soon. “What were you doing before you moved home, for a job, I mean?”
She slides a bin out from the wall and peeks inside. “I was a script editor. Well, I am a script editor,” she says without looking up. “I’m just working at night right now while I get things sorted out with the shop. I like to keep busy anyway, so it’s totally fine.”
I haven’t heard Melody talk a mile a minute for ages, actually not since we were kids. She was the queen of speaking in circles when she was nervous or excited about something. I remember being able to listen to her talk for an hour straight, barely taking a breath between paragraphs. She made me feel inspired, and enamored by every single word that left her pretty lips. Opinionated about almost everything, some of her logic was pure craziness, but I loved listening to it anyway. Since she’s been home, though, there has been more silence than anything else. She isn’t the Melody I remember.
“Do you think it’s too soon to be picking up the pieces, Melody?” I don’t want to be offensive or intrusive, but I want her to know I’ll keep doing what I’m doing until she is ready to take on more. I’m sure it will be a while before I return to the warehouse with Pops, and he knows this, but at the same time, this is Melody’s family business, and I want to be as supportive as I can be without making it look like I’m trying to overshadow her.
“Will there ever be a good time?” She asks.
“I don’t know. You just seem so stressed out.”
“Sorry,” she spouts off like an automatic response and moves toward the back wall where we keep the labels.
Again, she slides the next set of bins out, one at a time, still in search of the shipping labels, but I notice her shoulders rise a few inches up toward her ears. A crack … that’s what I used to call the moment when I felt like I was doing okay and then suddenly, something would hit me. It felt like a crack, as the torment split my mind and body in different directions, leading up to a crescendo of pain. When I got to that point, I was afraid I’d fall to pieces if I moved the wrong way or thought the wrong thought.
With a bit of hesitance, I take a few steps forward and gently place my hands on her shoulders. “If this is okay, I’ll stay by your side and help you through it.”
Beneath my grip, I feel the muscle tension release in her shoulders. “What are you going to get out of it? It’s not your family business. You’ve stepped away from yours to help me with mine. It’s not fair to you or your dad.” It pains me to think she’s concerned about wasting my time, so I explain that I’m happy to be here to help out any way I can because that’s what friends do for each other. As I take my hands off her shoulders and reach for her wrist, my arms brush lightly against hers. Her skin is like silk; soft and warm and I just want to feel her hand in mine. She turns around to face me, but her eyes don’t meet mine right away, giving me time to stare at her beauty; admire her dark lashes, and the shadows resting above her cheekbones. “You’re asking an awful lot of unnecessary questions for your first day running a bourbon shop.” My words do the trick in forcing her to look up at me with her mesmerizing green eyes. “I want to be here, okay? Your father left you the distillery, and it’s yours to do whatever you want with, but until you ask me to leave, I’m not going anywhere.”
“Thank you,” she says through a whisper.
“You won’t learn this stuff overnight, so be easy on yourself. Notes are good, but you’ll figure it all out with time,” I offer, knowing I might have picked things up a little quicker because of my experience working at the warehouse with Pops, but she’s smart, she’ll get it all down quickly.
“I hope I’m making the right decision. I don’t want to be the reason this distillery fails either. I don’t know what’s right or wrong,” she says.
There is no way for me to respond to her statements with sound advice because I’m not inside her head and I