Page 25 of Hot Mess Express
God, I wish I could fucking sleep.
Just an hour would do.
Hell, I’d settle for half of one.
“Just close your eyes and picture yourself on a raft counting stars,” says Juni suddenly, reading my mind. “I’ll set a timer on my phone for six o’clock so you wake up in time for your shift. If I can find my phone,” she then adds, fishing for it off the mess on the coffee table, tossing things left and right. I lean back with my head cradled in Juni’s horny Roger cat pillow. All the while, the people keep being idiots on TV. Eventually Juni gets up from the couch to hunt for her phone around the whole place, for some reason still wearing her pumps. I listen to their loud, clumsy thumping with her every footstep while my eyes are shut. I’m on a raft. Counting stars. And not a single fucking wink of sleep finds me.
I wish I knew that guy’s name.
If I bottled up my manager’s sighs of disappointment, they’d power a windmill. “I swear I thought the alarm was set for six,” I start, “but it must’ve been AM and not—”
“You and your excuses,” the manager drones, a woman in her seventies who looks in her forties, athletic, slender, hair dyed a strawberry-blonde color, tall and authoritative. “Anthony, you are on thinner-than-thin ice with me.”
I put on my charm. It always works. “Can’t be blamed for thin ice in this record heat. Isn’t that a tad unfair?” I give her my best smile. “I’ll work hard tonight and remind you why you hired me.”
“A lapse in judgment is why,” she fires back dryly, “and ‘cause I owed one to your sweet dad for dealin’ with a pesky ant problem in my garden. Also for givin’ my dead car a jump on the Strongs’ driveway last Fourth a’ July. Good man.” She lowers her clipboard to the break room table and eyes me over herreaders. “A single slip-up, one more, and we’re callin’ this social experiment quits.”
“What happened to three strikes and I’m out?”
“You’re already on strikenine. I’m bein’generous.”
“You used to be nicer to me,” I tease her, grabbing an apron.
“Sometimes you forget I’m theGraninGran’s Home Kitchen. I don’t need to benice. I just need to behere.” She rights her readers and lifts her clipboard. “Go clock in, and—are you even in the right shoes?—grab yourself an order pad. Walt’s barfin’ in the bathroom and I need someone to take his table.”
I stop tying my apron. “You need what now?”
“Believe it, kid, you ain’t my first choice, either. Short-staffed tonight. Busy.” She takes a look at my frozen face. “Oh, snap out of it, you know how to do the job. Just greet ‘em, find out what they want, and bring the order to the kitchen, simple as that.”
“I know what to do,” I insist, reach for a pad and pen off the small desk by the door, fumble, drop the pen, pick it up, then stuff both into my apron. “You can count on me, Gran.”
“Table 8.” She leaves the break room.
I trip over a cable running along the floor on my way to the employee terminal, nearly crashing my face into the wall next to it. Someone taking his break stifles laughter nearby. “Lick a dick, Larry,” I grumble, which only causes him to laugh even harder as I clock in.
Table 8, I think over and over after leaving the break room, as I take quick breaths and get ready to take an order. I sure hope this table’s an easy one. If I get one of those fussy Sunday night people, I don’t know if I got the strength in me to deal with it.Table 8, table 8, table 8. I pull my order pad right back out of my apron and start drumming my fingers on it as I push through the swinging door into the main restaurant. Loud conversation blasts over my face the second I’m in the room. Explodinglaughter. The tinkling and scraping of utensils.Just greet them, find out what they want, and take their order to the kitchen. It’s the easiest thing. I’ve watched others do it a hundred times.
It’s halfway down the aisle between tables 10 and 12 that my exhausted ass comes to a stop.
A dead stop.
Seated there, right the fuck there, like a king on his big stupid throne he doesn’t deserve, wearing a denim jacket and a smirk the size of Texas, sits the jack-off wagon himself, holding a menu at table number fucking 8.
8
BRIDGER
I can’t believe my first instinct is to hide my face behind the menu.
As if that’ll stop the train wreck that’s about to happen.
Sure, I know the odds of running into someone multiple times is relatively higher in a small town. But there are still many other people left here to run into, right? Hundreds more I’ve never met. Statistically speaking, it is absolute madness that I am once again coming face-to-face with this motherfucker.
I would say he’s stalking me.
If it weren’t for the fact that the bitter look on his face right now tells me he’s as disappointed by this encounter as I am.
Anthony’s in a plain black t-shirt with a nametag tacked onto the chest—a correct one this time:Anthony—tucked into ill-fitting, tight slacks that were probably black once but are faded now, like he’s wearing the same ones he’s had since high school and won’t let go of them to get a new pair, long since outgrowing them. A short maroon apron hangs from his waist stuffed with straws, a pen, a pad of paper, and a random-ass fork I can’t explain. His hair is less tidy than it was at church this morning, his bangs flipped the wrong way, like he fixed his hair then drunkenly ran a hand through it forgetting he’d fixed it at all.
