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“I say the damnedest things, don’t I?”
“Sometimes,” he said, a sparkle in his eyes.
“I meant it when I said I want to try new things,” I said too loudly, feeling the sides of my neck get all hot. “I don’t think I’ve given wheat beer enough of a chance. Maybe I’ll love it.”
He gave me a nod. “I think especially with a nice blood orange slice, you’ll at least enjoy this batch enough not to spit it out.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said. “Really perfect.”
Words were just coming out of my mouth, and I felt like I had no control over them at this point.
For God’s sake. People had told me plenty about crushes over the years, but nobody had said how disorienting it was to get a crush on your best friend.
It was making me act like a total dumbass around him, multiple times a day. It was consuming my mind while I was awake and also while I was asleep, because I had dreamed about Harlan almost every night since the night at the inn.
Meanwhile, Harlan had been acting more normal than ever. He hadn’t brought up what we’d done in the inn ever since. I kept replaying the night in my head. He’d told me that being so close to someone he cared about again was intense for him, but ever since, it seemed like he was cool as a cucumber. If anything, it seemed like it had affected me more than him, at this point, judging by how I was acting.
Maybe that night was just a one-off, special moment during a blizzard. Like its own little contained snowglobe, with its own rules. Maybe he’d thought nothing of it. Or maybe he didn’t want to do it again.
Not that that stopped me from crushing on him harder than I ever had in my life. I was in my thirties, going through what most people do at age thirteen.
“All right! Let’s roll again,” one of the TV crew yelled from the edge of the deck. “Sawyer, can we have you back on the blue marker?”
“Got to go,” I told Harlan. “Good luck starting your shift. You always do such great work in there.”
Harlan couldn’t hide his smile any longer as he nodded and then headed back inside. I was a mess, and there was nothing else to it. A mess with a big, fat, walloping crush.
I walked over to the blue piece of tape on the ground that Chase had put down. I planted my feet firmly there, trying to drill it into my mind to stay still in this spot. I was supposed to stand there for the interview shots to get the best framing, and earlier today, I kept accidentally moving away from the tape as I gestured and talked with my hands.
“That is perfect,” Chase said as I stood up straight in front of the camera. “Okay, we need a few more takes of you and Nathan talking about the blizzard and how it affected the renovations.”
“The blizzard was fine, though,” I said. “The mud didn’t really impact too much of what we have going on this week.”
Chase clicked his tongue. “No way. We need to play it up for the show. I want to get you guys talking about how the blizzard could have been a massive setback, so that we have tension for TV. Then we can show footage from today and give people a sense of relief that nothing too devastating happened.”
I pulled in a breath of air, trying to dissipate the tension in my own body. Today had been another string of tasks that made me feel like a fish out of water, trying my hardest to do the right thing, or at least not to fuck anything up. Earlier this afternoon, I’d sanded a whole portion of the deck before Nathan had to come over and tell me that I wasn’t applying nearly enough pressure, and that I’d have to go over it again. Of course, it was all caught on camera, and I was sure it would end up on TV later.
I tried to remember that it was okay to make mistakes. Okay to learn, and let other people watch me learn. But after a lifetime of being told I was never good enough, it was still hard to stomach, sometimes. I’d felt like I was making a fool of myself with the renovation work, with being on camera, and now with Harlan, but there was nothing else I could do but try my best.
I just hoped that whatever my “best” was would be good enough for everyone else, too.
Nathan appeared beside me a moment later, and the cameras started rolling, the red lights flashing on.
“The blizzard was a massive one,” Nathan began, using his hands to talk in a big, animated way for the camera, but keeping his boots firmly planted on the blue tape. “The biggest we’ve seen all season.”
