A Slippery Slope

by Tanya Gallagher

  Gayle opens the front door and waits for me to speak first. It’s not that Gayle is a bitch, I tell myself. It’s that we don’t know each other yet. My dad met her on his morning train ride into Boston a few years ago. She worked in advertising and he trekked into the city to teach art history to bored undergrads a few times a week. I guess things got interesting over talk of visual communication in advertising and he invited her to be a guest speaker in one of his classes. “It’s about a practical application of creative skills!” my dad had said when he told me about Gayle’s lecture. I don’t know if she wowed the class but he sure was hooked. It was all over from there.

  My dad told me he was getting married my first semester of college. He’d suggested a fancy meal at the Ritz, which should have been a sign that something was wrong. Surrounded by the tinkling of silverware and the murmurs of business deals being conducted he’d dropped the bomb that, yep, he really was over my mom and moving on.

  “Ok,” I’d said around a mouthful of lobster roll. What else was I going to say? It wasn’t until afterward that I realized he had been worried about my reaction. The whole overpriced lunch had been a front.

  Truth be told, it was weird to have my dad falling in love when I was feeling adrift in school. Back then Jackson and I still spoke every week, and his voice was the only thing keeping me tethered to the present. Even still, I hadn't come home when my dad moved out of the house next door to Jackson’s parents and into the place he and Gayle live now. I’d let him go through my things and pack them up for me, so there’s still a box of my yearbooks up in his attic somewhere.

  Before I moved into her guesthouse, the longest Gayle and I spent together was probably the few days before their wedding in Philadelphia, where Gayle’s family is from. I saw my dad every week anyway; I didn’t need to swing by Swan’s Hollow for old time’s sake.

  It’s not my stepmom’s fault I never came home to visit, and even though my mom doesn’t have great things to say about her replacement when we talk on the phone, I need to give Gayle a chance. After all, my dad is happy with her and that means a lot.

  I hold up a bag of pastries as a peace offering. Maybe blueberry muffins and cinnamon donuts will crack her. “Is Dad still here?” It’s only fair that if my dad could surprise me by hanging out on his front porch with Jackson last night then I can surprise him by showing up before breakfast for a little friendly interrogation.

  Gayle opens the door wider and I follow her inside. “He hasn’t left for work yet.”

  My dad sits at the breakfast bar in the sprawling white kitchen, a newspaper spread in front of him. He shuffles it into a neat stack to make room for me. “Hey Natalie.”

  I set the bag of pastries on the counter next to a photograph of Gayle and her granddaughter before climbing onto a barstool. I wait until my dad has a donut in his hands before I speak. “You didn’t tell me you were friendly with Jackson.” I cringe. That wasn’t supposed to sound so defensive.

  My dad raises his eyebrows in amusement. “I didn’t know I needed to. After all, I lived next to him for two years. See him around town from time to time.”

  Oh yeah. So many times I think of Jackson as mine, but I forget that he belongs to other people too. People who aren’t me. People who didn’t skip town and hide.

  “He’s a nice young man,” Gayle says, taking the blueberry muffin my dad offers her. “A real sense of duty.”

  I flinch. I don’t know if she’s making a dig at the fact that I never came to visit, but it still cuts. Another one of my failings, no matter how justified my motives might have been.

  It feels strange that Jackson probably knows Gayle better than I do. She seems to like him better than me, anyway, despite the fresh muffins.

  “He’s something all right.” I shove a bite of muffin into my mouth before I can say anything rude, savoring the tang of blueberries and lemon. Still, curiosity wins out. “What did you guys talk about last night? Before I showed up?”

  “Ansel Adams,” my dad says.

  I almost choke on my muffin. “Ansel Adams?”

  “Sure. You know he shot a lot of images in California, up in Monterey and Carmel.”

  God, Jackson’s good, going straight for my dad’s weak spots. “Uh huh.”

  “Speaking of which, did you know Clint Eastwood used to be the mayor of Carmel?”

