Bad for You

by J. Daniels

  I stalked to the door and turned the knob, glancing back once more before I opened it. “Appreciate this. A lot,” I said, my throat suddenly feeling tight. “I wasn’t expecting…just, thanks. I mean that.”

  Nate dropped his head into a nod.

  I walked out of the office and crossed the restaurant, pushing through the double doors that led outside.

  * * *

  Starting over wasn’t easy, but I didn’t want easy. I just wanted a chance to make it happen, and Nate gave me that.

  I owed the guy.

  But now I needed to make sure he knew that just ’cause I owed him and probably would for the rest of my fucking life, that didn’t mean I could be pushed around. And I wasn’t leaving this office until he got that point.

  Whitecaps had two cooks now. Me, and this kid Nate hired last week.

  I worked with J.R. for a day and a half while he was training. He seemed all right enough. Knew what he was doing. Talked a little too fucking much, but I was used to that kind of shit around here. And yeah, it was damn good luck he started when he did, seeing as I needed the day off yesterday for settlement, but every motherfucker here had another thing coming if they thought I’d just sit back and watch my job get taken from me. No fucking way.

  Nate glanced up when I stopped on the other side of his desk. “Hey. How’d it go with the house yesterday?” he asked, sounding genuinely interested. “Everything work out?”

  “Yeah.” I crossed my arms over my chest, thinking about how I wanted to approach this. “Gotta talk to you about something, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not stepping down so that little prick can take my shifts.”

  Nate’s brows lifted. He sat back in his chair and removed his glasses, dropping them on the desk, and studied me, saying nothing.

  Fuck. I gritted my teeth, thinking maybe I should’ve approached this differently. I wouldn’t have shifts to fight for if I got my ass fired.

  “Are you referring to J.R.?” Nate asked.

  I nodded.

  “He handled it well yesterday. No major issues. No complaints.”

  “Yeah? Good for him,” I growled. “Ain’t like it’s brain surgery.”

  Nate tilted his head, asking, “What’s the problem, Sean? You needed the day off, and he covered it.”

  I breathed deep through my nose, wanting to keep my anger out of this but finding that hard when I was feeling threatened. But tearing into Nate? What fucking good would that do? I couldn’t mess this up.

  And I always messed everything up, fucked it all when it was going good.

  Don’t blow this, asshole.

  “Appreciated that,” I said calmly. “I don’t remember saying anything to you about it Sunday, but just know I’m grateful. That shit yesterday was important.”

  Nate said nothing. So I kept going.

  “That being said, I need the hours. I need the money. I need my fuckin’ shifts. I can run that kitchen by myself. You know I can. So, I’m not seeing a reason for that kid sticking around. You need to cut him loose. If he handled things yesterday as well as you say he did, he’ll have no problems finding work. You don’t even need to feel bad about it.” I shrugged. “Shit, I’ll tell him if you want. I got no problems doing it.”

  Might even enjoy it a little too. Payback for talking my fucking ear off.

  Nate’s mouth lifted into a half smile. “I think that kid might shit his pants if you fired him,” he said, then his face grew serious as he sat forward, looming over his desk. “I hired J.R. to help,” he shared. “To take some of the workload off you. I know you can handle that kitchen, but Jesus, man, everyone needs a break. You open and close for me every day.”

  “Am I complainin’?” I asked.

  “No, but I doubt you would. You and I both know there are days and times when we’re busier than others. There’s no reason why there can’t be two of you back there.”

  “Full season, I can handle it. I’m not askin’ for help.”

  “And I’m not asking your permission to give you help, am I?”

  Nostrils flaring, I clenched my jaw to keep from saying something I couldn’t take back.

  “Look.” Nate raised his hand to halt me from speech. “Let me say this before you flip my desk over and knock me out, since you look ready to do that. You and J.R. are going to be splitting up the shifts. That’s not up for discussion.”

  Cursing, I turned and headed for the door.

