Tell Me It’s Right (Sweetspire #1)

Chapter 12

Chapter Twelve

GRACIE

I head into the shop Monday morning with a pep in my step. I lock the bike up front before striding inside with my backpack and camera bag slung over my shoulder and my head held high.

Liam can make fun of me all he wants, and maybe it’s a little overzealous, but the more I think about it, the less working here sounds like a bad idea. Like Carson said, maybe this is an opportunity. If I can revamp the shop’s presence online, I can use this as a real-life case study. A little look-what-I-can-do example to show other companies. Something that’ll make me stand out enough to find the right job within the next six months.

The past week has been about finding my bearings. Learning the basics, making plans. Now it’s time to get serious. And I know I can do this. When I’m through with this place, I’m going to have people who never even dreamed of getting a tattoo lined up down the block. I’m going to be dodging job offers left and right. I’ll be able to hold it over Liam’s head for the rest of his life that I doubled—no, tripled —the shop’s income through my social media plans alone?—

“You have something to keep busy with today?” Liam is standing on the other side of the desk, though his attention is squarely on his phone, and judging by the tension in his face, whatever he’s looking at isn’t good.

“I…was going to start setting up the different social accounts, make a plan for the website updates, take some pictures of the shop since it’s nice and sunny today…why? Is there something else you want me to do?”

“Nope. Works for me.” He finally glances up at me, but his eyes don’t meet mine, and he gives me a closed-lip smile before shoving the phone into his pocket and heading for the back of the shop.

I stare after him for a second, not sure if I’m imagining the weird vibe, but he doesn’t come back out. It’s none of my business , I remind myself, then tidy up the desk and pull out my camera. I’ll want to clean up and stage the inside of the shop more first, but I can grab some shots of the exterior. They’ll be good to add to the website but also some easy first posts once I set up the new social accounts.

The bells above the door jangle as I step outside, and I tie my hair up in a ponytail before the breeze can make a mess of it. The sunlight is gentle and golden this morning, the way it falls on the building almost whimsical and picturesque. I can already tell these are going to turn out so good.

I try few different angles from the curb, then jog across the street for a wider shot. As I close one eye and peer through the eyepiece, the image blurs. I pull the camera away to wipe off the lens, but my vision doesn’t clear.

Oh, God, no.

It’s been so long since I’ve had one—years—but I recognize the aura for what it is immediately. Pixelated lines zigzag across my vision, slowly growing in size. I have maybe thirty minutes before the nausea and headache set in, but probably less until I can’t see all together. I don’t bother checking my bags for my medication because I know I won’t find it. After years without a migraine, I stopped carrying it around. Shit. I couldn’t bike home right now if I tried.

Sometimes my vision clears up after about forty-five minutes, so I guess I’ll have to wait it out. My head will be on fucking fire by then, especially if I have to go out in sunlight, but I don’t see any other solution.

The shop is quiet as I step inside and retreat to the bathroom to ride this out. No sign of Liam.

I close the door, rest my back against it, and slide down to the floor. I can’t believe this is happening. Why now? After all these years? I mean, sure, I’ve been stressed, which used to be one of the things that triggered them. But I thought I’d outgrown them altogether once my hormones settled after puberty. That’s what my doctors said, at least.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but the lines keep dancing behind my eyelids. Honestly, it’s one of the most annoying parts of these headaches. Being forced to watch this damn light show until it makes me throw up.

I don’t know how long I sit there with my legs pulled to my chest and my forehead pressed against my knees. Long enough for the pain to set in behind my eyes and at the nape of my neck.

Footsteps thud quietly outside the door. They disappear, then increase in volume like someone is pacing. After a moment, there’s a soft knock on the door.

“Gracie?” calls Liam.

“Yeah?” I call weakly.

“Are you all right?”

I sigh. I’m going to be utterly useless for the rest of the day. There’s no getting around it. So much for taking the day by storm. And during my second week here too.

“Gracie?”

“No,” I finally answer. “I—I’m sorry. I’m getting a migraine, and I don’t have my medication. I’d just go home but I—” I huff out a frustrated exhale. “I can’t see right now and?—”

“Can I come in?”

“Okay.” I scoot away from the door, but he doesn’t open it right away. His footsteps sound like he’s going in the opposite direction. Several moments pass before he returns and opens the door.

