Chapter 5

5

Hudson

Hudson’s Words To Live By:

When in doubt, blame the alcohol.

I could sense Charlie’s body stiffen beside me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked after his parents.

“Nah. My mum took off when I was twelve. Decided to move to a big city for a corporate job. We never saw her again. My dad moved abroad almost a year ago,” he said before clearing his throat. “Remarried.”

His clipped answers confirmed this topic was not a good one for a stranger to pursue.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry,” I said softly.

His hand came to rest on my arm, stopping me from taking another step down the shell path. I felt the warmth of his slight touch before he pulled it away. The varied shades of his hair caught the weak sunlight struggling through the clouds above. It looked both golden and auburn and so incredibly touchable. But his self-deprecating smile was what really set my heart tripping.

“It’s okay. You didn’t know. Not my favorite topic. I never really forgave my mum, but I’ve had loads of time to get past her leaving. My dad, on the other hand… well, let’s just say if I saw him right now, I might be thankful we’ve no safety rails at the cliffs’ edge.”

I could tell he was joking about the cliffs, but clearly the subject wasn’t a pleasant one. How had we even gone down the path of sharing personal stories in the first place? I almost never shared personal information about myself the way I had with Charlie and the woman on the plane before him. Had something happened to me? Had my breakup with Darci brought out all the feelings or unleashed some need to share my innermost thoughts with others? We needed to get away from these personal topics and back to the business at hand. I was there to do a job.

Despite how easy Charlie was to talk to, he was there to give me a tour of the place. I needed to understand the property in order to do good work for Bruce Ames and earn back some of the respect the man had lost for me after the fiasco with his daughter. “So, that’s the brewery building up ahead?” I asked.

Charlie cleared his throat before responding. “Yes. That’s where we make the beer. We currently distribute to four countries in Europe besides delivery to most of the UK.”

“Seems a lot for such a small facility,” I said without thinking.

“The building is much bigger than what you see there.” With that, he continued the tour as if we hadn’t just shared pieces of our past and revealed vulnerabilities we had in common in the form of our parents. As he spoke of the history of the facility and how the company had started brewing its own beer, I noticed a new comfort between us, as if we were no longer strangers but something a little more than that. When the natural silences came into our conversation, they were easy rather than awkward, and for the first time in a long time, I felt at ease like I usually only did with family and close friends. It made me wonder if my attraction to him, which hadn’t waned in the least despite my brain now being alcohol free, was because of this ease between us, rather than his physical presence.

That was it.

He was a kind human. I was naturally drawn to him because of his gentle and interesting personality, not because he was sexy. I must have sensed his magnetic personality the night before when we’d first met. Charisma. That’s what it was called when certain people drew others to them so effortlessly.

Charlie was charismatic. That was all.

It was a relief to finally understand I wasn’t actually attracted to him physically… it was a different kind of attraction all together. I didn’t have a problem with men being attracted to each other of course, but if I was feeling attraction to a man for the first time in my midthirties, it sure as hell would be confusing. I should have felt relief at the realization, but all I felt was my stomach rolling around like it did on the few occasions I got a calculation wrong in my reports at work.

I tried to ignore the sensation, but as we approached the brewery building, Charlie leaned over to pick up a cigarette butt off the ground. His shirt rode up to expose a strip of pale, creamy skin above a colorful, rainbow striped waistband peeking out from his jeans.

My dick went straight for it, filling and jutting out so quickly, it reminded me of the time one of the girls in my biology class in high school leaned over to pick up a dropped pencil and showed half the class her thong. The sudden blood rush left me dizzy with want.

Oh god.

It wasn’t just his sweet personality after all. I was pretty sure I wanted to see him naked, to touch his bare skin and kiss his full lips. Could it really have taken me thirty-four years of life and thousands of miles from home to realize maybe I wasn’t as straight as I’d thought? No. That couldn’t be right.

Surely my confusion was simply a combination of jet lag and a hangover.

I hated traveling.

* * *

When we entered the brewery,Devlin Murray called out from across the reception area.

“Oy. Over here then. I was wondering if you wanted to test out that ring bit you was telling me about earlier.”

I glanced at Charlie who clearly had no idea what his boss was referring to.

“I do have a sample of the, ah…” I took a deep breath and tried to get my shit together. “I brought several samples of the device I came up with in case you wanted to play around with it.”

Devlin stood up from behind the reception desk. “Let’s go put that little yoke to work, shall we?”

I wasn’t sure what a yoke was, but I had to assume it was my head regulator.

The older man winked at me before leading us down the hallway through a doorway to a big open warehouse space where I immediately saw a long bar set-up with several different sets of taps.

