Page 1 of Bad Seed
CHAPTER ONE
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I’M DEATHLY ALLERGIC to eggplant.
That’s usually how I greet people. Hi, I’m Sadie, a Gemini, lifelong Californian, and if I eat even a slice of fried eggplant my face turns as blue as a bouquet of violets. When I was younger, I wore a pin with a crossed-out eggplant, but people took that a whole different way.
So now I just tell them.
When I remember to.
After work, the Taphouse is tapping. Music blares from the party room where the occasional drunk stumbles out, screams they have to pee, and is guided toward the bathroom. I snatch up a piece of pita and drag it through the hummus while watching one man in a cowboy hat lumber back to the party with a little help from his friends.
“This is so good!” I squeal. Most times I am, at best, a friendly acquaintance with hummus. It’s a little too beany, and either too lumpy or smooth for us to take it any further. But the Taphouse’s newest app is phenomenal.
“What’s that?” one of my friends and fellow plastic worm slinger asks. Lucy jerks her zinfandel toward the pulse of lights throbbing down the hall.
“It’s an alien invasion or line dancing has gone techno,” I shout, then give a quick cough. “Either way, they better watch their butts.” Nervously, I scratch my skin and dive-bomb another pita triangle into the dip.
“Sadie!” Ann, one of the managers at the Bass Pro Shop, chides me. She isn’t technically ours so we can whine about the others off the clock, but she also likes to keep us honorable. Like we’re a church representing the holy ascension of our lord Billy Bass while in our work polos.
“What?” I argue back, not about to let her dour face ruin a perfectly good joke. “Do you want them to all get pegged?”
Lucy squirts white wine out her nose while Ann gives me the familiar struggling-to-not-laugh face. I pop the hummus-drenched pita into my mouth and chew while smiling wide at Ann. The scratch crawls up my arm.
It’s these new polos. They were probably sitting in a factory filled with wooly lice before our corporate overlords docked our pay for them. I drag my nails up my skin, watching the brown shift to a throbbing red. The second I head home, I’m diving into a coconut milk bath.
Wait. There’s something else I have to do. I think.With a sigh, and still gouging the invisible lice from my skin, I pull out my phone. There’s my list. It should come with a drumbeat and a woman singing forlornly in the background. I did well today. Got up, brushed my teeth, didn’t put the toothpaste in the freezer while making coffee. But at the end is a blaring red warning about the Wizard Bowl shoot.
Due tomorrow.
So much for that soothing bath.
As I close my phone, doing my best to tell my brain we have to pick up glue for the milk, my eyes wander.
All thoughts of perfectly placed cereal that tastes like cardboard flit from my distracted brain. Most of the Taphouse clientele are the kind of families who made enough in Silicon Valley to live “comfortably.” Rich without thinking they’re rich, middle-aged with kids in private schools, and implants for both parents. But the man in the corner short circuits all functions in my body.
Even resting back in his chair, sipping on a beer all alone, I can tell he’s big. He’s got the kind of shoulders it’d take a lizard a day to cross. His t-shirt struggles to keep all that contained, muscles bulging where I didn’t even know muscles are. I try to figure out what’s on his purple shirt, but he reaches an arm back to scratch his neck and his pecs hop. I bet I could hide under those and he’d never even find me.
He bats a sweep of his luscious black hair out of his eyes, the side part as hard as his jaw. For as much as his body screams man there’s a softness to his face—a slighter nose and poutier lips. If I just saw his face in frame, I might confuse him for a hot member of a new boy band. I wonder if he’s waiting for someone in the bathroom. Or a date to show up.
Curious who in Loomis would be worthy of someone like him, I watch without watching while eating more of the hummus.
I should probably look away. No reason to be weird. Nervously, I claw at my throat. He runs a palm over his sweating glass. The idea of that palm sweeping over a thigh sends my heart racing.
He tousles his hair like he’s just waiting for the right fingers to run through it and tug his face closer. As he presses his glass to his lips, his eyes close, and he takes a drink.
I’m staring.
That’s probably creepy.
I should really look away.
Maybe a little longer.
The glass falls, and his lips open for an appreciative sigh. I’m nearly falling off my stool trying to get as close as possible.
Dark eyes open…right on me.