I cover my eyes and turn away as the piercing light fills the small bathroom, but he slips inside and closes the door behind him just as quickly.

“All right. Here we go.” I startle as his hands brush my face. He pulls mine away, then slides on a pair of sunglasses that are a bit too big for me. “Come on. I’ll drive you home.”

I take the hand he offers and stumble to my feet, my balance off. He braces a hand on my back as he leads me to his truck parked out back.

It’s not until I’m in the passenger seat, my hands pressed firmly to my eyes to block out the sun, that it occurs to me I left everything on the front desk. “My stuff?—”

“I already got it,” Liam says, and I feel him set my bag at my feet.

“I did manage to get a few good pictures,” I say as the engine roars to life and he pulls away from the curb. “And the rest of what I was planning to do today I can do from home. It’ll probably have to be, like, eight hours from now…”

“Gracie,” he says, sounding…perplexed. “I don’t care about the work. It’ll get done another day. Don’t worry about it.”

I press my lips together as the car turns, not sure if the steadily building nausea is from my head or motion sickness.

“I didn’t realize you still got these,” he says after a while.

“I didn’t either. It’s been years.”

“You know Mak started to get them after pregnancy? She’d never had them before. The doctor said it could just be temporary with her hormones out of whack and whatever. She said they were worse than giving birth had been.”

I hum, not knowing how else to respond. I barely know Liam’s sister, Makayla. She’s the oldest of the Brooks, putting her a good ten years older than me. She also got the hell out of town the moment she turned eighteen, so the last time I saw her, I was in elementary school. I didn’t even know she had a kid.

And I’m far too busy concentrating on not throwing up in Liam’s very nice, very clean truck.

A low, primal groan escapes me as I fold forward and put my head between my knees.

“Gracie?” says Liam, a hint of panic in his voice now. “Do you need me to pull over?”

“How close are we?”

He turns the AC up higher and points the vents in my direction. “Two minutes?”

“I can make it.” I have no idea if that’s true, but I guess we’re going to find out because there is no way— no way —he is pulling over and letting me puke out of the side of his truck. It’s not like we’re on some two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. We’re in the center of this very small, very gossipy town. I don’t need the witnesses, and my pride can’t handle being that person who threw up on some random person’s yard or a public sidewalk.

But the second Liam pulls up to Leo’s house, all bets are off. Liam tries to be helpful by opening the door and offering his hand, but I push past him, hurrying for the bathroom. I barely manage to open the toilet seat before the contents of my stomach surge up. I retch a few times, the action making the pounding in my head amplify, then slump against the wall, exhausted.

This is not good. In my experience, how a migraine starts sets the tone for how the rest of the day will go. If I can take my medicine and stay in the dark right at the start, it’s like I cut the headache off at the knees and it never builds to its full potential.

Today, it’s clear, will not be like that.

Liam knocks quietly on the door.

“You can leave my stuff out there,” I murmur.

A pause, then: “I won’t have you falling down the stairs on my conscience.”

After flushing the toilet and rinsing my mouth in the sink, I swing the door open. “Didn’t know you had a conscience.”

His grin almost looks relieved as he steps aside to let me pass, and true to his word, he follows me to the basement. But even once I make it down the stairs, he doesn’t leave. The sunlight is streaming through the windows in full force, and I curse myself yet again for not putting up curtains.

I groan and burrow under my blankets for cover.

“Hold on,” Liam mutters, then jogs up the stairs.

I hear him return, but don’t come out of my cave. That is, until he starts hammering something.

“What are you?—?”

He’s balanced on top of a stool he must have brought down from the kitchen with a hammer in his hand and nails between his teeth. He secures a dark blue towel over the first window, casting darkness over the bed, then moves his setup down the wall to tackle the other one. I wince, but the relief from the darkness far outweighs the pulses of pain from the noise.

“Good enough, yeah? Hopefully Leo won’t mind a few holes in his walls.” He grimaces. “And his towels.”

“Thank you,” I say softly. I don’t think I could manage to do it myself right now, and I wouldn’t have lasted long in this room. I probably would’ve ended up curled in a ball in the bathroom with a towel shoved in the space beneath the door to block the light.

“What else do you need?” He hops down from the stool and discards the hammer in the corner, looking around like he’s eager for his next task.

“I’m good, Liam. Really.”

“Oh, come on. There has to be something you use to help you feel better.”