  Fuck this. Fuck this fucking job and every motherfucking asshole working here. I am done.

  “And I’m giving you a raise.”

  I froze, blinking at the wall. What the…

  “And just so we’re clear on this—it’ll cover the cut in hours you’ll be taking and then some.”

  I slowly turned my head, meeting his eyes. “Why?” I asked, voice tight.

  Nate gave me a look like he knew that question was coming. “How long have you been working for me?” he asked.

  “Fourteen months.”

  “And how many times have you been late in those fourteen months?”

  “None.”

  “Sick? Called out for whatever reason? How many times?”

  “None.”

  “Complained about hours?” He smirked. “Complained about anything?”

  I turned to face him again. “So I don’t bitch? So what?”

  “You come in here, you do your job, and you do it well, Sean,” he said. “You’re the best damn cook I’ve had in here, and I appreciate the fact that you don’t give me shit or cause drama. You wanna know why I’m giving you a raise? Because you earned it. You’ve also earned a break, so take it. Split up the shifts with J.R. Work together. Let him take some of the load. Just figure it out. I don’t want to see you when I get here and when I’m leaving at night. Take some days off, man. Christ. Nobody needs to be here as much as me.”

  I stood there unable to speak, just processing everything Nate just said, which was a fucking lot, more than he’d ever said to me at once before. But mostly, I was focusing on the fact that I was going to be making more money and working less, which meant I would have time to fix up that dump.

  I wouldn’t need to be pulling late hours and giving up sleep entirely. Hell, I might even be able to get it ready sooner than I thought.

  This was a good thing. I didn’t understand why, but I was getting an opportunity, another break, and there was no fucking way I wasn’t going to take it.

  “Are we good?” Nate asked when I still hadn’t said anything back to him. “Or do you want to try and talk me out of this, and maybe still punch me?”

  I stuck my hands in my pockets. “I’m not gonna punch you.”

  “Do you still have a problem with J.R.?”

  “No.”

  “Good.” He shook his head, the corner of his mouth lifting. “You need to ease up a little, Sean. Give yourself some credit. If you work hard for me, I’m not going to ignore that. Keep it up, all right?”

  Nodding, I turned away from Nate and got the hell out of that office, feeling strange as shit.

  Good, yeah, I felt good about the changes, now that I knew how this was going to play out for me, but I still didn’t know how to feel when I was handed something. Especially when I knew I didn’t deserve it.

  Treat me like garbage. Be a complete dick to me. That I could understand. But Christ, anything else was confusing as hell.

  After shrugging off my coat, tying my hair back at the base of my skull, and washing the rest of the compound off my hands, I went to the walk-in and started taking inventory.

  Work kept me busy and my mind off shit I still couldn’t wrap my head around, no matter how hard I tried. For an hour, I had silence.

  Prep done, I was working on the soup of the day when J.R. came in through the back.

  “What’s up, man?” he asked, sounding pleased as fuck to be here and see me, like we were close or something. This kid was weird. “Hey, did Nate talk to you about
how we’re gonna split up the shifts?”

  I jerked my chin, keeping my eyes on the pot I was stirring.

  “’Cause I just wanna let you know, I’m down with whatever,” he continued as he moved around the kitchen. “So if there’s days when you want me to cover early, I got that. Or if you wanna roll out of here before close, cool. My shit is flexible.”

  That ache in my neck continued to throb. “Wouldn’t mind getting out of here before too late tonight,” I said, meeting his eyes then. “You sayin’ you got this covered?”

  J.R. smiled, tugging off his beanie and running his hand through his blond hair, spiking it up. “Brother, I got you. No problem. Hey, man, this is gonna work out. I know you seemed a little…unsure about me getting hired on, and I got that. I’m young. I got this new style about me. It’s intimidating. I feel you. But you’ll see. We’ll probably be best friends by next month.”

  I stared at him. It’s intimidating? Jesus Christ. What the fuck was this kid on? And why the hell was he calling me brother?