  “Another bit of trivia from Jackson?”

  My dad bobs his head.

  I sigh, setting down my muffin. “I guess he’s just a fountain of knowledge.”

  Gayle snags a wayward blueberry off my plate and pops it in her mouth. “You could invite him over for dinner, you know. One night next week, maybe.”

  “Gayle makes a mean roast,” my dad chimes in. He rubs a hand over his stomach and smiles. “Part of the reason I married her.”

  She blushes. “I thought it was my brains and my beauty.”

  “Well, that too.” My dad turns back to me. “So what do you say? Will we be seeing more of Jackson?”

  “I don’t know.” I stare at the counter and think of the bottles of lube in my trash, unused and unhelpful. If I’m losing money on stupid mistakes now, what’s it going to be like when there’s even more money at stake? Every penny counts and as much as I hate to admit it, maybe Jackson knows some secret business-school tricks to avoid these kinds of blunders. Maybe partnering up would actually be a good thing for me, a crash course in learning business without actually crashing.

  Then again, saying yes to being partners could mean starting down a slippery slope. I think of Jackson’s infuriating grin, his irrefutably hot body. Adding Jackson to the mix might be the biggest mistake of all.

  Chapter 13

  I’m heading on lunch break,” Jess tells me when I walk into Holy Grounds the next day. “Should be pretty slow for a bit.” She hangs up her apron and flounces out the door, her long blond braid swinging behind her.

  I tie on my own apron and scowl at her back. Jess is so shiny and wholesome, like a mini Abercrombie model. I bet she’s got a bright future and a college education all lined up in front of her. I bet one day she’ll look back at her time at Holy Grounds as a way to get extra cash, not as her sole source of income. And I’ll be the weird older girl who couldn’t hack it in the real world.

  Ugh. I need to snap out of this. It looks like the chalkboard hasn’t been updated since yesterday so I grab a piece of chalk to do the one task I know will make me feel better.

  “Too much Monday, not enough coffee,” I write, because, pretty much.

  I fill a few to-go orders but the shop’s empty when the door opens and Jackson strides into the room. I guess he couldn’t wait for an answer after all.

  There’s gotta be more going on with him than what’s on the surface. I need to accept that I’m single and back in Swan’s Hollow, but also that Jackson has a life here and that he’s wedging his way into mine. I just don’t understand why yet.

  I tell myself to settle down, to not get worked up about Jackson coming to my place of employment because it is the one and only coffee shop in town. But I’m still ruffled by him, by the way he can show up looking so cool when I’m just not.

  “What can I get started for you?” I ask, all business.

  Jackson leans his elbows on the counter and I’m reminded again of how grown up he is. I can look at him and see the Jackson from before, the one who’d come to Holy Grounds and make a single coffee last for hours just so he could use the free wifi. But that’s not the same Jackson in front of me now.

  The afternoon sun spilling through the shop highlights the stubble on his chin, shot through with gold and copper and red. It’s so different from the brown strands on his head. And the muscles standing out on his arms under that weathered blue T-shirt? He didn’t have them before. And I like them.

  I press the backs of my hands against my apron. If I don’t do something, I’ll reach out and touch him.

  “Can I buy you a mocha?” Jackson asks. I look at him in surpris
e. He can be way too persuasive when he has an ulterior motive and I need to keep my guard up.

  “Now you’re trying to get on my good side.”

  “I am.” He looks so damn earnest as he smiles. The motor in the cooler case fills the room with this comforting humming sound and it smells like coffee and caramel and butter, and my heart, thumping along at more than the normal eighty beats per minute, whispers maybe.

  Maybe he’s different. Maybe not.

  “Fine,” I tell him. There’s no one in the shop now anyway.

  Jackson pulls out his wallet and it’s the same one from when he got his driver’s license. Jackson Wirth, who is loyal to things if not people.

  “Make it two mochas,” he says. I smirk at him and his eyes crinkle in confusion. “What?”

