Mutual Release

by Liz Crowe

  “So… you are legally married?” Evan’s eyes darkened in an odd way, triggering a different response in her. One that made her want to do really embarrassing things with him, right there in the empty bar.

  “Yes, I am. I don’t wear a ring, obviously. But on paper… I am Mrs. James Dawson. It works for us… so far. Once it becomes legal for him to marry Grant, who knows?”

  “But… you haven’t… I mean, it’s been, what, five years or so since he… left?”

  “No, three. And no, I haven’t. I’ve been too busy trying to make a fucking living for myself running a giant distribution company.” Anger flooded her brain at Evan’s seeming small-minded focus on one stupid detail. She grabbed her purse from the chair and stared him down. “So, enough of my personal true confessions. Here is the deal. I’m interested in you.” She blushed at his grin. “Not you, you over eager asshole – your company, your brewery. But not enough to jump in just yet. Will you give me limited rights to a few accounts, let me see if I can get some of my hungrier sales guys to push it, focus on it, and get some traction? I won’t demand exclusive rights. I don’t believe in that shit. It only hurts breweries, and when breweries hurt, my bottom line suffers.”

  “Wow.” Evan took a step back, his face blank. “Um, sure. I think.”

  “Great.” She took a breath, tried to regain some equilibrium. “Thanks for listening,” she smiled at him, “Country Club.”

  He grinned back, and her heart nearly pounded out of her chest. She turned away and walked towards the Tap Room front door. She had to get the hell out before she threw herself in his arms and told him… everything… all of it. Because suddenly that was exactly what she wanted to do. The need to confess how she’d manhandled and manipulated James into their current bizarre circumstance was so strong she stopped, nearly turned and spilled it all. He put a hand on her arm, his eyes making her choke back the urge to gasp at his touch.

  “Anytime. I mean it.”

  She cursed her way back to the office, the forty-five-minute ride giving her plenty of time to remind herself she had said too much, revealed too many private details while not telling him the truth. It would only bite her in the ass ultimately when he turned into just another jerk. Men were not her friends and never would be. Pretending this one was somehow different was a recipe for disaster. No matter that he was so comforting, so… absolutely fucking perfect.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I just have to ask,” Julie said, holding the monthly sales report and staring down her nose at the chain store sales team. “Who in the hell thinks this is in any way acceptable?”

  Silence met her ears. They had skidded and lost traction with some major stores, including the growing Major Organic Grocery presence in the state. Nothing pissed Julie off worse than walking into a major retail chain and taking stock of the beer cooler only to find her brands shoved to the bottom and giant display stacks of beer she did not represent littering the endcaps. The Michigan craft beer boom was in full swing. And while she had a firm grip on the big dogs, small-timers were popping up all over the place, Big House Brewing being one that was creating a fair bit of low-level buzz, now that they were on her radar.

  She put the paper down on the table, flipped on the laptop, and worked her way through the steady decline of shelf and floor space she’d been tracking for all their brands. “Complacency,” she said, turning and removing her glasses, “will not be tolerated. I do not employ ‘order takers’ at Dawson. You people are trained sales professionals. Anyone who wants to sit back and collect a fucking paycheck should get up and walk out. Now.” She met every set of eyes. “Well? What are you waiting for?”

  No one moved an inch. She smiled. “Good. Now, let’s talk about how we’re gonna fix this.” The next hour was spent doing positive brainstorming and planning, and by the time she ended the meeting she felt good about the result. Collecting her laptop and notes, she listened as the staff bantered, laughed, and talked about upcoming events. A sudden strange sensation of loneliness nearly forced her back into her seat. But she smiled at everyone in the room and no one in particular, then walked out, leaving them to chatter, gossip, whatever they did when she wasn’t around.

  “Julie.” Paul leapt up when she rounded the corner to her office. “Someone is here to see you.”

