Ruth: Go back to arousing your husband.
Rylee: I don’t think he can get it up for the rest of the night.
Rylee: Wait, he told me he can and to not emasculate him.
Ruth: You guys are something special. Good night.
Rylee: Use the perfume!
Chapter Five
BRIG
“I got a letter,” I yell, coming through the back entrance of The Lobster Landing, my family-owned business. Established when I was still a sperm in the fruit of my father’s loins, it’s become the tourism headquarters of Port Snow.
Need lobster apparel? We have it.
Looking for fudge? We’re known for it.
Have a craving for a baked good? Come to our bakery case and indulge.
At the end of Main Street, it’s the neighbor to Reid’s new restaurant, Knight and Port, that he runs with his girl, Eve, and his best friend, Eric. It’s one of my favorite places to go for lunch because they have a baked bean sandwich that haunts me in my dreams. It’s all I can think about when I’m within its vicinity.
And because my family is smart, they use a lot of the baked goods from The Lobster Landing at the restaurant to promote crossover.
Standing at the counter, wrapping up cubes of fudge that we sell online—expanding distribution has been one of Griffin’s goals ever since he took over the responsibilities of running The Lobster Landing—Griffin looks up with a quirk in his brow. “A letter?”
Ren, his girlfriend, who is an algebra teacher, steps up next to him and helps wrap fudge. “Is that for the Summer of Love?”
“Yes.” I sit at one of the counter-height stools and put the letter flat on the metal counter. “It was delivered to me today by one of Mrs. Davenport’s minions.”
“How does that work exactly?” Ren asks. “You don’t give each other names, right? How do they know who to deliver it to?”
“There’s a box in the post office just for Summer of Love participants. We each have a number ID and we write it on the envelope. They match up the ID with the person and deliver it. Pretty simple.”
“Wow, that Mrs. Davenport is a clever one,” Griff says. “Too bad there was no Summer of Love when you came to town; we could have written each other love letters.”
“There’s no way you would have done it, not with how stubborn you were. I would have been matched with Jake from Jake’s Cakes. Instead of wrapping fudge on my summer break, I’d be in a food truck, taking crab cake orders next to a hunky man.”
“Are you saying I’m not hunky?” Griffin asks with an offended smile.
“You have relationship flab,” I cut in, knowing damn well Griffin is going to freak out from the comment.
“No, I fucking don’t,” he snaps only to lift his white Lobster Landing shirt and flash his abs. “Right, babe?”
Ren playfully pokes his flat stomach and then shrugs. “I don’t know, I think there might be a light layer of love there.”
“Bullshit.”
Ren and I both laugh, as Griffin mutters displeasure at our company under his breath.
“Are you going to open the letter?” Ren asks, nodding toward the envelope.
“I’m nervous. What if she didn’t like my first letter?”
“If she didn’t like it, she wouldn’t have written back,” Griffin says, unfolding a shipping box and carefully putting tissue paper in it. He’s all about the details.
“He has a point.” Ren helps him with the fudge, neatly stacking it. “Do you have any idea who it might be?”
I shake my head. “Not a clue. The information I got about her wasn’t very specific and when I asked Mrs. Davenport about the match, all she did was smile and say: ‘I’ve been wanting to get you two together for years.’ For . . . years. I mean, that’s a lot of pressure. What if it doesn’t work out?”
“Then it doesn’t work out, and you move on,” Griffin says.
“Easy for you to say.” I gesture toward Ren. “You already found your post-curse love.” I tap the unopened envelope and say, “I don’t think it’s really fair that I’m the one who is shit out of luck when it comes to breaking the curse. I wasn’t the one being a dick. I was actually nice to the old hag. If anyone should still be single, it should be Rogan and Reid. They were the ones that brought on the curse. I was an innocent bystander.”
“You broke her table,” Griffin points out.
“Not on purpose. It’s not like I sought out to break a palm reader’s table. I was drunk and fell.”
“Still, you’re the one she touched.”
“What? Do you think direct contact made the curse worse for me? Because I’ve taken that into consideration when going through all the reasons why I’m still single.”
Ren snorts to herself and we both look at her. “Sorry, it’s just hard to sit here and listen to you two talk about the curse with a straight face.”
Shockingly, she doesn’t believe in the curse. No one does. I point to my chest. “Am I the only one who knows what happened was real?”
“I think so,” Griffin says.
“Bullshit.” I call him out. “You believed in it for a while. You’re only making fun of it now because you have Ren.”
What happened to Griffin is why I believed in the curse. When we left for New Orleans, he was happily married to Claire, his high school sweetheart, and then three days later, after we were verbally assaulted by a haggard witch, Claire passed away suddenly from a heart condition no one was aware of. To say Griffin was devastated is an understatement. He lost his soul mate. His life. And we lost a beautiful woman we all loved like a sister. Her sudden death rocked our whole family. And as we mourned, even though we didn’t want to consider it, every Knightly man thought about what happened in New Orleans. And we wondered. We wondered just how real it was. And for that reason, Griffin didn’t date—ever—until Ren came along and opened his heart again. Although, it took him a long time to give in to being with her. Loving her.
“I love you, Griff, but you so believed in the curse; don’t even try to pretend.”
He shrugs, but Ren and I both know the truth.
“Either way,” I say, “I shouldn’t be the one still being punished four years later. This is ridiculous.”
“Then stop bitching about it and open the damn letter,” Griffin says. “The love of your life might have written you a note, but you’re so hyped up on the damn curse that you’re forgetting what’s important: a girl is showing interest. Take it, man.”
Oh damn, he’s right.
Then again, Griffin is always right.
He’s the annoying older brother who’s perfect at everything he does, follows in Dad’s footsteps, makes everyone proud, and is reliable as fuck.
It’s also why I love him so much.
Turning the envelope over, I tear open the sealed flap and pull out the white piece of paper.
Huh, just white?
I admit that I wish the letter was scrolled across some kind of romantic stationery, but then again, maybe she hasn’t had time to get any.
I open the letter and immediately see a pair of red, full lips at the bottom.