by Pippa Grant
I dump everything—plates and all—in reusable, organic-cotton Crunchy totes and drag my haul across the snack bar to an open table by the windows overlooking the tree-lined street. I’ll miss this view. Not that I sat here and watched the street often, but I have this sinking feeling it’s time to move home. My mom’s been running an Etsy business selling mason jars with homey motivational sayings etched in them in preparation for retirement. I could move into the basement and help double her production. It’s been ten years, and that restraining order for the Bratwurst Wagon will only really be a problem during Baloney Festival.
“Berger.”
Would you look at that?
Mr. Fancy-Pants Twisted-Dick Billionaire himself has come to the snack bar.
I hug two bags to my chest. I’d hug them all if I were half the size of my brothers, but I got the short genes in the family and two’s all I can hold without toppling myself over. Still, the Dick is not getting my cheese biscuits. Or anything else from me. Except a nod of acknowledgment. “Dickhead.”
There are only four other people in the snack bar. All four of them gasp in unison. Chase’s left eye twitches, and for a split second, I swear the right corner of his mouth twitched too.
Upward. Like a… Like a smile. As though he has a sense of humor.
Yep, I’m getting canned.
“Quit fucking around and get back to work. All that bok choy won’t sell itself.”
Glitter is all over his hands. It’s decorating the bits of his soul stuck in his chin dimple. His suit coat sparkles like a leisure suit, and I have to pretend I remember yoga breathing to keep from snorting out a laugh. Swear to God, if his ass is covered in glitter, I’m buying Eloise a new drum set and Parker a new guitar.
Wait.
He just told me to get back to work.
Like I still have a job.
“Don’t make me regret this,” he growls. “I can make your life hell.”
“You already do.” I give him my worst fake smile and stand, still clutching the bags. The whole marketing department’s having snacks on me today.
Well, on Chase.
But I had to sleep with him to get said snacks, so I’m still a giver.
His left eye is twitching again. Without another word, he turns and stalks out of the snack bar.
Glitter sparkles in a giant rainbow all over his ass.
What do you know?
Today is a good day to be me.
7
Chase
I hate it when Bro’s right. But she’s so fucking right my nuts hurt. And not just because a glitter bomb exploded all over them when I sat down this morning.
She’ll pay for that. She’ll pay dearly for that. I don’t even care if she didn’t do it, she’ll pay.
I’m picturing her spread out naked on the counter of the snack bar, in a fantasy that involves her tits again, and I realize I’m so totally fucked I can’t see my way to getting unfucked.
I need to get my dick back in my pants and start using my head again, because I have housecleaning to do.
Mavis, the executive administrative assistant, is easily bought with a contraband chocolate chip cookie from Starbucks and a bullshit story about my sister getting fired from a job after filing a sexual harassment claim.
The only thing not true is the part about me having a sister. She was actually a girl I dated about eight years ago.
I might hate Bro like New Yorkers hate the Red Sox, and I might hate myself for wanting to fuck her brains out again—and again, and possibly again and again—but I won’t tolerate the way my executive board was ready to fire her for what she drove me to in the elevator last night.
Takes two to have sex. Letting the woman take the fall isn’t how I do business. Plus, my mother would be horrified.
Over everything.
Thank god she’s halfway around the world.
By four, I have a stack of paperwork outlining at least a dozen cases of harassment or inappropriate relationships that have been swept under the rug with severance packages. I want to hit something.
Instead, I take a break to get out of the building and cool off, and something else hits me.
Namely, a fist. Right to my left cheek.
The ham-boned sucker punch isn’t the first one I’ve gotten from this guy, who used to be like a brother to me, but the last time he hit me was a decade ago. Since then, he’s been drafted by the NHL and beefed up even more than the stocky bull he used to be. In a battle of wits, he probably couldn’t spell his name, but I like my skull in one piece, so I do the most manly thing I can. I lift a hand to order back the security guards flocking out of the building to defend my honor. “I got this, boys.”