  She shot him a look. He knew damn good and well she had no time for surprises. There was a distributor summit in two days and she had to give the keynote address. She needed to write the damn thing and study the stats about the growing craft beer market share they were all scrambling to get in on – the market she had discovered early and was struggling to hold on to.

  She still had not decided what to do about Big House or her strong feelings about its owner. Nearly a week had passed since her little tour and confession time, and the distance had given her some perspective. And a fair bit of wild sexual fantasy.

  She sensed every blood vessel in her face flush and turned away from her assistant. She could not square the nearly irresistible urge to call, reach out, email, text, hell, just drop in at his house or condo or whatever and… talk… then let him do whatever he wanted to do with her. In her entire life, Julie had never had such urges. They were irritating, distracting, and made her have to haul out one of the vibrators James and Grant had given her, back when they were still pretending James was her husband.

  “Tell them they have to make an appointment,” she said, shoving open her door, pissed it was closed in the first place. God, she was on edge. Something had to give. But she was not about to admit the raw, wild sex she dreamed about with one Evan “Country Club” Adams was the answer. No fucking way. She started to speak, to order Paul to bring her the stats she’d been gathering for her speech. The sight of Evan sprawled on the couch in her office, reading a beverage industry magazine as if his life depended on it, made her suppress a smile.

  He looked up at her and put his hand on something at his feet.

  She tried to keep her voice calm when she spoke. “Seriously? A picnic? Are you that much of a sad romantic?”

  “Sad? No.” He got to his feet. He was dressed like any other man, in a pair of jeans and a blue button-down shirt with a small brewery emblem over the pocket. But he wore it better than anyone she could conjure at that moment. “Romantic? Not so much. Eager to see you again? Without a doubt. Shall we?”

  She tried to resist but, as she would come to learn soon enough, it was futile. So she put her laptop on the desk and told Paul she was going out “for lunch” as she ignored his knowing smile and nod to the man with the very warm, possessive, and inappropriate hand on the small of her back.

  Evan drove a little like a deranged maniac, but Julie was too busy admiring the sexy lines of the classic E-type Jag to pay much attention. She had a lead foot herself and had been accused more than once of having a death wish on Interstate 696 between downtown and her office building.

  They ended up in some random park, close to Ann Arbor. He pulled the basket out of the boot, and a six-pack of beer. “Please spare me the hard sell again.” She sighed as he handed her the blanket to spread out.

  “No, today is just about enjoying the last decent weather before winter.”

  The early November had gotten abnormally warm, allowing them to sit outside wearing light jackets, blinking in the sunlight. He pulled out some food, but she was suddenly not hungry. She sat, awkward in her tight skirt and jacket, watching him fuss around with the set-up. Finally, he leaned back on one elbow, slipped his shoes off, and chose a piece of cheese and a strawberry from the array of choices he’d brought. He lifted them to her as if saluting, then ate them.

  Julie was mesmerized by his face, the line of his jaw, the way his throat flexed as he swallowed. She had to look away, plucking at her skirt, unable to figure out what to do with her feet, or hands, or eyes. The old sensation of being the one awkward girl at the party filled her brain, pissing her off.

  The distinct sound of a beer bottle being opened made h
er look around again. He smiled and held the Big House Brewing-labeled bottle out to her. She frowned at him. He waggled it. “Come on, you know you want some.”

  “Maybe. But not sure if I want it from you.” She grabbed it, feeling a tad like Gollum with his “precious” as she cradled it close and ignored him as best she could. He shrugged, opened his own bottle and knocked back half of it, smacking his lips and holding it up to the sunlight.

  “Now that is perfect. Here, try some with this.” He handed her what looked to be a lump of white nondescript cheese. She took it.

  “I try not to eat dairy. Or drink before five, thanks.” She held the cheese and the beer, trying to summon a superior look.

  His goofy smile made her want to smack him – or kiss him. But the damn thing was as contagious as always and the corners of her mouth kept trying to turn up. Finally she huffed, leaned back against a tree, and popped the cheese in her mouth, then sipped the beer. The explosion of rich chocolate nearly made her fall over.