I pulled out the constrictors sample I kept in my pocket. Bruce had suggested the doohickey might make for a good ice-breaker. I didn’t expect the thing to actually interest anyone beyond the novelty of it, but I was happy to have a chance to let him play around with it and see what he thought.

Devlin went around behind the bar where he gestured toward a single tower tap. “Hudson, you’re up. This one’s Beamish unless you want something else?”

“I don’t know what that is,” I admitted. “But any lager is fine.”

There was a beat of silence before he and Charlie plus four or five men working in the warehouse behind us began laughing. My face went hot, and I realized just how ridiculous of an idea this invention had been.

Devlin moved to another single tower. “Try this one then,” he said through his laughter. “It’s Harp. Just a suggestion, but you might want to learn the difference between a stout faucet and a regular one, aye?”

I looked closer and noticed the faucets. “Oh. Right. I knew that. I just hadn’t looked closely,” I mumbled. And that was true. But it was, admittedly, one of the very few things I knew. The truth was, I knew jack shit about beer. I’d learned just enough to try and impress my girlfriend’s father at the time. It wasn’t my job to know beer, though. I was a master of finance integration, forensic accounting, and market share assessment, not to mention financial risk reduction, human capital optimization, and negotiation strategy.

I stepped forward with the small metal ligature and began installing it, babbling the entire time about what I was doing when, in reality, I could have simply said, “Twist it on like this.”

Once the tool was on the tap nozzle, I found a stack of pint glasses under the bar and poured one with the lowest amount of foam, explaining that adjusting the tool with a twist to the right lowered the amount of air and twisting it to the left, let all the air through.

Devlin watched me pull several pints with increasing amounts of foam before nodding and looking at me seriously. “You know how to pull a pint, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Lager anyway. Not as great at the stouts yet.”

“Come here and let me show you a thing or two, Hudson,” he said in a kind voice. I stepped down to a different tap and watched him pour a perfect pint of Guinness from a tap without my ring on it, all the while explaining what he was doing and why it mattered. “Now you try,” he said, handing me a fresh glass.

When I began the first part of the two-part pour, he took a big swig of his pint, smacking his lips together afterward in satisfaction. I sat my glass on the bar as if I had a customer present and waited for the bubbles to do their thing before picking it back up for the rest of the pour.

“This is where I generally screw up,” I admitted, trying to get the perfect dome without overflowing. This time, the beer gods were with me, and I ended up with a good pour.

“Ah, perfection. Just took being in Ireland to get it right,” he boomed with a hearty slap to my back followed by a chuckle.

I grinned at him. “Maybe you’re right. A little luck of the Irish?”

After following his lead and taking a sip, I noticed Charlie out of the corner of my eye. He was studying the row of Harp pints I’d left farther down the bar. His forehead was creased with concern as he seemed to be assessing the different amounts of head on each pint.

Once he seemed satisfied, he removed my head control device and poured a pint. His eyes were on the first pint I’d poured rather than the one he was currently pulling. Without even seeming to try hard, he duplicated my pour by hand.

Then he did it again. This time the pour matched my second one.

And again, the third.

And again.

Until he had a nearly identical row of pints lined up next to mine—all done by hand without the benefit of my special device.

He was showing me up, and I was mortified, despite having predicted this type of challenge if I’d ever decided to actually pitch the idea to pub owners.

Was his intention to humiliate me in front of his boss? And why did it sting more coming from him than it would have coming from Devlin himself?

I opened my mouth to make the argument I’d already thought through a million times, but he beat me to it. His voice was the kind of quiet, steady voice that hushed a room just so people could listen in.

“The Irish take their pint pulling very seriously, Hudson,” he began. The sound of my name in his soft lilt made something strange happen in my gut. Maybe it was the Irish accent and the fact I wasn’t used to it.

I tried to cut in, to tell him that times were changing and not all bartenders were properly trained or experienced in pulling pints anymore, especially in the States, but he continued before I could get a word in.

“The problem is time,” he said. “Pulling the perfect pint takes time and attention, which is all well and good when it’s halfway through a lazy Sunday and you’re only serving auld Johnny who’s been holding down his same stool for fifty-odd years. But when you’re serving loads of university students or stacks of customers at a festival or game, there’s no time for the perfect pour, is there? And chances are, you haven’t hired the type of bartender who knows how to pull a pint the right way because he hasn’t been tagging along with his dad for twenty years to every public house in Ireland watching how it’s done.”

Charlie turned to Devlin. “He needs to pitch to the city pubs, not ones like ours in the middle of nowhere,” he said before turning and walking out.

I stared after him. He’d made my argument without me saying a single word.