Page 5 of Violet Spark
I swallowed. “Just employees.” I sidled backward a half step, the chill from the dispensers enveloping me. “But I only gave my crew a ten-minute break, so we can’t…”
The toes of his Rockports were right up against my Vans before I could say what we couldn’t. Yeah, it’d been awhile since my last up-close boyfriend, and Brayden smelled nice—apparently MageLords use aftershave?—but I wasn’t in a place right now to have a boyfriend-boyfriend. Like, not in a placeright now, and not my messy twin bed in my childhood home with a killer cat either. I just…wasn’t.
I put my hand out between us, but he was already leaning toward me. I bent back, practically becoming one with the icy machines on either side of me. His long arms caged me in, and his aftershaved face was looming over me.
Ah crap. Closing my eyes, I figured I’d take the kiss. Alarms were clanging in my head, like the bells on the castle walls when the dark elf high king rode to war, but it would be too awkward to say no.
His lips were warm and soft—and lingered for like a half second. No, what’s way less than a half second? A nanosecond?
He kissed me for a nanosecond and then pulled away.
An aluminum clang snapped my eyes open. That wasn’t my mental alarm bells. He’d been reaching up over my head—bracing his nice tall self on the shelf above?—and must’ve knocked his elbow against the mixer. Maybe I could say something cute that would make this less awkward.
But he wasn’t looking down at me. He was staring over his shoulder, out the window. “I gotta go,” he muttered.
I scowled. I wasn’tthatbad a kisser. “Don’t you want…that freezie?”
“Nah. I—” He swiveled back to look at me. “I guess I don’t have time.”
His voice changed again, sort of cracked. For the first time, I really looked at him. He was my age—twenty-one, or so he’d said on Discord—but in that moment he seemed older. The tension on his face was still there, showing where wrinkles would be in another thirty years after he’d worked his way up from junior tech drone to senior tech drone, with a four-door Mazda in cherry red and two kids in college. But the shadows under his eyes made the blue of his irises brighter.
I touched his hand and found it clenched into a fist, probably because he’d bumped his funny bone. “Are you sure you don’t want that caffeine?”
“Maybe next time.” He spun around and headed for the door. Rique and Amanda were hovering just outside, watching, and they scattered to either side as he burst out and strode quickly toward his car. He folded that tall, aftershave-y, awkward boy shape behind the wheel and pulled away.
He never once looked back.
Rique and Amanda, however, were snickering together. So I very deliberately concentrated on everything else. The lid of the pomegranate mixer was askew, and I straightened it like that was job one in the handbook. What had just happened?
The lid jammed on something tucked onto the high shelf that I couldn’t see from my lower angle, and I gave the machine a hard shove to force it into place.
I desperately wanted to text Swann, but then I’d have to get into the truth that I was in the back of the Desert Freeze, kissing—badly, apparently—some guy I met through a late-night gaming binge. If we’d still been in high school, this would’ve been hilarious. I would’ve reenacted the entire thing for her with emojis of heart-eyed faces, shocked faces, laugh-crying faces.
Luckily, the teen rush hour came to distract me.
They wiped out the cherry and blue raspberry like a swarm of sugar-deprived locusts and then vanished. After that, the Desert Freeze was so dead, I told Amanda she could go home. She was out the door almost—but not quite—as fast as Brayden.
While Rique set up the juicers for the post-work workout smoothies crowd, I started to break down the slush machines for cleaning. When I opened the spigot on the pomegranate bin to empty it, a spurt of thick, purple sludge blorted all over my hands and splashed my t-shirt. Obviously Amanda hadn’t been doing jack-shit back here, but I didn’t even have the gusto to swear.
I dumped some more ice into the hopper to break up the congealed flavor syrup. The machine churned for a second, then made a sad gurgling noise and stopped.
“What the…?” On tiptoes, I hooked my arm over the rim of the hopper and reached down through the opening to wedge my way through the ice cubes. A plastic bag crinkled under my fingertips.
Ah shit. When I’d shoved the machine, it had hit the top shelf. Something up there—probably a refill bag of pomegranate flavoring—must’ve fallen in.
With a sigh, I fumbled around, blindly trying to unwind the plastic from the beater bar. If I had to take apart the whole machine, I’d be so pissed…
I jerked back as sharp pain sliced across the back of my hand. “Fuck!” If I cut off my hand in the freezie mixer, I was going to bereallypissed…
“Please don’t curse,” Rique called from the front. “It makes for a hostile workplace.”
Ignoring him, I spread my hand in a wide, purple-stained star. All five fingers accounted for. I let out a harsh breath, partly relief, partly disgust at the scarlet blood welling up from the cut—were those silvery streaks my tendons?
I slapped my other hand across the wound, as if not looking at it would make it okay. I should call Mom. She was a nurse. A psychiatric nurse, yeah, but she knew about stitches and easy stuff like that too.
Thinking about her calmed me a bit, and I scuttled over to the wash station. Now for sure someone was going to have to break down the freezie machine.
Pain burned through my hand, as if the crushing blade was still chopping at me. It wasn’t, I knew that. But still. Air and more cursing clogged in my throat, as invisible and choking as the clear plastic bag.
