dual-line dragon in flame colors. He let Hannah get it aloft—she was still the baby, even at sixteen. The wind threatened to disappear just as the kite took wing, then returned with a vengeance, and the dragon’s oranges, yellows and reds lit up against the cloudless blue of the sky. Chiara squinted up at it and felt happy.

  “What was Jax doing in the shop?” Auburn demanded, coming up alongside her sister and bumping her with one shoulder.

  She’d been waiting for it. They’d left her alone on the walk to the beach, maybe because Hannah was hanging on every word, and, even though sixteen was pretty mature, it wasn’t all grown up, not yet.

  Levi joined them on her other side. “The offer to kick his ass still stands.”

  “You don’t need to kick his ass.”

  “That worries me,” Levi said.

  “You also don’t need to worry about me.”

  Levi frowned, squinting into the sun. “Convince me.”

  “I told you Evan’s store’s in trouble,” she said to Auburn.

  “You’d have to be blind not to see that,” Levi said. “What the fuck was that kid thinking?”

  “He was thinking ten thousand dollars would go a lot further than it did,” Chiara said.

  Levi nodded.

  “So Jax and I are going to get him back on track,” Chiara said. “My brains, Jax’s brawn.”

  “Has Jax heard that description?” Levi asked, one eyebrow sky high.

  “I’m not serious,” she said. “We just agreed, I’d provide the vision, he’d do the contracting work.”

  Levi pursed his lips. “Makes sense.”

  Hannah ran up, kite spools extended to Chiara. “You want it?”

  She took the spools, feeling the kite tug. She dipped it one way, then the other.

  “Can you turn a loop?”

  She did, then handed it off to Levi. She and Auburn strolled toward the water, where the sand was damp, and stood staring out at the horizon. The water was vivid and sparkling, the lighthouse visible in the distance to the right. Breaker Rock loomed over them, off to their left. She felt a brief, sharp moment of grief: She’d be leaving this behind if she went to Seattle.

  But there were always opportunity costs. She remembered her father talking about what he’d given up to run the family business, take over Cape House hotel. He’d sometimes look at business magazines, the ones with lists of influential people, and he’d say—half-joking, in a Brando voice—I coulda been a contender.

  You’ll be on one of these lists one day. That’s my consolation. My money’s on youngest female CFO of a Fortune 500 company.

  There were always opportunity costs.

  “So you’re going to be in the shop with him all day every day for—?”

  “A couple weeks. That’s all.”

  “And he’s going to have his shirt off, running the sander.”

  “No. He’s not going to have his shirt off. Or be running the sander. He’s going to do the dirty work somewhere else.”

  Auburn waggled her eyebrows.

  “Shut. Up.”

  “He looks good,” Auburn said, abruptly. “I’m sorry to say it, but he does. He’s aged well.”


  Chiara sighed. “Yes. He has.” She had stored up some nice visuals from the morning. The way that gray t-shirt clung to the planes and contours of Jax’s bad-ass body. And those few scraps of bare skin—the dips and dives of bicep and that stolen glimpse of his back.

  Also the uncertainty on his face the one time she’d looked up and caught him staring at her. What the hell had he been thinking?

  Hannah drew even with them, kicking sand up as she did. “You have homework, bebe?” Chiara asked her.

  “Keeeee,” Hannah moaned. “I can take care of my own homework. I’m sixteeeeen.”

  “Tough habit to break,” Chiara said. She’d been in charge of making Hannah do her homework for most of Hannah’s life. And Hannah hadn’t always been a good student. She’d had trouble in school until this last year, when suddenly she got interested in pretty much everything. Math still gave her hell—go figure; genetics were weird—but it was like something got turned on in her brain sophomore year and suddenly she wanted to tell her siblings about government and history and psychology and philosophy and whatever her teachers fed her. Auburn had been the same way, except her indifference to school had ended in late high school when she realized she wanted to run her own hotel one day.

  Chiara suddenly thought of Jax and his crack about helping other people with math homework. That did describe her life—all of it—pretty damn well.

  Is it what you love?

  “Earth to Keee-aaah-raaa.”

  Chiara surfaced to find both her sisters staring at her.

  “Something on your mind?” Auburn asked innocently.

  Hannah squinted. “Do you have a crush on Jax?”

  “No,” Chiara said. “I most certainly do not have a crush on Jax.”

  “Methinks the lady doth protest too much,” Hannah said.

  Chiara rolled her eyes. “School is ruining your brain.”

  12

  Jax was at Meeples when she got there the next morning—and on a ladder. Her gaze climbed the rungs; he was standing three-quarters of the way up. It was a good look for him. He had a spectacular ass. It should be illegal, or at least a controlled substance, especially in those well-worn jeans. With the small hole at the base of the pocket, through which she could see a flash of gray.