“If I take this money, will you leave me alone?” I ask, desperately trying to get ahold of myself. “Let me go back to serving the rest of my customers?”
He stares down at me, his eyes gleaming and intense.
But then he says, “Sure.”
With that, he lets go of my hand and simply disappears back into the crowd of bikers, waitresses, and all the other women who like to hang out in this underworld.
It’s like tugging on a rope and suddenly having it go slack. He’s gone. I can breathe again. But I’m still shaking on the inside. For the first time in my mostly boring adult life, I understand the meaning of the term “totally shook.”
“What’s his deal anyway?” I try to ask Candy when she finally returns to the bar after delivering Griff’s Patron. “Why does he think he’s God’s gift to women?”
Candy averts her eyes and answers, “I don’t know. I guess because he’s really hot?”
She guesses?
I squint. The one time Hades, the Reaper’s other co-president, came onto me, Candy and every waitress who heard I turned him down spent an entire shift telling me how crazy I was.
They extolled his virtues—not just his good looks, but how rich and powerful he was. One waitress who’d actually slept with him before told me it was my loss because he was hung like a horse and then went on to describe the magnificent cock in detail.
But now Candy doesn’t seem to be able to string more than a few words together to talk about the outrageously good-looking guy who tried to pay me to go upstairs with him?
And it’s not just her. Every waitress I ask about Griff catches a severe case of the vagues. Somehow, they don’t seem to know anything about the good-looking biker beyond his road name of Rockstar.
And as for Griff himself, I throw him quite a few wary glances, but he just laughs and jokes with his fellow bikers all night. As much as I find my eyes wandering to him, he pretty much ignores me for the next few hours of my shift.
Good, I tell myself. I no longer have his attention, and that’s what I wanted.
Right?
Griff flags down a waitress about an hour before my shift is due to end, and she comes up to the server station to put in an order for a Coke.
That probably means he’s fixing to leave. 1% bikers aren’t always the best when it comes to drinking and driving laws. But the more responsible ones switch to nonalcoholic beverages about an hour or two before they’re due to get back on the road. Good for him.
Still, I carry an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach as I put some ice in the clear plastic cups we use instead of real glasses and pour him some Coke from the soda gun.
Then a different kind of feeling twists my gut when a blonde appears at his table—one who’s definitely not a waitress.
Nestor requires all of us to wear extensions so that our hair scrapes our bottoms, but her hair is styled in a sharp bob. And she looks way too classy to be one of the biker bunnies. She’s dressed in a sensible beige wool coat buttoned up all the way to the top. And I can’t tell from here, but I think she might be wearing pantyhose—like actual pantyhose underneath her wedge boots.
Griff greets her with a smile and a hug. They have a short conversation, and she hands something to him in a large brown bag. What could it be?
“Red? Red? Earth to Red!”
I don’t realize I’m full-on staring until I look up to see Stormy, the graveyard shift bartender. She must be here to relieve me. I don’t even want to know how long she called my name before I snapped back to attention.
She follows the direction I was looking and throws me a knowing grin. “Oh, hey, Rockstar’s back! No wonder you were staring. I can’t believe he’s actually one of the—”
Before she can finish, Candy shows up out of nowhere and takes her by the arm. “Hi, Stormy. Let me go get you set up on the register, babe.”
My chest swirls with suspicion and confusion as I watch Candy pull her away. Since when did our manager start overseeing us logging into the bar’s system?
It only takes a few taps on the register for Candy to set her up. Then they start talking about something with their heads together. At one point, Stormy glances back at me. What the . . . ?
I’m feeling so paranoid that I almost give in and text my friend Allie. But she’s taking her med school finals right now, and I don’t want to disturb her.
“I’m back,” a voice announces.
I turn to see Griff standing in front of the server station, this time with the brown bag in his hands.