by J. Daniels
I stepped inside my room, flicked the light on, closed the door behind me, toeing off my shoes while pulling up my recent contacts, then sitting on the edge of my bed and hitting Dial.
The call connected after three rings. I heard a soft rustling sound, then gentle, quiet breathing.
Nothing else.
“Hello?” I asked, glancing at the clock on the wall and wondering if I was calling too late for her.
It was already after eleven.
Fuck.
“Hey,” her soft voice filtered into the phone immediately after hearing mine, the tone vibrating through my ear and into some deep part of me, where it settled and warmed.
It sounded heavy with sleep.
“Shit, sorry. Did I wake you?”
“Yeah, a little.” Her response broke with a yawn. She sighed, then reassured me, “It’s okay. I didn’t mean to fall asleep but I did. Um, hold on, let me just…” I heard more movement, rustling, then a light tapping sound, before she came back with a breathless, “Okay. Back. I was still wearing my glasses.”
“You wear glasses?” I asked, settling back on a pillow, my legs swinging up on the bed and feet crossing at the ankles.
I bent my free arm and tucked it behind me, resting my head in my palm as I drew more of her in my mind.
“Only when I read,” she admitted. “Or sometimes at the movies my eyes will bother me. I always carry a pair with me for that reason. You never know when you’ll get a hankering for greasy movie popcorn.”
“You get hankerings like that often?”
“Oh, all the time,” she told me, a smile in her voice. “I’ve even gone to the theater once in a while without seeing a movie. Just bought the biggest popcorn they had and took it home, cued up something on Netflix, and camped out in front of my TV with a bucket the size of my head.”
“You live a dangerous life,” I joked.
She was silent for a breath, then she mumbled, “Oh, my God.”
“What?”
“You call me Wild!” she shrieked in a quiet way that still contained every beat of her excitement. “And I’ve been thinking how that name doesn’t fit me, like, at all, but it does! Ha! I am wild! I’ve cut the tags off my mattresses, cussed in church one time when I banged my knee on a pew and the pain was so intense, I thought I was going to throw up all over my pretty Easter dress. I didn’t. Just said, ‘Shit,’ really loud and got looks from everybody. My mom pitched a massive fit after the service, but she always pitches fits so that’s nothing new and not pertinent right now. I’m getting off track.”
I laughed, but kept it silent so I could listen to her continue.
I wanted to hear every word she wanted to give me.
“I wear white after Labor Day. Mostly sweaters that look really cute with boots. I rarely ever use crosswalks because I’m too lazy to walk to one, and I grab some of the loose grapes when I’m at the market and eat them while I shop.”
“Damn,” I mumbled, grinning.
“Told you,” she giggled. “Wild.”
She gave me a lot to focus on, but I settled for her last admission.
“You know those aren’t free, right?” I asked. “The grapes.”
“Um, well, actually, I’m pretty sure it’s a deal we have with the supermarkets that as long as we purchase something, we’re allowed to graze.”
“Pretty sure that’s a deal only you have with them, and it’s all in your head, babe.”
“Babe?”
“Mm.” I nodded. “Babe.”
“Why are you calling me babe?”
I inhaled through my nose quickly, priming to respond when she filled in our silence.
“I like it,” she added softly, nearly a whisper, as if she was afraid to admit her honesty out loud. “I like Wild, too. I understand Wild, but babe? That’s a sweet name, and…really, I was terrible to you.”
“Got another suggestion?”
“Besides Wild? Satan.”
This time I didn’t keep my laughter quiet.
“You aren’t Satan, babe. You got sweet in you. A lot of it. Heard it in your voice even when you were laying into me, showing me your wild.”
“What?” she snapped. “I was not sweet when I was laying into you. I was feisty and a total badass. My best friend told me so.”
“You were a badass,” I agreed, doing it smiling. “But you were sweet, too.”
“You can’t be a badass and sweet at the same time, Brian. That’s like being…I don’t know, a Steelers fan and a Ravens fan. It doesn’t happen.”
“You watch football?”
Her knowledge of two teams who fiercely rivaled each other intrigued me. I didn’t know a lot of women who followed sports. None of the ones in my family did.
“No, not really. My brother was a Steelers fan. My only knowledge of the sport came from him.”
“Was? He wise up and start backing the Panthers? The Steelers fucking suck.”
“No. He died.”
Regret came like a swift kick in the chest.
“Shit,” I muttered, sitting up. “I’m…fuck, I’m sorry, Syd. Jesus. Were you two close?”
I closed my eyes, realizing then how dumb that sounded.
It was her brother. Even if they weren’t close, it was still her fucking brother.
Asshole.
I gripped the back of my neck, squeezing hard.
“We were, for the most part,” she answered, nothing in her voice but sweet tones and light.
She wasn’t upset about my offhand comment.
“He was seven years older than me so we didn’t do everything together. But he was awesome. Funny and loud and just, like, a cool big brother, you know? He had all these tattoos and drove a black 1970 Charger.”
“Nice,” I muttered appreciatively, then slid down farther on the bed and relaxed with my head on a pillow.
“So cool,” she added. “Barrett was the definition of badass. He was wild. Must be where I get my edge from.”