  His smile grew, stretching his lips wide. “You’re serious as fuck back here, man. You need to lighten up a little.” He laughed at himself, then looked toward the window separating us from the restaurant.

  I was just about to get back to what I was doing, considering I had nothing else to fucking say to this kid, when his next words stopped me.

  “Morning, ladies! Who else froze their balls off driving over here? Just me?”

  I didn’t give a shit what he was talking about. That’s not what had me turning more and looking through that damn window myself.

  I had to know who he was talking to.

  Kali stopped in front of the window first, giggling as she tugged off her wool hat.

  She was one of the waitresses. Young, like the rest of them, but had a kid I knew she was raising on her own, considering how much all of them fucking talked around that window. She didn’t say much to me, though, never did, and unlike two of the others, didn’t get up in my shit every other second like they were getting paid to do it. I didn’t mind her too much.

  “Don’t you have heat?” she asked J.R.

  “Not heat that’ll shoot up to my balls,” he replied. “Why hasn’t someone invented that yet? There needs to be one of those vents below the wheel, shooting straight at my junk.”

  “How lovely.” She chuckled.

  “My balls are fine!”

  Hearing that voice, my shoulders pulled back and I sucked in a breath. I watched Shayla smile and laugh as she walked toward Nate’s office.

  Our eyes locked—hers so fucking big. Almost too big for her face; it should’ve looked weird, but it didn’t.

  They were one solid color—a rich brown, shiny like wet soil, and Christ, they were beautiful. I’d never seen eyes like that before. I could look all fucking day at a pair of eyes like that.

  But, like usual lately, my time for looking was limited.

  Shayla immediately turned away, her cheeks a shade redder, which I’d put money on having absolutely nothing to do with the cold, and knocked on Nate’s door. He called out, and she disappeared behind it.

  Gritting my teeth, I turned back to the stove and kept stirring my pot of crab soup, reminding myself how fucked up it was to be wanting attention from someone I had no business getting attention from.

  This was the way it needed to be. She should be turning away. She should be avoiding me and keeping all those sweet words to herself now. So what if I felt like a giant piece of shit for doing her the way I did. I had to do it. She shouldn’t be wanting anything from me anyway. She deserved better.

  I had no idea why she took to me in the first place. I sure as fuck didn’t ask for it.

  I wasn’t particularly nice to her. I didn’t go out of my way to talk to her or even so much as look at her back when I first got hired on. I kept to myself and worked. That’s what I got hired on to do, so why the fuck would I do anything else? I didn’t give a shit about anyone here. And they shouldn’t give a shit about me.

  But for some reason, that girl felt inclined to push her way in, like talking to me was something she not only wanted to do, but enjoyed doing. And I couldn’t keep ignoring her. I tried. Motherfucker, I tried. I didn’t give her anything in return those first couple of days, not even making eye contact with her when she’d drop off a damn ticket. Just let her ramble on and on. She told me about everything. Everything she was thinking, feeling, wishing for, and wanting more than anything. I kept my focus on my work and nothing else, until I slipped up and looked up after hearing something in her voice, something I didn’t like that sounded an awful lot like fear, and for the first time I saw who the fuck was talking to me like they were in some sort of competition for most words spoken in a minute.

  I saw her eyes first. That stopped my breathing.

  Then I looked over the rest of her face, taking in all those sweet features—pale flawless skin, cute little nose, and full pink lips. Her hair was dark and stopped just below her chin, cut choppy, and held out of her face with a skull bandana. She looked young as fuck, couldn’t have been much older than twenty. She looked tiny as fuck too. I could see most of her, since she was sitting up on the counter and peering at me through the window, but I didn’t get to check out much more than her face before I watched those pretty lips stretch into a smile, shutting my brain down completely from further functioning.

  It wasn’t just the fact that she had a good smile, a fucking great smile, actually. One that somehow made that mouth even prettier. She had a smile that lit up her whole damn face like she was standing in a spotlight, making her shine from the inside out.