  “Aren’t mochas, like, the opposite of your healthy running lifestyle?”

  “Maybe the reason I run is so I can drink the mochas in the first place.”

  I can’t help but laugh as I turn to fix our drinks. Mocha is the first coffee drink I ever learned how to make and deep down it’s still my favorite. Hell, it’s the first coffee drink I ever tried, and it was all Jackson’s fault, really. I’d spent one lazy afternoon up in the treehouse, reading, when Jackson and Conor came outdoors to toss a baseball around. The brothers were loud enough to distract me from my book, and I swung my legs out of the treehouse to watch them tumble around in the grass. They yelped like puppies and I wanted to reach out and pat their heads and toss them a treat or something. I settled for bringing them hot chocolate and Jackson teased me when I handed him his mug.

  “Hot chocolate is a kid’s drink,” he said, and I blushed down to my toes. After six months in Swan’s Hollow, Jackson had a reputation for taking girls out in that car of his, a reputation for making out with them, or more. He’d stepped over the line between kid and adult and hadn’t looked back, while I was still toeing the damn line.

  “Screw you, Jackson.” I pointed at his empty cup. “You’re drinking it, too. And considering it’s almost gone, it can’t be all that bad.”

  He downed the rest of the hot chocolate in a single swallow. “I’ve got something for you to try next time.”

  Next time, huh? A shiver raced up my spine. He was electric even when he was driving me crazy.

  “What’s that?” I asked, holding steady, not backing down.

  “You’ll see.” His grin slipped into my stomach like molten chocolate.

  Jackson didn’t say anything more about it until a few weeks later, when he grabbed my hand after school and announced, “I’m kidnapping you.”

  “Ummm,” I said.

  “Um nothing.”

  I imagined myself in a different life, one where I didn’t care if I got my heart broken, where I said yes to dates with the cute, dangerous boy who lived next door.

  “Fine,” I said.

  It felt good to ride around in the front seat with Jackson, different than all the other mornings when we’d drive to school bleary-eyed and with purpose. Afternoons were normally the time Jackson hung out with friends or other girls, but that day he chose me.

  “Coffee?” I asked skeptically when he guided me through the door at Holy Grounds. “Coffee is disgusting.”

  He shook his head and grinned. “Coffee is the elixir of life. And mocha is the gateway drug.”

  Jackson led me up to the counter and even paid, which made me feel awkward and dumb. Up until then I’d always shoved wads of cash at him for gas money and here he was, treating me, like we were on some date. It made me feel unsteady and woefully underprepared.

  We sat at our table and clinked mugs, and when I took a sip I felt my world tilt, full of chocolate and coffee, smooth and soothing and spiked with magic. A hundred girls at school would have died to trade places with me, and here I was, drinking mochas with Jackson Wirth. And if he was electric, being around him made me electric too. Or it could have been the caffeine and sugar spiking through my blood. Same same.

  The memory makes me smile, and I reach for a can of whipped cream and squirt a generous amount into our mugs. If we’re going for it, we’re really going for it.

  Jackson grabs both mugs and leads me to a table in the front window. Someone’s carved a pair of initials into the wood surface. AZ and CR, twinned together in a heart. As much as he’s against defacing property and all for doing right by your neighbor, I’m surprised Mr. Spence let it stay. But maybe even he makes exceptions for love.

  I think, with a trace of bitterness, of how different AZ and CR probably are from Matthew and me. Must be nice to trust your relationship enough to leave a permanent mark. I trusted Matthew, sure, and look where that got me.

  I swing my gaze back to the man in front of me. “So,” I say.

  “So.” Jackson takes a long swallow of his drink before he continues, so I do too. I make a damn good mocha. I lick my lips appreciatively and see that he’s watching me, his eyes on my mouth. “I want you to know I’m serious about this business thing.” Jackson flicks his eyes up to meet mine. “I’d really like to be partners.”