“Mr. Jett—”
“Back up or you’re all fired.”
They all stop. Nice to know where their loyalty lies. I think.
“Feel better?” I ask Ares.
“No way, motherfucker.”
The term he’s really looking for is sister fucker, but there’s no sense in waving red panties in front of the bull. Dude takes his name seriously, and his twin brother isn’t any better. Worse, actually, because he got the brains on top of the stature.
Later I’ll contemplate the amazing feat that was Ares using a four-syllable word, but for now, I’m going to try not to get hit again.
“Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to leave,” the biggest of the Crunchy security dudes says. He has to crane his neck to make eye contact with the beast.
“Or I can crush you like a bug.” Ares pushes a fist into his other palm and glowers. If he’d been born anywhere but Minnesota, he probably would’ve been a pro wrestler. In Minnesota, it’s hockey first, nice second.
Since Ares can’t count to two, all I get from him is the hockey glare.
I flip a look at the guard to my right. “Go tell Ambrosia Berger she has a visitor.”
Suddenly my feet are dangling off the ground. “You don’t say her name,” Ares snarls. His breath smells like Cheetos and stale coffee, and his nose has more personality than it did last time. I added one of those lumps, but I knew him better then.
I’d also had an overwhelming and uncontrollable case of rage fueling my fists that day.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pissed about the shit I need to clean up at Crunchy. I’m also pissed that I let Bro drive me to fucking her in the elevator. But getting off last night seems to have put me in a mellow place.
Especially since I’ve come to my senses and realized there’s no fucking way Ambrosia Berger would’ve let me stick my dick in her if she wasn’t already on birth control.
She’d probably claim she was on STD-preventatives too, because she can’t resist getting any random dig in, but I’m not planning on giving her the satisfaction of letting her throw that one in my face.
“How about putting me down?” I say to Ares. “Your sister can take care of herself. She glitter-bombed my office, and god only knows what she buried in my desk drawers to make that stench.”
Ares loosens his grip, and my feet slip closer to the ground. “She got you with that sparkle shit?”
Aw, he said a two-syllable word. His mother will be proud. “All over my ass.”
“Got my whole team too. In March.”
He drops me. I land on my feet and take a subtle but healthy step out of arm’s reach. “Heard you made the play-offs.” I would’ve cheered against him and the Blackhawks, but they were battling his twin, Zeus, and the Predators, so it was pointless. I watched baseball spring training instead. “Nice.”
“Sir?” The guard is back, and he looks like he’s just swallowed a live frog. “Ms. Berger has, erm, declined to see her visitor. And you may consider updating the employee guidelines on profanity.”
I can’t exactly threaten to move her whole department into the elevator of shame with her brother standing here, frothing at the mouth. I like breathing. I’d like to continue breathing for the next sixty or seventy years. I box, I run, and I can bench my ow
n weight, but Ares can bench an entire city block.
This calls for a far more subtle attack.
One that no one can fault me for, but that Bro will hate just as much as she probably hates working for me.
Psychological warfare is the shit.
“Too bad.” I shrug. “I thought she’d enjoy having dinner at Selma’s with her brother. On me.”
“They eat raw shit there?” Ares asks.
“If you want.”
“Like my steak raw,” he grunts.
Not surprised. Medium-rare has too many syllables. And well-done sounds more British than ape.
I hate that I miss this dumbass, but I do. Zeus was the brains, Ares was the muscle. I was the spice.
My phone dings. It’s a photo text of Bro’s middle finger.
“Look at that,” I say. “Your sister’s decided to join you. I’ll get a car brought around.” I slap him on the back—not expecting that, is he?—and retreat before he can process what’s going on. I glance at the frog-eating guard. “Might want to put stronger steel on the lower windows,” I murmur.
Or I might want to sell this godforsaken grocery store.
But Bro would like that too much.
And I’m not getting out of organics. This isn’t business.
