Fair Trade (Bold Brew #7) - Cate Ashwood Page 0,3

brought sustenance.”

“Least you could do,” I muttered, walking to the kitchen.

She wound her arms around my waist as I opened the bag, pulling out box after box of white takeout containers and placing them on my counter.

The counter was barely visible beneath the takeout overkill. I stared at her. “But what are you going to eat?”

“There’s one more bag in the car.”

“You’re shitting me.”

She grinned. “Yeah.”

I grabbed two forks from the drawer as Jody opened up all the containers, and we stood over the sink, gorging ourselves on greasy breakfast food until neither one of us could eat another bite.

I was going to miss the hell out of this.

We spent the next hour watching reruns of Parks and Rec and regretting how much we’d eaten. I knew she’d miss me, but as hesitant as she was to leave, I also knew she was excited to start her new life. She’d been dancing around it at work, reining in the outright elation, but I knew her better than that.

I was less thrilled.

I did my best to keep the surliness to myself as we said our goodbyes because this really was a great opportunity for her.

But now that she was gone, the house seemed quieter than it ever had—a nifty trick considering I’d always lived alone—but I felt the loss of Jody’s presence in Laurelsburg as though it were a palpable thing.

She’d been gone all of an hour, and I was irritable and itchy. I needed something to keep my mind off things—something to release some pent-up frustration.

There was only one thing I knew was foolproof enough to work.

The scent of cigarette smoke and Acqua Di Gio hung in the air outside the bar. I checked my phone again, my eyes catching on the photo that had finally prompted me to get out of the car in the first place.

Bar hookups weren’t my usual. Most of the time I was too fucking tired to drag my burnt-out ass all the way out of town to get laid. But tonight, I needed to let loose. And rather than leave things to chance, I’d dragged the app out of the depths of my phone and spent half an hour in the parking lot, scrolling through the matches within a mile of me.

He was the only one who’d caught my attention.

Maybe because he was so far from the usual type I went for. Not to say he wasn’t beautiful, because he was. Maybe a bit too young for me, definitely too bright-eyed, but for tonight, he’d do.

Pushing the door open, I stepped into the bar. I’d been here a few times before. It was perfect in that it held the optimal amount of predictability, with a splash of anonymity to cap it off. Just far enough away from Laurelsburg, but not so far that I spent all night driving. It was a convenient solution to a two-part problem.

The first was that while my taste in partners could run male or female, my preference was usually men. The second problem was that in Laurelsburg, most people knew your business, but paramedics knew more than anyone. They were privy to all the secrets most people didn’t want to get out.

And the last thing I needed was my crew gossiping about me when they thought I couldn’t hear them. It wasn’t that I was hiding my bisexuality. I wasn’t. I just didn’t feel the need to have details of my sex life splashed all over the place as fodder for rumors.

So anonymous bars in a town or two over were the perfect answer.

Despite the unusually crowded Wednesday night, I spotted the guy I was looking for immediately. Tall, fit, and midtwenties, he was leaning against the bar seeming far more comfortable in his own skin than I’d been at his age. He was drinking a bottle of some imported beer, his body casually angled to the side as he surveyed the room. I held back for a moment, taking him in, watching as he lifted the bottle to his lips to take a long pull.

The simple sight of the glass rim pressed to his mouth had my dick hardening in my jeans, as though I could feel his mouth on me already. It was going to happen before the night was done. I was sure of that.

Impatience fluttered in my belly. It’d been far too long since I’d done this—I could barely remember the last time. It had been unmemorable, apparently, but something told me this guy, this