“How’d he die?”
“Alcohol poisoning. Happened his second semester away at college. My mom and I flew out to California when we got word, but it was too late. He was in a coma and died pretty soon after we got there.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve.”
“He your only sibling?”
She yawned and sighed.
I didn’t want her drowsy. Not right now. I was wired and burning, restless for more words and sweet, light tones.
I wanted her to be that way, too, and to want to give me that.
Mine. This was mine. Her voice in my ear in the dark.
“Yep,” she replied, sounding anxious to answer and silencing my discomfort. “Just me and him.”
“Must’ve been hard on your parents,” I commented.
“Just my mom. Dad isn’t in the picture. He never was. But my mom? Yeah.” She inhaled, then breathed out slowly. “She went a little crazy, which I guess is understandable. Barrett was brilliant. A good kid. Then one night he partied too hard, and that one mistake took him. It wasn’t fair. You’re eating popsicles on your porch with your daughter one minute and the next you’re getting a call saying your boy is dying. It was too sudden for her sanity, I think. Or maybe, even if it was slow, it wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t know.”
“She doing okay now?” I asked.
“Depends on your definition of ‘okay.’ She found a way to heal, a few months after it happened, and it started out great. The intentions were good. She joined this prayer group and it was really helping. I didn’t see her cry as much. She smiled when I smiled. Then weekly meetings turned into daily meetings, she was always at the church and never home with me, and when I did see her, the only thing she’d talk to me about was my relationship with God and how I needed to get on the right path. She was better, happy, but different. Not the mom who ate popsicles with me. That woman was gone and far too busy with her new spiritual
family to eat popsicles.”
I felt something twist and wrench in my gut.
“Babe,” I whispered.
“And that is all the sad talk you’re going to get out of me tonight.”
Her voice floated with a hint of laughter.
She was trying to move forward and tread with amusement, possibly into dildo territory, where our conversations stayed the farthest from serious, but all I could picture was a sad little girl and her melted popsicle.
It fucked with my head.
“You have anybody after that happened? Any other family?” I asked, fidgeting in bed, adjusting and readjusting the height of my pillow until my upper body was bent and the weight of my edginess shifted out of my chest.
“I had Tori. She’s my best friend. And her family. I’ve always had them.”
“That’s good.”
“Then I had Marcus.”
My brows rose.
“Husband?”
“Yep.”
“You wanna talk about him?”
“Nope.”
I laughed. So did she.
“He hasn’t called,” she revealed a heartbeat later, her tone broken. “I left two days ago, packed up and walked out, and he hasn’t called. Seven years together and he doesn’t even bother to make sure I’m okay.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that.
I couldn’t be reassuring. I didn’t know dick about this guy or their marriage. I didn’t know if silence was usual for him. I only knew what she told me, that he wanted out. He ended it. Let her walk away.
He was the dumbest motherfucker on the planet.
“Even if he knew I was living with Tori now, he could’ve called,” she whispered, then with words too quiet I almost missed them, she added, “You called. Don’t even know me, I cuss you out, and you ask if I’m okay.”
I closed my eyes.
“You’re trouble,” she whispered.
I smiled in the dark.
She yawned again, sighed like she seemed to always do after revealing her exhaustion, and asked me with the smallest voice to tell her something about myself, something I’ve never told anyone.
Something she could keep.
“Please,” she begged. “Then I need to go to bed. I start my new job tomorrow and I don’t want to look like a redheaded zombie.”
I was reluctant to oblige her request, to share a secret and to let her go.
I wasn’t done. I wanted more.
But I also wanted to give her something. Something she could keep, ’cause I felt like I was taking and taking from this girl and she didn’t even know it.
I rolled onto my side and stared at the wall, the phone trapped between my ear and the pillow and a smirk on my face.
I pictured her, red hair and glasses.
“I fucking love popsicles,” I confessed.
It wasn’t much, but I knew she wouldn’t think that.
She was silent and smiling, I was sure.
And I was right.
I heard it in her voice.
“Good night, Trouble.”
Chapter Six
SYDNEY
Day three, post-Marcus.
I was excited and nervous and strangely okay.
As long as I didn’t think about the conversations I wasn’t having.
And I didn’t have a lot of time to think about those conversations. My day was jam-packed with information I needed to process, new faces and names, daily specials, menu items that were still listed but weren’t technically offered anymore, since we were waiting on new updated menus to arrive, and table numbers, which for some reason seemed to be really tripping me up, due to the randomness and inconsistency of their layout.
Table 23 was next to Table 4. Booth 7 butted up against Booth 13.
I questioned this madness, earning myself a giggle and nothing more from Tori and the other two waitresses I had met when I first arrived.
Shay, short for Shayla, a cute little brunette with a brilliant smile and killer taste in hair accessories—she wore pins with jeweled crossbones on them. They were right up my alley. And Kali, a single mom whose baby daddy ditched her to pursue an affair with his boss’s wife, one that was still going on and apparently not a secret in Dogwood Beach, the baby daddy being in politics and his boss running for governor, making the scandal newsworthy in a big way.