  “Wow!” She held out her hand for another piece and repeated the process.

  “That is good,” she said, without meeting his eyes.

  “You are the most uptight woman I’ve ever seen.” His soft voice belied the harsh statement. “I mean, really, Julie, we are having a picnic, just friends sharing some great beer and snacks, and you’re sitting there like there’s a flagpole up your ass. Relax, Boss Lady, for real.”

  She blinked, then burst out laughing and couldn’t stop. Tears streamed down her face, and she nearly choked by the time she got herself back under control. He just lay there watching her sipping and eating as if observing a nature documentary: The Uptight Female Executive Out Of Her Element. Of course, nature shows always ended up being about animal sex. She flushed red at the thought. He handed her a napkin so she could wipe her face.

  “You do not mince words, do you, Country Club?” she said, drinking the rest of her beer and enjoying the pleasant sensations it brought her. She kicked her shoes off and tucked her feet up under her before grabbing strawberries and half a small sandwich he’d laid out for them. “Okay, I’m relaxed now, are you happy?”

  He swallowed once, seemingly at a loss for words. “Not yet,” he stated, his voice taking on that sexy edge again.

  The tingly sensation she’d come to associate with him started crawling up her spine, but she rolled her eyes and drank and ate. “I know, I know, you want me to give you a schedule for rolling out your adorable little products, and I haven’t yet. Sorry.” She sipped, her heart pounding as she watched his face go from pensive to pleased.

  “Well, that would make me happy too.” He opened his second beer and held it up. She leaned forward to touch hers to it, but before she could settle back down he grabbed her wrist tight. His eyes held hers. And she had the most bizarre but pleasant sensation of stress leaving her, flowing from her arm to his hand.

  Crazy. You need to get back to your therapist, Dawson. That is nuts.

  But the rough pad of his thumb traced a small circle on the inside of her wrist, making her shiver all over. She stared at him, watched his lips move, form words, but something had deafened her. Something was threatening to bowl her over, to wrestle control out of her hands – and that she would never allow.

  She yanked her arm out of his grasp and sat back. He stayed up on his knees for a minute, watching her. She forbade herself from looking any lower than his neck. Finally he sat back down, his face drawn and a little pale. The silence that descended between them had a life of its own.

  The clink of bottles, the rush of water from the nearby river, bird noises, kids shrieking on a swing set, all swelled in her ears. She accepted the third beer, hardly realizing she’d finished the second one. “You trying to get me drunk?”

  “Sweetheart, if it only takes three beers to get you drunk, you are not the woman I took you for.” He saluted her again, then stared out over the river.

  “Touché,” she said. But she’d not consumed this much alcohol this fast in a long time and was feeling more than a little buzzed. She turned her entire body to face him, sticking her legs out so her red-painted toes were centimeters from his thigh. “So, I told you one of my deepest, darkest secrets. It’s your turn. Spill something and let me know you aren’t perfect.” She smiled, hoping it didn’t look desperate or as wobbly as she felt.

  “Hmm, I don’t think you’re ready for my dark corners. Not yet.” He put a hand on her foot, and the move was so casual and perfect she didn’t even flinch. “I am curious about something, though.” He ran his fingers along the outside of her foot, then across the tops of her toes, watching himself do it.

  “What’s that?” she asked, sipping and trying like hell to process that her whole body was screaming for more, that she wanted him to grab her again, force some of that crazy calm he seemed to share with her earlier.

  “You’ve been alone, for all intents and purposes, for four years?” He kept up his feathery-light touch on her foot.

