The Best Lines

by Nicole Pyland

  At the same time, she also sometimes hated the restaurant business. She was lucky that her parents practically lived there. It meant she got more nights off than most restaurant managers, but the hours were still more than the standard work week and the only day she had off altogether was Sunday when the place was closed.

  She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t hoping Eva would show up, but she had tried to flirt with her a couple of times now. The last time was slightly more overt than the first, but the woman clearly wasn’t interested. Maybe Ember was losing her touch. Maybe Eva was distracted with losing her job and hadn’t picked up on it. She was cute though but also seemed somewhat uncomfortable in her own skin. The sweater she’d worn earlier that day was slightly too large for her thin frame. Most women that looked like Eva would purchase clothing that hugged them in all the right places. Eva was model tall and nearly as thin, but even that night when Eva had worn yet another sweater, Ember noticed the same thing. Eva clearly had no desire to show off her assets and, somehow, Ember found that endlessly adorable.

  After closing, she opened the door to an unconnected part of the building and proceeded up the stairs to the small apartment above the restaurant. Technically, no one lived here. Ember had her own place, despite her mother and father both telling her to just take the apartment here for free, but she wanted her own apartment, and she wanted to pay rent. She didn’t want to owe her parents anything. However, it was a place to crash when she had to close and didn’t want to walk the two blocks to the train in the cold and then five blocks to her apartment after that.

  This apartment was larger than her own, and that was saying something. It was a studio with an open kitchen and a full-size bed against the front wall, which had a large window that overlooked the street outside. The only other room in the place was a bathroom. There was a small closet off to the side where they stored extra cleaning products for the restaurant and the apartment itself also contained boxes that wouldn’t fit into the dry storage room downstairs. Ember mainly used it for the bed and the refrigerator that she always stocked with her favorite beer.

  She opened one and sat on the bed. One of her most satisfying rituals, when she crashed here, was to sit at the head of the bed that had no headboard and stare out the half-moon window. The city was different at night. While people could be found walking on every block at all hours, this part of the city was a little less populated because it wasn’t a big draw for tourists. She liked looking out to see the one or two random people heading home or on their way out. She took a long drink of her beer and pushed the bed away from the wall a few feet, so she could hang her legs over the edge and watch. There was no TV in the apartment, so she regularly just used her phone to play podcasts as she tried to wind down from the busy night. She’d chosen All Squared for tonight, which was a mathematics podcast where the hosts interviewed popular mathematicians.

  ◆◆◆

  When she woke, she crawled out of bed and dressed for the new day. Thursday morning was her coffee day with Charlie and Hailey. They shared a cup at their favorite local place before they all went their separate ways for work. As usual, Ember was the last to arrive.

  “Em, I swear. It’s 8:15,” Charlie scolded as soon as Ember sat at their regular table in the back of the shop.

  “Not my fault. I stayed at the restaurant last night and had to take the El to get here,” she replied as Hailey passed her the coffee she’d already procured for her. “Thanks. I’m next week, right?” she asked, recalling that they alternated buying their weekly coffee.

  “Yes,” Hailey told her.

  “Everything good at the restaurant on V Day?” Charlie asked her. “I know you guys always get slammed.”

  “We were.” Ember took a sip of her regular coffee with a splash of 1%. “It was fine though. How’s little Eddie?”

  “He’s okay. He hates that damn dog collar though. He keeps trying to eat it.” Charlie’s four-year-old black lab recently had an operation to remove a growth on his neck. “Not cancer though.”

  “Thank God,” Hailey replied, and they all nodded. “I have news,” Hailey said, her voice betraying a hint of nervousness as she placed her coffee back on the table and clasped her hands around it.

  Charlie, with her short brown pixie cut and matching dark eyes, looked over at her best friend. “Oh, should we worry? Who is it this time?”

  “That’s not nice.”

  Hailey was thirty-one and an attractive woman who wore her long, blonde hair in subtle waves when she left it natural as she often did. She had green eyes that made every woman swoon, but Hailey was terrible with swooning women. She had no clue how to recognize when a woman was flirting with her and especially when the wrong woman was flirting with her. Kayla had been one of those wrong women, but she hadn’t been the only one. Hailey had fallen for others like her time and again despite her friends’ protestations when they met these women and warned her that they were likely going to break her heart.

  “Hails, why do we have to keep having the same conversation with you?” Charlie asked.

  Ember often found herself watching these exchanges with no need to participate.

  “Her name is Trisha and she’s-”

  “Amazing and smart and funny and kind and every other word you used to describe all the other ones who treated you like shit,” Charlie finished for her.

  “Charlotte Ann, that is not the case this time.” Hailey used Charlie’s first and middle name, which meant she was already frustrated with her.

  Ember listened for another few minutes as Hailey defended the girl she’d been on three dates with while Charlie questioned her taste in women. Charlie was madly in love with Hailey and had been since they’d all first met, when they were twenty-one and Charlie and Hailey both waited tables at the restaurant while going to school. The three of them had talked one night and discovered they were all gay and had remained close friends. The ever-stoic Charlie had only revealed her feelings for Hailey to Ember after a particularly long night of drinking about five years ago. That drinking led to Charlie and Ember sharing a heated kiss and nearly more, but they’d stopped themselves when Charlie confessed her love for Hailey.