“Ice,” I admit.

“Ice…”

“Like an ice pack.” I wave a hand around. “I put them on my head.”

“Right.” He pauses with one foot on the stairs. “You want heat too? Is this an alternating kind of thing?”

“I doubt Leo has a heating pad,” I mumble. Keava, maybe. But I don’t want to go through her stuff.

His only response is the sound of him jogging up the stairs.

I dig around in the box beside my bed while he’s gone until I find my medication, though it’s probably pointless. It never makes a difference unless I take it within the first half hour or so.

Liam’s quieter when he returns, like he’s being careful with his footsteps. “Here we are.”

I squint one eye open as he kneels beside my head, an ice pack in each hand. My vision has cleared enough to make out his facial features, at least. But that only means things will get worse from here. After my vision clears, that’s when the pain really starts to set in. I prop one behind my neck, then use the other to press against my forehead.

He sets a heating pad on the nightstand. “I’ll hold off on warming this up for, what do you think, twenty minutes? Twenty ice, twenty heat?”

He says that like he’s planning on staying that long.

“Liam…I can take it from here,” I say slowly, not wanting to sound ungrateful, but my confusion pulls heavily at my voice. “And I’m sure you have more important things to do. Appointments. Clients.”

“You trying to get rid of me? I’m hurt.”

“No—I just—I?—”

He lets out a soft chuckle and sits on the edge of the bed. “Gracie. Don’t make it so easy, remember? Besides, a few of my other artists have clients today. They can manage without me for a bit. I don’t have an appointment until later.”

I scowl even though he can’t see my face beneath the blankets. “You can’t make fun of me right now. Haven’t you heard you’re not supposed to kick someone when they’re down?”

“Gracie, I’d never make fun of you.”

I scoff, then wince at the pain that shoots through my temples. “Liam, that’s all you’ve done my whole life.”

There’s a pause. “I teased you growing up,” he says quietly. “I never made fun of you.”

I’d roll my eyes if that wouldn’t hurt too. “There’s a difference?”

“ Yes .”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I opt for nothing and adjust the ice pack to my eye sockets. I don’t know if it actually helps with the pain, or the different physical sensation is just a nice distraction, but either way, it makes it more bearable. There’s nothing worse than lying here with nothing to focus on but the pain.

“What does it feel like?” Liam asks after a while.

“Like I want to take an ice cream scooper and carve out my own eyeball.”

“These usually last all day, don’t they?”

I hum.

“What do you do then? Because you can’t look at anything, right? So no TV or whatever.”

I sigh. “If I’m lucky, I sleep through some of it. That’s unlikely since this one started so early in the day. Quiet sounds don’t bother me nearly as much as light, so I can listen to stuff to try to distract me. Music. Podcasts. Books. But sometimes even trying to process what I’m hearing hurts my brain too much. So I usually just lie here.”

“All day?”

I shrug. “Don’t have much of a choice.”

“That sounds awful.”

I press the ice pack to a different spot higher up on my head.

“Is me talking to you making it worse?” he asks when I don’t respond.

“No,” I admit. “You’re actually…distracting me a bit.”

“I’ve been told I can be very distracting. Here!” There’s rustling on the nightstand, and I peek out to see what he’s fishing around for.

My stomach flips as he pulls the book out from the rest of the pile and situates himself against the headboard.

“You are not reading me that book,” I blurt.

He licks one finger, flips to the first page, then pauses. “ That book.”

“What?”

“You didn’t say, ‘You’re not reading to me.’ You said, ‘You’re not reading me that book.’” A devilish grin stretches across his face. “So why not? Why not this book?”

I look away.

“Gracie.”

I say nothing.

“Is this a dirty book?”

He’s never going to give it a rest now. My face flames despite the ice against my skin. “Maybe a little,” I mumble against my pillow.

He flips the pages until he reaches the spot I dog-eared. “Chapter seventeen. Hm. Have we gotten to the good stuff yet?”

Silence.

“We have!” That damn grin grows wider as he crosses one ankle over the other and makes himself right at home in my bed. “All right. Catch me up. What’s happened so far?”

I don’t respond, but that apparently is not enough of a deterrent. “‘Chapter seventeen,’” he reads. “‘I wake up with his naked body in the bed beside me and about a dozen possibilities of how I could murder him and get away with it in my head’—Gracie, what is this ?”