  “Well, technically, yes. But James was out of my bed for at least a year before that. He came out to me as a bisexual man very early in our relationship. He wanted us to mess around, make it a threesome, but that freaked me out, I said no. So he started slowly withdrawing from me. We had nice dinners, polite conversations about work, mostly. He loved to buy me stuff, which actually annoyed me because the more he spent the lonelier I got. Then one morning as he was headed to the gym, he turned to me and said we had to ‘figure something else out,’ that he was ‘sorry, but I was not what he wanted anymore,’ but he was not going to abandon me.” She sighed, letting the alcohol ease her further into a zone dangerously teetering outside comfortable truth-telling. She smiled when he took her foot and slid his leg underneath it so he could massage her sole. “Oh, that is nice. But it won’t make me move any faster with your beer, you know.”

  “I know,” he said simply, pinning her once more with his intense stare. “Go on.”

  “Not much more to say, really. He wanted to move out and leave me our house in Birmingham, but I confessed I had never liked the place – too domestic and reeking of picket fence, homemade muffins, and ladies who lunch. So by the next day I had found my new place, downtown on the river at the top of a renovated warehouse. It was and is perfect. He bought it for me, and for a year we pretended to his parents we were still happily married. But…”

  She sighed, her long-neglected body and mind starting to melt into this man, Evan who listened and drew the most amazing confessions from her. “I haven’t had sex with a non-battery-operated device for – ” She frowned, embarrassed. “ – nearly five years now.” She lifted her half-empty bottle to him as tears pressed the backs of her eyes. The not-so-minor detail about the few times she had had sex before that, being either forced on her or as a form of manipulation by a professor, she kept to herself.

  “Huh,” he said, putting her foot back on the blanket and moving around so he sat with his legs crossed, facing her. “I sensed that about you. I also need you to know I sense something else about you. Something dark, alone, and frightened… of me.”

  She spluttered when her sip of beer went down her windpipe. “I’m not afraid of anything or anyone.” But her voice broke, betraying her. She sucked in a breath and looked away, then scrambled to her feet, needing some sort of motion to dispel the tempting tension building between them, and the small lick of fear taking up residence at the base of her skull.

  Leaving her shoes on the blanket, she picked her way across the grass to the edge of the Huron River. The booze hit her brain then, making her sway, which pissed her off. On her worst day she could drink most men under the table and have enough left in her for a nightcap. But she was self-aware enough to admit he was right. She was scared, but what the smart, funny, handsome, and potentially terminally romantic man did to frighten her remained elusive.

  The sun beat down, heating her shoulders and face. The unusually warm day seemed just another piece of this surreal alternative universe she
’d entered in the last few weeks. Clenching her hands into fists, she stared at the rocks in the shallow, still water, then stepped out onto the first one, righting herself with a wave of her arms. Distance… she needed more of it between them. She could not allow herself to go wherever it was he seemed to want to take her. Her inner control freak was screaming at her to run, fast, and not look back.

  By the time she hit the middle of the widest part of the river, she looked over her shoulder. Evan stood on the shore, hands in his pockets, watching her, his face amused but with a touch of that pensiveness she’d noticed once before. “You’re gonna fall in,” he yelled to her.

  “No, I have excellent balance. I can climb a sheer cliff wall. Did you know that, Country Club?” She turned, crossed her arms, and glared at him. “I ski black diamond slopes, ride roller coasters backwards at night, race jet skis on Lake Michigan, and spent last summer learning how to drive on a racetrack with Danica Fucking Patrick.” She pointed at him, knowing it was a mistake the second she did it, as her off-kilter, buzzy equilibrium slipped along with her foot, landing her ass-first in the muddy water.

  Tears hit her eyes when she bit down on her tongue hard enough to draw blood. The sting of embarrassment nearly matched the bite of the rocks on her palms and the jolting pain in her neck and back. “Fuck,” she muttered, astonished at herself.

  Evan laughed so hard he almost fell over. She frowned, watching him, then felt a giggle burble up from her stomach. Putting a hand over her lips she tried not to let it fly, but it was too late. She was not a hundred percent sure if she were laughing or crying by the time she saw his hand and heard his voice.