She was bitter when she spoke of her ex, but her face lit up when she mentioned her son, Cameron.
He sounded adorable.
I also met Sean, or Stitch, as everyone called him. He was the cook at Whitecaps and attractive in an entirely new way to me.
I had never before found rough men good-looking. Men with long hair, thick shapeless beards, and tattoos decorating practically every visible inch of skin. Men who had a pack of smokes poking out of their front pockets and who wore chains on their jeans and jewelry around their necks. I’d never looked at them twice. They were hard and intimidating.
But Sean was hot in a big way. A new way. And the fact that he had let the girls nickname him Stitch for accidentally cutting himself so many times and didn’t seem to mind them poking a little fun, that, for some reason, made him hotter.
I was getting the hang of things, learning the absurd seating layout and making new friends, and I was doing all of this with my mind the farthest from Marcus it had ever been.
It was a great first day.
No worries. No drama. No monumental mess-ups. Nothing particularly interesting going on.
Until I heard Shay make a noise at my back that sounded an awful lot like a mix between a gasp and a squeal.
It was worthy of a head turn.
“What’s up?” I asked her, watching her big brown eyes move with something behind me, her lips pulled between her teeth and her cheeks flushing red.
I was facing the kitchen now, and the back of the restaurant.
She was tuned to something at the front by the doors and looked like she wanted to climb on the bar and do backflips off of it.
Tori walked up beside me and noticed Shay’s big eyes, held smile, and flushing cheeks immediately.
“You look like Tom Hardy just stepped in here, Shay. What gives?”
She turned her head at the same time as me, then muttered a soft yet unquestionably irritated, “Shit,” under her breath.
I wasn’t sure what she was seeing. I knew what I was seeing.
Two men sauntering through the restaurant toward a booth by the window, the one closer with short tan-colored hair and blue eyes that smiled, a shaved jaw, and sharp, muscled shoulders. He wore a white tee under an opened button-up with khaki shorts and boat shoes, and the skin on his face and neck and arms was kissed a deep golden brown.
He was all boy-next-door charm and good clean fun. Very easy on the eyes. While the man behind him screamed secret sex in your parents’ bed and stolen touches under the dinner table.
Standing a head taller with limbs that stretched for days, lean but solid, this stunner had wave-tussled sandy blond hair that tickled his neck and curled at his ears, and a day-old beard you knew was rough on soft skin. He wore a loose Hurley tee that looked wrinkled from being kept in a backseat, tattered board shorts and sandals, didn’t look like he cared in the least what you thought about it, and had a cigarette tucked behind his ear.
His eyes were a penetrating shade of blue, deeper in tone than his friend’s and definitely not smiling.
And that penetrating shade turned even more intensely sexual when he slid them to my knockout of a best friend and moved his gaze from tits to toes.
“Whoa,” I mumbled, shifting my weight and giving life to my legs again.
My limbs tingled.
I knew fifteen minutes into my shift this morning exactly why Tori worked here, the screaming hot locals, and why she had that mischievous shift in her eyes when she suggested I would love it here, again, the screaming hot locals, but now I was seeing the full effect of committing to waiting tables the rest of your life when you did
n’t even need a job in the first place.
Exhibit A, and his cousin with a dirty little secret, Exhibit B. B for bad-boy.
“This is so awesome,” Shay whispered excitedly, rounding the bar and stepping beside us. “I love it when he stops in here. And he’s in your section, T. As usual.”
I took notice of the booth they had chosen, which was most definitely in Tori’s section, and which also happened to be in my section since I was training and paired up with Tori, and as I was taking notice of my section and the surrounding sections, my eyes took notice of something else.
These two sun-kissed surfer boys had drawn the attention of everyone in the restaurant.
At least everyone with a vagina anyway.
Tori sighed, grabbed my hand, and tugged me behind her, whispering obscenities under her breath and the slapping of our sneakers against the tile.
Exhibit A had his head down and was skimming the menu.
Exhibit B was relaxed, leaned back with an arm slung along the back of the booth, his cutting, captivating blues glued to my best friend’s every movement.
“What up, Legs?” he greeted her as we stopped at the hot boys’ booth.
I glanced at Tori, or Legs, as Exhibit B had so eagerly addressed her, then back at him, swaying a little at the sight of dimples and perfect teeth.
Oh, my.
Tori, ignoring the nickname and the man who delivered it, released my hand and reached into the pocket of her apron, flipped to a new ticket, and clicked her pen open.
“Welcome to Whitecaps. My name is Tori.” She paused, cutting a face-melting glare at B. “Not Legs, jackass.”
He raised his brows, smiling with the devil’s mouth while she continued.
“And I’ll unfortunately be your waitress today along with my best girl Sydney, who is training, so try to keep the assholery to a minimum if that’s even possible for you, which I realize might be a long shot and not something in your control but it never hurts to ask. We don’t want to scare her off.”
She bumped my hip and smirked at me.
I waved at B, and at A when he looked up, getting a smile and a wink from the former.
“Our special today is fish and chips with coleslaw, and our soup of the day is cream of crab.” She looked up, pen poised to paper and profile death-stare crazy. “Now, can I get you both something to drink and possibly your tab?”