  Charlie had relationships here and there but hadn’t found the one because she’d never been able to move on from her feelings for Hailey. Hailey, however, remained clueless, which always made Ember laugh because Hailey was off the charts smart. She went to school at Northwestern and graduated at the top of her program. She could have gotten any job she wanted in Chicago or probably anywhere else, but when it came to her love life, she made terrible decisions.

  “Hails, we’re happy for you if she’s what you want,” Ember finally interrupted their argument.

  “Thank you, Em.” Hailey looked at Charlie. “Why can’t you just be happy for me like Em is?”

  Ember would never reveal Charlie’s feelings to Hailey, but sometimes she was tempted because at least then it would be out in the open. It had been nearly ten years of Charlie wanting Hailey and not saying anything. When Ember had asked her why, Charlie said that Hailey didn’t feel the same way. She didn’t want things to be awkward once she turned her down. It was true Hailey had never given any indication that she had feelings for Charlie, but Ember knew Hailey probably just as well as Charlie. Hailey was never the girl to initiate things. She never flirted first or asked a woman out. It wasn’t a rule, but it wasn’t in her to do it. Charlie would have to work up the courage to tell her best friend that she loved her. Ember only hoped it happened before Hailey actually found someone worthy of her love.

  “What about you, Em?” Hailey turned to her and changed the subject.

  Ember watched Charlie roll her eyes and take a drink from her cup.

  “What about me?”

  “Since your whole abstinence thing, have you found anyone who may be worth breaking that abstinence thing?” Charlie teased her.

  “It’s not an abstinence thing,” Ember corrected her. “I’m just not pl
aying around like I used to. I haven’t abstained from sex as a rule. I’m just not jumping into bed with women like before.”

  “So, you’ve had sex recently then?” Hailey asked and took a drink of her coffee.

  “Hailey, what would you define as recently?” Ember shot back and took a drink of her own coffee.

  “Within the last week?”

  “No.”

  “Month?”

  “No.”

  “Oh my God! You haven’t had sex in a month? Did hell freeze over?” Charlie joked and pressed a hand to her chest.

  “I’m not some sex fiend, Charlie.”

  “It’s rare that you go this long.”

  “I’m done with all that,” Ember said.

  “You want to settle down?” asked Hailey.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I haven’t exactly found someone to do that with. She’d have to want it with me, too. I just feel like I need something else, something new.”

  “Someone new?” Charlie asked.

  “Maybe, but that’s not what I mean. I’m bored at the restaurant. I love my family and I love that place, but I feel like I need something else. My father is more stubborn than my very Italian mother, so things aren’t likely to change there.”

  “You two are both like records skipping,” Charlie said. “You literally say the same crap every time I see you. Hails, you have a girl you’re crazy about that ends up breaking your heart or telling you she was just in town for a week before she had to go to South America to help provide remote villages with fresh water.”

  “That happened once!” Hailey said loudly.

  “Em, you keep talking about how you want something new, but you do the same damn thing every day. Do something different. Figure out what you really want, because I know I don’t think you want to spend the rest of your life running a restaurant just because you were born into it.” Charlie stood up and looked at them. “Alright, I have a meeting, so I’m heading out. Get it together, you two.” She carried her coffee with her as she left the coffee shop.

  “Well, I feel better,” Ember said, the sarcasm in her voice evident.

  “Yeah, me too,” Hailey replied in roughly the same tone of voice.

  “Why do you keep letting these girls in? Hails, none of them deserve you. They usually treat you like crap after the first few dates, or they leave.”

  “It’s not like I know it upfront, Em.”

  “What do you mean?” Ember glanced toward the barista who was a rather attractive woman probably in her mid-twenties, but Ember knew she was straight because she’d asked her out about six months ago.

  “You and Charlie are better at it than I am,” Hailey replied. “I don’t have that same thing that you two do where you can sense that they’re wrong for me from a mile away.”

  “But we tell you when we do, and you still do it anyway.”

  “Because I guess I want to give them a chance. You’ve been wrong before about people. It’s not like you have superpowers. Yes, you’re usually right and yes, I know that means I have to deal with you two picking on me all the time, but I don’t know how else I’m supposed to find someone, let alone the one.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve never really been in love, Em. At least not as an adult. The relationships I’ve had have never gone beyond a few months. I know you and Charlie think it’s stupid, but it’s how I’ll find someone I can actually fall in love with.” She checked her watch. “Okay, I’ve got to run.”

  “Hey, Hails?”

  “Yeah?” Hailey stood to gather her things.

  “I’ll stop picking on you about it, but you deserve someone amazing, someone, who knows you and gets you.”

  “You must be hard up if you’re hitting on me, Em.”

  “Ha-ha,” Ember replied with an eye roll. “You’re not my type.”

  “Well, maybe you should figure out who is,” she replied and then placed a gentle hand on Ember’s shoulder before she left the coffee shop.