  It was the fact that she was giving it to me and giving it good, like she’d been waiting for me to look at her and couldn’t have been happier about that wait ending. And then she further fucked me up when she opened her mouth and spoke, saying something I shouldn’t have heard and further, shouldn’t have given a shit about.

  Too bad I did.

  “There you are,” she’d said, holding onto that smile while she jumped down, staying turned to face me. “I thought I was going to have to set myself on fire to get your attention. That would’ve sucked.” She giggled.

  And that laugh was fucking pretty too. Don’t ask me how, but it was.

  I watched her cross the restaurant and tend to some dickheads who got seated in a booth.

  She was joking, obviously; I’m not an idiot. She wouldn’t have set herself on fire, but I suddenly felt like the world’s biggest asshole for putting those words in her mouth.

  Maybe I should’ve been giving her attention…

  What? No. Fuck, no.

  Shaking my head, I got back to work, doing what I should’ve been doing all along for about two seconds before I was stopped again.

  “I’m Shayla, by the way.”

  I quit working and looked up.

  She was back to sitting on the counter as she finished scribbling on a ticket, smiling softer now, like she was thinking about something funny but didn’t want to share it.

  That pissed me off.

  And then it pissed me off further because why the fuck did that piss me off? What did I care what she was thinking about?

  And why the fuck was I still looking at her?

  I watched as she ripped the ticket off her book and slid the paper across the lip of the window, pushing her body closer and giving me view of her uniform top.

  My eyes fell to her name tag. “You go by Shay?” I asked.

  Her mouth dropped open as she stared at me for several seconds, gaze lingering on my beard. “Uh…y-yes?” She cleared her throat and her cheeks pinked up. “Sometimes. I go by both.”

  “You like one better?”

  “I don’t know.”

  My eyebrow lifted. “You don’t know?”

  She stared at me for a breath before responding. “I guess I like whatever people want to call me. I like both. I answer to Shay or Shayla. What do you like?”

  “Shayla.” />
  My response shocked the shit out of me and threw her off too. Me because what the fuck was I even saying? Why was I telling her what I liked? Why did I even like it? And why the fuck was she even asking? What did she care?

  I didn’t get this girl, but I knew my response meant something to her. I could see it.

  Shayla blinked those big, brown eyes, mouth slack, my answer clearly stunning her, which I’m guessing had to do with me giving her one so quickly, then she started smiling at me again, and muttered a “Cool” before hopping back down and busying herself getting drinks.

  I didn’t want her busying herself getting drinks. I wanted her to plant her cute little ass back on that counter, and keep talking to me, and I wanted her to do it while I looked.

  Something was seriously fucking wrong with me.

  I got back to work and tried not giving her any more attention for the rest of the day, which I fucking sucked at. I didn’t say much else to her, but I looked. I fucking looked a lot. I looked forgetting I shouldn’t be looking, and when that realization hit me later that night when I got back to my shithole trailer, and I remembered why I didn’t deserve to be looking at someone like that, seeing as I wasn’t ever going to be better than the filth surrounding me, I vowed to put an end to it. The next time we worked together, I wouldn’t give her shit. I’d ignore her. And she’d eventually get the hint and leave me the fuck alone.

  Yeah…That didn’t happen. I didn’t ignore a damn thing. And she didn’t sway either.

  We kept at it for months. Months. Her talking. Me listening and looking.

  And although I liked it more than I could remember liking a lot of things, I needed it to stop. I wasn’t ever going to be worth what this girl wanted to give. I knew that, and I needed her to know it too, but I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t do a damn thing to stop what was going on between us. I had to look at her. I had to listen to everything she was telling me, knowing that it could and would end and wanting it to just as badly as I didn’t. I couldn’t fight it. I needed her to fight it. Something had to get this girl away from me.

  And when an opportunity came for me to fuck it all up, I saw my out and I took it.