My hand shoots out from the blankets, but he holds the book out of reach.

I sigh. “It’s enemies to lovers, okay? And you can’t narrate and judge at the same time.”

He hums as if it all makes sense now. “So why do they hate each other? What makes them enemies?”

I’m not sure why I’m entertaining this conversation. Maybe because his voice sounds genuinely curious and not like I’m about to be the punchline of the joke, or maybe because I haven’t given much thought to the agonizing pain spreading through my skull for the past few minutes.

“They’re more rivals than enemies. They’re competitive figure skaters. They do pairs, but they’re not each other’s partners. None of the others really stand a chance against their two partnerships. For most competitions, it’s pretty much a toss-up which one of them will get first or second. But the guy thinks this might be his last season, and the girl’s partner is threatening to drop her if they don’t win.”

“Huh.” He flips the book over to read the description on the back. “Figure skating,” he mumbles to himself. “Do you watch the competitions and everything?”

I laugh a little. “No.”

“So you don’t care about the sport?”

“Nope.”

“But you read about it.”

“I mean, I don’t seek out skating books. This one just had good reviews. And I liked the cover.”

I’ve always been a sucker for the more symbolic, abstract covers. This one has a pair of skates dangling in the center, but it’s the mix of colors and textures in the background—like watercolor paint—that really caught my eye.

He turns the book over to inspect it. One corner of his mouth turns down, and he nods his head to the side. “Okay, so I get it. The art is good.”

He flips back to the marked chapter and starts reading. I stare at the side of his face, the blurry parts of my vision now lingering at the edges. I’ve known Liam practically my entire life, but I’ve never spent this much time around him alone. Most of the time we’ve spent together over the last twenty-two years hasn’t been by choice. Which just makes this entire situation that much stranger.

But there’s no denying how much the distraction helps.

He keeps his voice low and soft as I curl into a ball beneath the blankets and close my eyes. I think he’ll stop after finishing the chapter, but then he moves onto the next, and the next, until I have no idea how much time has passed.

At some point, he pauses and goes upstairs for some water while I set up the heating pad. His footsteps are so quiet that I don’t notice his return until the bed shifts beside me.

Before he can pick up the book again, I murmur, “Liam, why did you really hire me?”

He turns to me with a frown. “What do you mean?”

“Is this some weird loyalty to Leo thing? Or was it pity? Because if it was, we really don’t have to?—”

“It wasn’t pity, Gracie. Okay, yes, at first I offered because I didn’t like the way Keava was talking to you. But I also knew you’d be good at the job. And after, when I started doing some more research to see what I’d gotten myself into, it proved what I already knew.”

“Research into…me?”

“Yes.”

“So you stalked me.”

“Yes,” he says without missing a beat. “And you know what I found? That I’m the luckiest son of a bitch on the east coast because the most promising design graduate just fucking fell into my lap.”

I roll my eyes despite my face heating under the compliment. But it sounds weird coming from him. “You’re so full of it.”

He doesn’t respond for what feels like a long time, and when I glance up, he’s not looking at me anymore. His gaze is focused somewhere across the room, and when he speaks again, his voice comes out softer. “I’m going to tell you something, Gracie. Something no one else knows. The shop’s not profitable. It never has been. But I want it to be. I need it to be. So yeah, when I looked you up and I saw how good you were at what you do, it made me hopeful. Because maybe I hired you on a whim, but call it what you want, I think there’s a reason for it. I think you and I can help each other.”

The sincerity on his face is undeniable. I’ve wondered about the shop’s income, how he was able to pay me so much when I rarely saw anyone in there. I’m willing to bet there’s a lot more to it, but what it comes down to is: “You need me.”

He ducks his head in acknowledgment. “I need you.”

We stare at each other, and there’s an openness in his eyes, almost a vulnerability, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.

The shop isn’t profitable, but he’s able to afford to keep operating, to pay me, to take random days off like today. So there’s money coming from somewhere. His family in some way, if I had to guess. And knowing Liam, he must hate that.

“I see a lot of potential with the shop, Liam,” I say quietly. “It can get there.”

He smiles. Not a smirk or a grin, just a soft, genuine smile.

“And thank you for taking care of me today.”

His smile falters, and he leans back, adding a few more inches between us. After a long pause, he says, “Anytime, Little Leo.”