  Can his knowledge help me launch my business without making costly mistakes? God knows I want to build something, to grow it, and have it sustain me. If I can start a company without making mistakes, maybe involving Jackson wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Maybe the trick to launching a lube business is to have a partner who actually went to school for this kind of thing, someone who knows his stuff. Then again, Jackson didn’t step up to run his dad’s shop. And I don’t know what I’ll do if he bails on me too.

  “This isn’t a group project in science class,” I say. “If you’re doing this, I’m not carrying your weight.”

  “I’m not eighteen anymore, Natalie.”

  I think of all the ways he’s not eighteen anymore. Every sculpted, hard muscle and those calloused hands. I swallow hard.

  “It’s just…” I pause. My throat squeezes around the words, but he needs to understand. “It’s just, the reason I’m back here is because I trusted the guy I lived with and everything he told me ended up being a lie. I can’t do that again. Not with something this important.”

  Jackson’s face hardens. “Your boyfriend?”

  Why does admitting this feel like a failure, like it’s something I did wrong instead of something Matthew did to me? My skin flames. “That’s not the point,” I tell him, even though I’m sure he can guess what happened. “If you’re in this, you’re really in it.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Until you get this product launched and you don’t need me anymore, I’m in it.”

  Over Jackson’s shoulder a quote on the wall informs me, “Faith does not make things easy, it makes things possible.” Is that what working with Jackson would be—a leap of faith? Am I going to keep letting my fear of getting burned be stronger than my desire to take action?

  I look at his face, at the fine lines bracketing his mouth. A product of too many lazy grins and cocky smiles. We used to be friends. I used to trust him. And I could really, really use a hand to make this business come together as fast as I want it to.

  “Fine,” I tell him.

  The answer shocks the hell out of both of us.

  “Really?” Jackson looks at me like he expected more of a protest.

  “Yes,” I say. Hope wins. “We’ll put a contract in place, or whatever. But yes.”

  He stands up and sticks out a hand for me to shake. I roll my eyes but stand up, too. When our palms meet he says, “Fuck it,” and pulls me close. He hugs me, just like that, as if forgetting that the last four years of our lives happened. Or didn’t happen, as the case may be. Jackson smells like freshly ground coffee and shampoo and sunlight and I lean against the expanse of his chest for a minute too long. My stomach skitters and I hope to hell I don’t regret this.

  I pull away and retreat to the safety of my side of the table. “Not that I don’t appreciate your random drop-ins, but how do I get in touch with you to set up meetings and things?” I
take out my cell phone and enter his name, looking up at him expectantly.

  “It’s the same number as always,” he says softly. “I’ve always been here.”

  Oh. I make him repeat the number, anyway, because I erased it from my phone years ago after I stopped having a reason to call. He’s an email address I deleted, a Facebook page I unfollowed because it was too painful to look at. It was easier to forget him when I didn’t have to see his name every day.

  Jackson watches as I tap the information into my cell phone. He drinks his mocha calmly as I write him back into my life.

  Chapter 14

  Holy shit. I look up from the computer with a smile. It’s an hour after my shift at Holy Grounds and Jackson has already filled my inbox with enough information to, well, launch a business. One email contains a web course on e-commerce and another details the process of getting products sourced. A third message includes no fewer than three podcast episodes about online businesses and five articles about online marketing and advertising.

  “Just for starters,” he’s written, which makes me laugh.

  But the best part is the time stamps on the emails. He’d written them before I even left my shift at Holy Grounds. If he had all of this stuff lined up, it means he’s really serious about doing this business together. I’m going to take that as a good sign.

  I sit at the kitchen table with a mug of warm lemon water clutched in my hands, reading through information for the course and watching videos on my tiny laptop screen. I inherited my dad’s academic brain, even if my dropout status doesn’t quite show it. As I bend over my computer and jot down ideas, my years of straight-A achievement show through. I take detailed, organized notes. I am the perfect student. It’s actually kind of a shame that, as good as I am at school, I never finished.