Page 70 of Landon & Shay: Part Two

Then, she stopped speaking.

That was it.

Was that what counted as an apology in this day and age? A non-apology was now what people were calling apologies? She simply said they never expected me to find out, not that she was sorry for her bad decisions. She hadn’t said she was upset about the flawed choices she made, just that she was simply disappointed I’d found out about their sexcapades.

Tina shifted in her shoes. “I mean, let’s be honest, you can see why I’m the right choice for him. Sam and I make sense in so many ways, ways you never connected with him.”

What in the hell was happening right now? Was the woman who’d cheated with my boyfriend actually telling me all the reasons she was right for him and I was wrong?

I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept of Tina standing in front of me and saying those words.

I loved women.

I loved women so much more than I loved men. I went out of my way to celebrate females, to cheer them on, to make them understand the power in their existence, and see themselves as the queens they were. I fought for our rights, I pushed for feminine self-discovery, and I was an advocate, a cheerleader for any woman who’d been scorned by the opposite sex. I. Loved. Women.

I knew it sounded odd, but in some ways I was more disappointed in Tina for her actions than Sam. Maybe I was so jaded that I figured Sam would end up being a letdown anyway, but Tina? Tina was supposed to be a part of the sisterhood. She was supposed to have my back the same way I had hers. Yet here she was now, telling me how I wasn’t right for my ex-boyfriend and therefore she felt okay screwing his Jar Jar Binks brains out.

“If you think about it, maybe the universe brought me to this coffee shop all those months ago just so you could connect me with Sam. If it weren’t for you, we would’ve never met one another,” she said with a smile.

With a goddamn smile like a freaking psychopath! What was she going to do next? Start skinning cats as she sipped her coffee?

That was when it happened. That was when the logical part of my brain shut down.

As we stood there, face to face, I lost myself. It was as if I had an out-of-body experience. I held a drink in my hand as Tina spoke my way. She kept moving her mouth and repeatedly kept explaining why she and Sam were meant to be. She kept moving her hands in such rapid movements, and the next thing I knew, the latte in my hand was soaking into her T-shirt.

At some point my hand jerked the drink toward her face, covering her head to toe. It was an iced latte—obviously. I wasn’t a complete psychopath like her, just a semi-nutjob at best.

Tina stood there frozen as everyone in the shop turned our way and stared, including Landon.Oh crap.He was still there, seeing me in the limelight of average joes.

Tina’s mouth was agape in shock, and I would’ve bet my stare mimicked hers.

“Shay, what the hell?!” Brady asked, hurrying out from the back room, holding bags of coffee grounds in his grip. He was my manager, so it was clear this wasn’t going to go over swimmingly.

Tina finally breathed out as her body shook, and then she hurried out of the shop, dripping latte across the floor the whole way out.

Brady pulled out a mop, cleaned up the mess, called me to the back room, and proceeded to tell me I was fired.

“What?” I gasped. I mean, yes, throwing iced lattes at customers does fall under the employees behaving badly category, but she slept with my boyfriend. There had to be some kind of corporate policy to let that slide on the employee’s first offense.

“You threw a latte in her face, Shay! We can’t just let that slide,” he explained, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“It was an iced latte,” I commented, as if that made a difference. “Please, Brady, I need this job right now. I can’t afford to lose it.”

“Yeah, I get that, Shay, I do, but you made a choice, and I cannot stand by and let that kind of behavior go without drastic consequences.”

“Then suspend me from my lunch breaks. Take the latte out of my check. Just don’t fire me.”

Brady frowned, and I knew he wasn’t having an easy time with the decision at all. He was the complete opposite of confrontational, and if he could have, he would’ve rather buried his head in the sand than fire me. “I’m sorry, Shay. It’s just out of my hands now. Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

I parted my lips to speak, but no words came from my mouth. He was right—I’d thrown a drink into a woman’s face, and there was no getting around that fact. Truth was I deserved to be fired; I just wished Brady could’ve overlooked it all.

I took off my apron, grabbed my purse, and headed out toward the front of the shop to leave. As I began walking, Landon gathered up his things and hurried after me.

“Shay, wait up. What the hell was that about?” he asked.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I muttered, still walking toward the bus stop.

“Yeah, but are you all right? Did you just get fired for that? Also, why did you throw a drink in that girl’s f—"

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