It’s personal.
8
Ambrosia
I pull a seat up at the edge of the red velvet-lined booth at Selma’s and picture my brothers having their nose hairs plucked out one by one. Ares is playing with the candle flame and taking up the entire right half of the booth, Zeus occupies the whole left half. I get a slice of the end.
“We already ordered two of everything,” Zeus tells me. His leg is bouncing, which explains the vibrations I felt on the sidewalk outside.
“But what am I going to eat?” I ask.
That earns me two matching grins. “A knuckle sandwich,” Zeus says.
A server approaches. He eyeballs my seat. These fancy places with Turkish rugs and real art and privacy curtains don’t like it when you sit at the end of their booths. But then he takes stock of my brothers and bows his head in concession. “A drink, madam?”
“I’m not staying,” I assure him. “Third wheel and all. But did these two lovebirds order a bottle of your best champagne yet?”
He dips his head once more. “Not yet, madam. I’ll see to it.”
My brothers don’t blink at the implication. Ares because he probably didn’t understand it, Zeus because—never mind. I hate thinking about my brothers and their security in their masculinity, because ew.
“Ah, she’s mad,” Zeus says to Ares. “You should’ve waited for me. I had a plan to get rid of him without anyone knowing.”
“The two of you together are as wide as a street. You can’t sneeze in Brooklyn without the tremors reaching all the way out to Long Island, and you think you were going to somehow sneak stealthy revenge on a billionaire?”
“He impugned your honor,” Zeus says.
“We can be small,” Ares adds.
My brothers, ladies and gentlemen. I haven’t seen them since they battled it out in the play-offs, and I miss the goobers. “How long are you in town? I have band practice tonight, but we could hit a Yankees game tomorrow.”
And then I can pretend, for three glorious hours, that I didn’t spend my day having my every move watched and whispered over by the people I’d claimed as family just yesterday. Everyone from the custodian to the store managers who were in the building for a social media crash course knew who I was and what I did in the elevator last night.
You know your life priorities are a little out of whack when what you’re most grateful for is the fact that video hasn’t leaked onto the internet. Without actual proof, I could twist this anyway I wanted to, and the only people who could correct me would be the security guards—whom I’m pretty sure only had a visual without the sound, please, god—or the Dick.
“Game sounds fun. Just us?” Zeus asked. “Or is the elevator fucker joining us?”
There go my panties getting damp at that part of the memory. Thanks, Zeus. And thanks to whoever’s leaking the gossip outside the company. I don’t want to know how they know. “Just us. Does Mom know you say fucker?”
“Who do you think taught me?” His eyes glint, and we all crack up. Mom saying fucker is about as likely as all of us sitting down over pineapple tater tot casserole for a round of Cards Against Humanity.
“She put sparkles on his ass,” Ares tells Zeus.
Zeus has a wicked vengeance smile. “You got him with that glitter bomb shit?”
“This is a five-star restaurant, not a locker room,” I say. Somebody has to pretend to be outraged other than the elderly couple behind us. “And no. I didn’t plant glitter bombs in his office. But it might’ve been my idea. And I might’ve played lookout.”
Both my brothers fist bump me.
I’m considering having a hundred cases of hot dog buns delivered to the Dick’s office with a suggestion of where he can stick his sausage next time he feels an urge, but everyone had been watching me too closely at work for me to covertly manipulate the inventory and shipping systems.
He was eerily un-dick-like today. It’s making me nervous. I think he’s trying to screw with me.
“You need us, we’re here,” Ares says.
“Don’t suppose you two can afford to buy an organic grocery store chain.”
Ares digs a few thousand dollars out of his wallet and shoves it at me.
Zeus grins again. “Dude. It’s way more than that.”
A different server delivers the champagne, along with a tray of appetizers.
Both of my brothers remove their elbows from the table and stare as fine china plate after fine china plate elegantly decorated with small-portioned food art is placed on the black tablecloth.
