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We were on the renovated portion of the Jade Brewery back deck, the smell of fresh wood stain in the air. I’d been outside all afternoon working, surrounded by the TV crew’s cameras as we filmed interviews, B-roll, and in-progress renovation footage.
I was in such a camera-induced haze that I hadn’t even realized Harlan had arrived indoors for his night shift.
“Oh,” I said to Harlan, realizing I’d gotten distracted by looking at his thighs. “Hi. Yes. I think I’ll have a beer. One beer, please.”
Fuck.
I was being awkward, which was not a feeling I was overly familiar with. Usually conversation came easy to me, and Harlan was the one who claimed he was bad with words.
Why the hell was I suddenly feeling like a shy teenager at the prom?
Harlan lifted an eyebrow, and all I could do was stare at his eyes. His beautiful fucking eyes, which had definitely always been that beautiful, but seemed to have taken on a hypnotic quality sometime in the last week. I’d never noticed the curl of anyone’s eyelashes before, but now my mind was transfixed with Harlan’s.
“And… would you like that beer to be an IPA or a lager?” he asked, a hint of something quizzical in his eyes. He could tell something was up, probably because I was looking at his eyes like they were catnip. “I assume you don’t want the wheat beer, because that’s not usually your thing.”
I swallowed and nodded, shrugging my arms in a forced way that made me feel like a puppet controlled by strings.
“Uh—well, maybe I will try the wheat beer, then,” I said. “It’s not usually my thing, but you know what? I like trying new things. I love trying new things, honestly. Lay it on me, bud.”
Lay it on me, bud?
Christ, this was getting embarrassing.
It had been five days since the night at the inn with Harlan. Five days since we’d sucked each other off by the fire, like some mix of the most romantic movie ever and an explicit porn flick. And now, it had been five days of me acting like an awkward, bumbling, fumbling mess around him every time we saw each other.
Because I had a crush.
For a long time, I had thought something inside me was broken when it came to crushes. I heard people talking about them ever since I was a little kid, and I’d never been able to crack what they meant by it. There had always been girls I liked—girls who were hilarious or beautiful or smart, girls I wanted to be around more than others. And that’s how I’d always felt as an adult, with women, too.
But crushes? It had always been a concept that seemed unavailable to me, at least in the all-consuming, mind-altering way other people described it.
That all changed like flipping a goddamn lightswitch after the night at the inn with Harlan.
“I’ll grab you a wheat beer, then,” Harlan said, still scanning my face with his eyes. “How’s the filming going today?”
I smoothed out my hair with my hand, nodding. “Fine. Good. I mean, a little weird, working on staining the new part of the deck knowing there are five cameras surrounding me, but I’m slowly getting used to it.”
“It’s a trip,” he said. “You always look good on camera though. Don’t sweat it.”
“Thank you, friendo.” I held up my hands at him, and now I was certain that I was being controlled by some sadistic puppeteer, because I held out finger guns toward Harlan.
Fucking. Finger guns.
As if calling him friendo and bud for the first time in our damn lives wasn’t bad enough.
One corner of his mouth quirked up into a smile, like he was trying hard not to roast the hell out of me for my painfully obvious awkwardness.
“I’ll go get you that wheat beer,” he said. “Since you want to try something new. Even though you’ve always told me how wheat beers—and I quote—make you want to rip your own tongue out of your mouth—”
“Did I really say that?”
“At least twice,” he said, crossing his arms. Fuck, his forearms looked good coming out of the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel.
Not that I needed to be focusing on that.
“When did I say that?”
He cocked his head to one side, thinking. “Well, once, back at the farm, when I brought in a batch of my first ever homebrew wheat beer. You said you loved me, but you’d punch me if I ever made you drink a wheat beer again.”
“Sometimes I hate that your memory is better than mine.”
He snickered. “Wheat beers are the most inoffensive, neutral beer, which is why I was surprised you said it. Then, there was that time about a year ago that you came into the brewery and I accidentally pulled the wrong tap. I gave you the summer wheat when you wanted the hazy IPA, and that’s when you said you wanted to rip your tongue off.”
