Maybe Drew couldn’t feel it yet, but Mitch could see the guy had more than his share of hurt and sadness. “I thought you had it all. Respected chief of police, beautiful wife. I thought I’d get the having-a-baby email any time.”
“You have it all,” Drew said, using a fresh beer can to point at him. “Your own business, plenty of money and you don’t have to give a crap what women want in life. You just give them what they want in bed and move the hell on before it gets complicated.”
It might be the way he lived his life, true, but the way Drew summed it up made him squirm a little.
“Look at you and Paige,” Drew continued, and Mitch was pretty sure he didn’t want to. “You’re a big man of the world and she’s a small-town girl, but neither of you are pretending you want the same shit in life. You’ll just screw each other and move on. That’s what I should have done with Mal. Screwed her and moved the hell on.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. You loved Mal.”
“I still love her.” He threw the can, and beer exploded all over the freshly painted railing. “Goddammit, I still love her.”
“I know you do.”
“I don’t want to.”
There was no magic off-switch, though, so Mitch knew the only thing Drew could do was ride it out. That’s what he’d done after his relationship with Pam ended and he thought he’d been upset. But looking at his best friend now, he had to admit he’d had a lot more anger and a lot less pain when they went their separate ways.
“Love sucks,” Drew declared, popping the top on a fresh beer.
“I’ll drink to that.” Not that he was sure he had a lot of experience with love himself, but it sure had a tendency to make people unhappy.
But Mitch didn’t hate love, or even mildly dislike it. He just wasn’t ready for it. Northern Star Demolition was his mistress and he’d already learned the hard way she left no room for a wife. Maybe someday he could take a step back from the company, but that someday was a long time off and, in the meantime, there was no sense promising a woman she’d be his everything.
Images of Paige flashed through his mind—in the diner she’d brought back to life all by herself and in the tiny trailer she’d made into her home. Like Mitch, she knew what she wanted in life and she’d dug in her feet to get it.
He knocked back some beer and stared out into the fading light. It was a good thing they both already knew they were on two different roads in life and were just enjoying a quick rest stop together. Or so he told himself.
Maybe if he had another beer, he could convince himself he still believed it.
*
Their chief of police’s wife suddenly moving out of their house when the town thought they were reconciling was, not surprisingly, the hot topic at the diner the next morning. Paige tried to keep her head down and her mouth shut, but her car had been spotted in the Millers’ driveway.
“How’s Mallory doing?” was the greeting of the day, and Paige recognized it for what it was. Probably twenty percent genuine concern and eighty percent conversational gambit, meant to open the door to spilling everything she knew about the poor woman. While, as the owner of a town gathering place, it was probably expected she’d feed them gossip along with cheeseburgers and fries, Mal was a friend and Paige deflected and distracted her way out of feeding the rumor mill.
She’d left a little before ten the night before, about the time the serious packing was giving way to alcohol-fueled mood swings. Tears, then rantings about how all men sucked, then more tears. Paige had made her escape and fallen straight into bed, exhausted by the emotional tension of the evening.
When she went through the swinging door into the kitchen with a full bus pan of dirty dishes, Carl jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I let a stray in the back door.”
She set the bus pan on the dishwashing platform and went out into the back area. There, sitting at the tiny break table nobody ever used, was a very haggard-looking Mitch.
He looked up at her, wincing against the fluorescent lights. “I’ll pay extra for my breakfast and the six gallons of coffee I’m going to drink if I can sit back here.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Not good.”
Sympathy tugged at her heart. He’d suffered the same emotional tension she had the night before, but it must have been so much worse. Not only had he been one-on-one with Drew, but he was his best friend. “I’ll get a carafe of coffee all your own, and an orange juice. What do you want to eat?”
“Four of everything.”
“You sure you’re up to that?”
He nodded, then winced at the movement. Shaking her head, she gave Carl his order for four pancakes, four scrambled eggs, four slices of toast and four each of bacon strips and sausage links. It was his stomach.
After bringing Mitch a carafe of coffee, Paige went back out front to brew some more and check on her customers. Katie Davis had taken a seat at the counter, not looking much better than Mitch.
“Why did you let me drink so much last night?” were the first words out of her mouth.