  ◆◆◆

  Ember documented the number of Merlot bottles behind the bar before marking that number on the printed spreadsheet in front of her. Inventory was her least favorite activity at the restaurant, and she hated that it was one of her main responsibilities as a manager.

  “Hi.”

  Ember looked up from her spreadsheet to see Eva standing in front of her wearing a plain gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans with holes in the knees along with tennis shoes. She looked very different than the day before, but still completely adorable.

  “Hi,” Ember replied, a little stunned to see her standing there. “Um… how are you?” she asked as she placed the spreadsheet flat on the bar and dropped the pencil down next to it. “Do you want something to drink or-”

  “I thought you weren’t a bartender,” Eva said with a smile.

  Ember smiled back and felt the anxiousness that had arrived the moment she’d heard Eva’s voice begin to dissipate.

  “I’m doing inventory. I can get you something, though,” she offered.

  “I probably shouldn’t have come by. You’re working.”

  “Why did you?” Ember leaned forward on the bar as Eva stood there with both hands in her sweatshirt pocket.

  “I don’t know,” she responded and sighed. “I spent my whole morning looking up possible jobs. I went for a long run and I showered. I had lunch and then I realized I had nothing else to do.” She paused and met Ember’s eyes. “Like literally nothing else to do. I cleaned my apartment top to bottom, and it was already pretty clean. My whole life was work and now I have no work, so I thought I’d come here, but you’re working so I-”

  “Have dinner with me,” Ember interrupted.

  Eva removed one hand from the pocket and pointed in the direction of the spreadsheet.

  “But, you’re doing inventory.”

  “My parents are here, and inventory can wait. Plus, we just opened. We’re not busy yet,” she explained. “Here.” She placed a menu on the bar. “Just tell me what you want.”

  “I don’t want to take advantage of you just because you happen to work here. You’ve already bought me alcohol,” Eva said with a smile but took a step toward the bar anyway.

  “Well, maybe you could buy me dinner sometime,” Ember said and smiled. “Have a seat.” She motioned to one of the tables. “Do you want a drink?”

  “Maybe just water.” Eva shrugged.

  “Okay. Do you know what you want?” she asked as she watched Eva looking down at the menu.

  “How about a salad?”

  “Okay,” Ember nodded. “Then let me surprise you with which one. Is that okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  ◆◆◆

  Eva sat at one of the empty tables toward the front of the restaurant and waited. She’d driven to the restaurant partly because she needed to get out of the house; she’d been going crazy the entire day. But also, she wanted to see Ember. She’d wanted to see her last night, but she couldn’t ditch Alyssa and Hannah. They’d stayed at Windy’s for another couple of hours until the two of them went home. By then, Eva was exhausted and figured that she wouldn’t be good company to anyone.

  “You ready?” Ember had returned, and Eva noticed her standing there with a plastic bag and some to-go containers along with two bottles of water.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah, to eat dinner with me.” Ember held up the bag as if it was obvious. “I told the parents I’m taking a break.”

  “Are we going somewhere?”

  “To the breakroom,” Ember winked. “Come on.”

  Eva followed Ember toward the restaurant’s kitchen.

  “Should I be back here?” Eva asked as she was passed by two men, one on either side so she squeezed in close behind Ember and held onto the back of her shirt to make sure she didn’t lose her as the men moved quickly and headed in the opposite direction. “Are they going somewhere in a hurry?”


  “Yes, you can be back here, and no, they’re not going anywhere in a hurry. They’re cooks. They’re just working.” She pushed open the door to the outside. “This way.”

  “I thought you said there was a breakroom.”

  They stood outside for a moment before Ember unlocked a door right next to the one they just exited and motioned her inside.

  “It’s a private breakroom,” Ember explained and followed Eva up a flight of stairs.

  “What is this place?” Eva asked when they arrived upstairs, and she looked around what seemed like an apartment, but also kind of a storage unit as well.

  “My parents own the building,” she explained. “Sorry, there’s not really a table, but we can use boxes or…” Ember’s words trailed off.

  Eva had begun walking toward the bed and the half-moon window.

  “Can we sit over here?” Eva turned her head back to ask with a smile.

  “Sure,” Ember replied.

  “This place is cool. Do you…?” Her words trailed off too.

  Ember approached her and used a few boxes stacked in front of the window between it and the bed to rest their bag of food and bottles of water.

  “Live here? No,” she answered. “Do you want a beer? I’ve got some in the fridge,” she asked as she motioned with her thumb.

  “Not if you’re not having one.”

  “Who said I wasn’t having one?” Ember winked, and Eva smiled. “I’ll grab two. Can you get the stuff out?”

  “Yeah.”

  Eva watched Ember walk toward the refrigerator. She pulled out two boxes of food, some plastic cutlery and napkins. Ember returned with two open beer bottles and set each next to the bottles of water Eva had rested behind their food boxes. She opened the boxes and passed Ember the fork and knife set.

  “What do you think?” Ember asked.

  “About what? The food, the view, or the breakroom?” Eva stabbed at the salad with her fork.