Chasing River
Page 27

“Oh, it’s something alright.” He winks. “And you’re going to tell me about it later. I’ll be back with your drinks.” He squeezes my bare shoulder on his way past, making me jump. I watch him go, catching more than a few glares from female customers lingering around the bar, likely waiting for seats to free up. Or maybe for River’s attention.
I meet a flat gaze from across the table. “So this is why you showed up at my work today.” Ivy’s hard to read, with her dry tone, but I’m pretty sure she’s upset. She hasn’t even sat down yet. “You don’t really want to get to know me. I’m your excuse for coming here . . . ‘again.’ ” She air-quotes that word. “You were afraid to sit alone in a place like this.”
I open my mouth to deny it but she cuts me off, shaking her head. “Save it. I should have known.”
I sigh, suddenly feeling like a jerk. “You’re right, okay? You’re the only person I know in Dublin and I didn’t want to come here alone to see River again. But . . . so what? We’ll have a few drinks, get to know each other, I get to see him . . . What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t like being used.” She tightens her jaw. “Alex emailed me to tell me you were in Ireland. She was afraid you might be lonely. She asked me to give you a chance, if you came by. I didn’t think you actually would.”
“I’m not lonely!” My cheeks flush. Sure, once in a while I get homesick, but lonely?
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were. You could never survive so much as a library hour without your harem of girls fawning all over you.”
“My harem of girls fawning all over me? Okay, first of all, I’m not a lesbian . . .”
Ivy’s eyes narrow. “Funny you should mention that.”
I bite the inside of my mouth. Does this girl ever hold a grudge or what? “So then . . . we’re even. You didn’t come here to get to know me either. You only showed up here tonight because Alex asked you to.”
“Exactly. Because she’s my friend.”
I guess I should have expected all of this to come up. Just because Ivy obviously didn’t tell Alex about what happened in high school doesn’t mean she simply forgot. But it was a freaking decade ago. Let it go!
Two glasses land on our table, delivered by a waitress instead of River. A glance at the bar finds him laughing with a customer while pouring pints. I guess I shouldn’t have expected him to be serving us, especially with waitresses to do that. Plus, he did go above and beyond already, getting us a table. Still, disappointment stirs inside me.
I sigh. “Listen. Can we please start over?”
“Until the second that bartender says he’s done his shift and you ditch me, right?”
I roll my eyes. “I don’t do that to my friends.”
Her jaw clenches. “We were never friends.”
“That’s because we didn’t really have much in common.” I stare pointedly at her, but if she sees my meaning, she doesn’t let on. “But we could be friends, now.”
She snorts.
I bite my tongue before I agree with her, which I’m tempted to do. If this is the real Ivy—and not just a bitter exterior that she’s saved for me—then I can’t see myself lasting through this pint, hot bartender or not. “High school was a long time ago, Ivy. Maybe we can bury this hatchet you’re intent on sticking in my back and actually get to know each other. Who knows . . . maybe you’ll find out I’m not so bad.”
After a long pause and a look around, she slides into her seat. Tipping her head back, she downs the entire shot of whiskey in one gulp. “I’m going to need a few more of these to find that out.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with starting those rumors. I swear!”
The flat look on her face tells me she doesn’t believe me. “Well, I know that Bonnie did, because I confronted her about it and she said that she had a highly reliable source who saw me discharged from the psych ward.”
“And you thought my mother, a reputable surgeon, would tell me something like that, and I’d run off and tell Bonnie?” My mother didn’t even tell me who Alex really was. Why would she divulge private information about a complete stranger who has no impact on my life at all?
Ivy slams back her whiskey and I follow, twisting my face up with disgust, the vile taste burning in my gut. It’s taken four rounds for Ivy to break out of her spiky shell and tell me exactly how awful I apparently made high school for her. She must be feeling the alcohol because she’s a lot louder and more animated than she was an hour ago.
“Three weeks into my sophomore year, in a new high school, in a town we had just moved to, and I was dubbed ‘the crazy girl who might stab you.’ Great reputation to have, right? I spent a lot of time at home, hanging out with my little brothers, that first year.” She keeps her eyes on our empty shot glasses as she balances them on top of each other. “When those rumors started, Jesse gave me some lame excuse and broke it off. Just like that.” She snaps her fingers, her short nails painted with black lacquer. “I know we’d only been seeing each other for a few weeks, but it still hurt . . .”
I groan out loud. Why does everything in my life somehow lead back to my brother? Of course Ivy’s heart would fall casualty to his good looks and poor judgment calls. And, of course the blowback would land on me. I sigh. “For what it’s worth, I never knew you two were ever a thing in high school.” Jesse had a lot of “things” with a lot of girls and got bored easily. I could never keep up, and by our junior year, I didn’t want to. “And I can’t make excuses for my brother except to say that he was an idiot back then.”
“An idiot who didn’t want a girlfriend that apparently sets houses on fire and tortures small animals. I don’t blame him. I would have stayed away from me, too. I figured your dad demanded as much.”
I snort. “Please! If my dad told him to not date you, he would have proposed.” A quick replay of my words in my head makes me cringe, realizing that hearing that isn’t going to help heal Ivy’s deep wounds. “I’m sorry someone started saying those things about you. But it wasn’t me.”
Ivy’s lips purse. “And are you gonna try and convince me that you didn’t accuse me of spray-painting the side of Poppa’s Diner?”
There it is. I knew this would come up. I knew that Ivy figured out I was the one who reported her to the Sheriff. “No. That, I did do. Poppa showed up at our ranch in his El Camino in tears. Do you know how awful it is to see an old man cry?”
“Funny, because when your dad hauled me into the station for spray-painting the side of the diner, I did cry. Your dad scared the shit out of me.”
“What did you expect? You can’t cover walls with racial slurs and swastikas and get away with it.”
She simply stares at me for a long moment, as if in shock that I would even suggest it. “I didn’t do it, Amber. You did!”
My jaw hangs open as I stare into those accusing black eyes, looking for the joke in them. There isn’t one. She’s serious. “What?! You are insane!”
“Okay, fine . . . maybe you didn’t actually paint the wall, but I know you were in on it. Don’t sit here and lie to me, now. After all these years. You and your little posse of mean girls and dickhead boyfriends.”