by Kendall Duke
The diner opened years before I was born, but Marcus hadn’t bought it from the old owner until I was seventeen, right before I joined the Marines. I remembered when he was just a server himself, still learning how to work the register and terrified of the deep fryer. That was a long time ago now, it felt like, although it’d only been ten years. Ten very, very long years.
I parked the truck and made my way through the door, listening to the little bell ring over my head and scanning the room automatically. I couldn’t help it; the training never left you. There were three guys sitting at the big round table in the corner being louder than the hour necessitated, but they were young, probably around twenty, and obviously a little drunk. There was another old vet at the counter; we’d served in different wars, obviously, me being at least two decades younger, but we understood one another very well and nodded without speaking. Marcus was in the back; I could hear him rattling around the pots and pans. I sat down at the counter and waited.
And waited.
I am a patient man. I have a bad temper, yes, and I’m not known for saying much, particularly anything very clever, but the one virtue anyone would agree I’ve always had, even before the military, is patience. I’ve always been able to wait. And wait. And wait.
But I was fucking tired. And cold, and hungry. Very hungry.
Without speaking, I stood up and looked through the plate rack back to the kitchen. Sure enough, there was Marcus, but he looked a little frazzled, as if he’d bitten off a big bite of something that he couldn’t quite swallow. And while he was standing still, looking frazzled, someone else was rattling around in the kitchen making all that racket.
Great. A new server.
I sighed and sat back down. Marcus got new people to work the graveyard shift all the time, and they never failed to fail. It was a difficult shift that didn’t promise a lot of tips, just a lot of harassment from the riff-raff that came in drunk or were too taciturn to be polite, like the other vet at the counter and me. I didn’t know his name—didn’t even know his regiment—but we’d been sitting at this counter every once in a while after a late shift for at least a year, since I got back from my second tour. He gave me a knowing look and then returned to his coffee. There was a new twinkle in his eye, though, that gave me pause, and when I finally saw the kitchen door swing open I immediately understood why.
I didn’t believe in love at first sight—didn’t believe in anything, any more. But when I saw that girl for the first time I knew something was happening to me—love, a heart attack, or maybe God finally had pity on me for all the things that had gone wrong in my life and sent down an angel just to say hello, I don’t know. But something was happening, something big.
She was only five feet tall, I was sure, and had freckles the color of cinnamon spread out across a dainty nose. Giant brown eyes and copper waves of hair, lips a shade of red I’d seen far too many times in my life but these… These were living, bright and bold. And her shape… She was wearing a uniform that clearly belonged to someone else, as it was a little too big and fell down around her shoulder, revealing a turquoise bra strap that sent my stomach down to my knees. She needed that bra, because her breasts were pushing at the sack of that uniform even though the rest of her was tiny, and her hips were so round I could see them swinging, shifting the whole thing left and right. I tried to stop staring, but I couldn’t. And when she walked right up to me, picked up her pen and looked me straight in the eye, it took almost all of my will to speak words like a normal human and not just sling her over my shoulder and walk out the door.
“Hi!” She had a voice with a laugh tucked inside of it, as if everything amused her. “What can I get you?”
I ripped my eyes away from her face and stared down at the menu for a long minute before I was able to answer her question. I thought she might leave, but she didn’t, and when I looked back up she was calmly waiting, that smile still dancing on her full lips. I felt the scrutiny of her eyes but tried to concentrate on my order. “Cup of coffee, black. Whatever soup’s on special. Two sides of bacon.”
“Okay,” she said, and walked back through the kitchen door, her hips doing a dance of their own across the floor.
The old vet next to me took a sip of his coffee and the silence between us filled with the unspoken conversation we didn’t need to have. That girl was like a slice of sunshine. A beautiful, sparkling note striking through the blackness.
But men like us lived in the dark.
I didn’t need the kind of trouble my heart already wanted to get me in—my cock was first to follow her, of course, standing at attention beneath the counter in a way it just hadn’t since I got back, but I had a funny feeling in my chest, too. I made my decision without having to think about it, though. I would eat my meal, enjoy the view, and leave. Nothing could pull me out of the shadows, and I’d be damned if I dragged someone—anyone, but especially something as beautiful as her—into the dark with me. I had enough on my conscience.
The old vet knew all that, without either of us having to say it.
All the same, I could swear he disapproved.
And fate, it seemed, had similar ideas.
The rest of Jordan and Jessica’s story is available on Amazon!