Ares starts to open his mouth. I love my brother—and not only because he just offered me a stack of Benjamins for a down payment on a grocery store—but I know he’s about to insult the food. I kick him under the table, and he closes his jaw. He might not be bright, but Mom drilled manners into all of us.
“Dated a girl once who ate shit like this,” Zeus says after the server pours their champagne and departs.
“One?” Ares asks.
“One was enough.”
Probably good that my brothers can’t afford to buy Crunchy. They wouldn’t get the customer base. Or the product.
Especially the vegetables.
Mom could only do so much with these two.
I take a plate with three edamame in the center of a small arrangement of watercress on a single slice of parboiled sweet potato and swallow it in one bite.
My brothers recoil in horror.
“Thanks for dinner,” I say. “I’ll get tickets to the game. You guys try to not harass anyone else I work with, mmm-kay?”
Ares levels a look that justifies his name. “He broke you.”
See? How can I not love these guys? “It was ten years ago, and I made prison my bitch.”
Okay, fine, by prison, I mean three nights in a county jail cell, and by made it my bitch, I mean I was reduced to a blubbering, scaredy-cat mess for those three nights, but I wouldn’t be the woman I am today without the experience. “My employment options are limited at the moment, so we’re all going to play nice until he goes away, okay?”
“I’ll get you a job,” Zeus says.
“I’ll get you a job,” Ares says.
Zeus is in Nashville and Ares plays in Chicago. My police record and recent sexual exploits wouldn’t make a hockey team blink, but as much as I love my brothers, I prefer food to their kind of mother puckers.
The food doesn’t talk back or try to screw me.
Usually.
“I like New York and I like my job,” I tell them. “This will blow over. I’m staying.”
My brothers drop it. They convince me to stay through dinner, then we get takeout hamburgers for the two of them for dessert. Because they’r
e goobers, they order a Zeus Berger and an Ares Berger, which confuses the heck out of the poor Five Guys cashier, but the guy manning the grill turns around and almost faints.
When he gets control of himself, he asks for selfies and autographs on his forehead, then triples their beef for free.
Zeus and Ares are the two biggest guys to ever play in the NHL. They’re called the Twin Tanks, the Brute and the Force separately, and fans go stark raving nuts when they play each other. They once made ESPN for a private bet over who could bench the bigger cow. Literal cows. I’m pretty sure Ares could pull a tractor on a rope with just his teeth, and Zeus would undoubtedly try a 747 if Ares tried a tractor.
Tonight, after the Berger show at Five Guys, the two of them come with me to band practice and belt the hell out of N*SYNC’s greatest hits. Parker goes a little star struck. Eloise bangs the drums while eyeing Ares like she’d like to bang him. Willow stops groaning over a wedding magazine to squeal, clapping her hands and asking if they can dance too.
The one thing we don’t talk about?
Chase Jett.
It’s two solid hours of heaven.
My brothers leave me at my apartment building. I assume they’re heading off to a club that mere mortals like me don’t know exists, and frankly, I’m exhausted to the point that I wouldn’t care if the bass was thumping right in the center of my apartment.
I’m going to sleep like a baby tonight. Mating Hogzilla above me and all.
Except when I turn into my hallway, the Dick is leaning on the wall outside my door.
Waiting.
And probably not for Mrs. Byrony in 3C, or Buck and Jason next door.
Chase is in low-slung jeans and a fitted white button-down that tucks in at his slim hips and perfectly brings out the bronze in his skin. His deep-set blue eyes track my path, and the intensity radiating off him reminds me of a leopard on the prowl. He still has glitter in his eyebrows. My nipples tighten, my belly curls, and I catch myself about to lick my lips.
“Oh, honey,” I say. “I should’ve warned you about my magic vagina. It makes men fall madly and irresistibly in love with me. The only way to break the spell is to dunk yourself in the Hudson four times at midnight under a full moon.”