"Well, honey, Niro is hot as sin. Holy hell. When are you giving him a tour of your bedsheets?"
"I'm not," I said, trying to sound more firm than I felt on the matter. Quite frankly, just that five-second interaction had me all hot and bothered. A large part of me wanted to tell him to ditch his woman, tell Benny to take a break, and let him take me right then and there. "He has a woman!"
"The purple-haired one?" he asked, brows drawing together. "You miss so much sometimes, Kenny. She has a set of rings on. His hands were empty."
"Maybe bikers don't wear wedding rings."
"What about that man suggests he is married? Come on now. He's single. You're single. So your fun parts should definitely mingle."
"Benny, I don't do casual sex."
"Angel face, from what I can tell since I started here, you don't do any kind of sex. It's not normal. Hell, I would argue that it's not healthy. People who fuck and come more are more likely to live longer. Do it for your future, woman!"
I threw my head back and laughed at that, the first real laugh I had experienced in far too long.
"Thanks. I needed that."
"You need to go walk your gorgeous ass down the street, walk into that compound, and tell sexy Niro to take you all night long." He stood, moving toward the front desk again. "I bet you would feel like a new woman after."
I didn't exactly doubt him on that.
Sex, for all intents and purposes, was the most enjoyable form of natural stress relief. That being said, I was still me. I knew that screwing around with some bad news guy would in the moment take the stress away, but would just pile on more after it was over. There would be the inevitable guilt or shame-type thoughts. There would maybe even be a bit of wondering if sex could be more than that.
But Jazzy's warning was still fresh on my mind.
Niro was not the settling-down kind of guy.
And I was not the screwing around kind of girl.
It was doomed.
And best left unexplored.
Case closed.
"So when is her appointment for?" I asked, trying to shake myself out of it.
"Get this," Benny said, looking excited. "Her name is Maze and she has Monday at 2 PM for a cut and color."
Cut and color was good. That was decent money for the time put in. We had a lot of clients who came in to get blowouts which, while not cheap, didn't exactly keep the lights on unless they did it frequently.
If things hadn't gone the way they had, the customer base we had would be more than enough to keep myself and Benny perfectly happy. Not rich, not rolling in it, but comfortable.
But there was no use thinking about the could-have-beens.
The reality was the reality, and that meant I kept Benny as happy as I possibly could so he didn't need to quit and find a better job and me, well, I barely, just barely scraped by.
Another year. That was all I needed. Things would be on track by then. And, maybe it was wrong of me to hope for such a thing, but I was hoping that the shop next door didn't get rented out. That was wrong of me because I knew that it sitting there meant it got no income for the owner. But I wanted it. I wanted that damn shop to expand mine to one big space. That had always been the plan.
Also, maybe it wasn't so wrong of me to think it since the person who owned it was Ethan, and the reason it was empty was that his stubborn ass wouldn't let me rent it at a slighted scale until renovations were done. Because it apparently was better business sense to let it sit empty.
Kenny, baby, you're too big of a risk right now.
That was what the jackass told me at She's Bean Around.
The worst part, though, was that I understood that. I truly did. I was, for all intents and purposes, still a risk business-wise. Through no fault of my own, but it was just how it was.
I was just having a really hard time accepting that there was a chance, even a good chance, that my dream salon could be out of my reach at literally any given time if someone else swooped in.
Then, blissfully bringing me out of my negative thoughts, the door chimed again and in walked my next appointment- a full set of gels and a pedicure. Benny had a labor intensive permanent straightening appointment that would last him most of the rest of the day while I took whatever walk-ins happened by. We always had a few of them- people looking for something trendy that not all the shops in town did yet like oil slick color or decorative undercuts. They would drop in to ask, and then if I was open, take a chair and get it done.