“No, I know.”
“Don’t be scared. Jump.”
“You know, this is funny, coming from a twenty-four-year-old kid.”
I scoffed, tipping my head and grinning at him. “I’m an old soul, Lance. Don’t you remember? Connie said so.”
“Oh dear God,” he grumbled, rolling his eyes.
“Ooooh”—I widened my eyes for good measure—“I’m telling your psychic Reiki master girlfriend you think she’s full of shit.”
“Look, I’ll figure out my life here soon, but until then…I’ll get the damn food outta the kitchen as fast as I can.”
“I wonder if Connie already knows you doubt her, deep down in her subconscious,” I whispered, then suddenly gasped, staring openmouthed at him.
“Fuck you,” he groused at me, turning back toward the stove.
“Jenny,” I called over to her, “Lance is swearing in your kitchen.”
“You dick,” he muttered under his breath.
“Lance!” she shrieked at him.
His groan was loud as he trudged toward her, his feet suddenly heavy, every step like his sneakers were made of lead.
“What the hell kind of sauce is this supposed to be?” she barked, and I saw him visibly deflate as he neared his grandmother.
Walking back out through the swinging doors, I was grabbed by Mackenzie, who gave me a quick squeeze before she jogged out onto the floor, beaming.
It was easy to fix. I just needed to train up some people currently on staff, and the owners needed to invest in some qualified personnel by hiring in some new blood. Cheyenne and I were not enough, Kent—no, Brent—was still in training, and judging from the assorted text messages on my phone, had already shown a strong aversion to multitasking when the bar was lined with pretty women.
To my mind, what we needed to make the restaurant grow was to bring on one manager who took care of the front of house specifically, one for the bar area, and another to recruit and schedule the acts who performed after ten. Trying to have one person do it all, per shift, with only seasoned team members to assist, was not working. The owners were nice people and had paid both me and Cheyenne for years to work insane, sometimes round-the-clock, hours, overtime paid in cash, which they had trusted us to simply give them a total for. And while we had both appreciated the plentiful amount of non-taxable income, things were changing. Cheyenne was a new mother, and her husband wanted her home more than a day once a week, and I had a dream. Neither one of us was a lifer, and the owners needed to come to that realization.
Slipping behind the bar, I walked up between Kyle, the man who resembled a defensive lineman, and Ronnie, the small sprite of a girl, both of them smiling big and fake as they took orders, both mixing drinks as quickly as humanly possible.
“Oh, thank God,” Ronnie moaned when she turned and saw me. “You can’t—no more days off for you, Jere, or I swear to God I quit. The new guy is a douchebag who can’t run the night shift for shit.”
“What she said,” Kyle barked at me.
“He’s new,” I told them dismissively. “He’ll learn.”
“The hell he will,” Kyle grumbled. “He wants to be a fuckin’ glorified greeter, and he enjoys comping drinks.”
“So many drinks!” Ronnie assured me with a roll of her eyes.
I ignored them because I had a bar to clear out.
“Who needs a beer?” I asked the crowd, and immediately there was yelling.
I served everyone who needed a soft drink, water, or one of the fifteen craft beers we had on tap. I rang people out, started tabs, filled pitchers of ice water for the servers, and once the wait was back to the normal ebb and flow of a busy Thursday night, not a clusterfuck, I stepped out from behind the bar and went to check on the floor, telling each table to figure out what they wanted for dessert because it was on the house. It took another half an hour, but after, I could tell from the sound in the building, having been there so long, that everything was back under control. It felt like it usually did, familiar, so before I checked on the kitchen again, I ducked into the back to take a moment.
Standing there in front of the time clock, hand braced on the wall, head down, I realized that even though it was stupid, I was going to drive back to the hotel tonight after my shift, at the insane time of two in the morning, and knock on the guy’s door. I had to know; was it a fluke, or was it something else? If it was something else, he wouldn’t care what time it was. If it wasn’t, and he was gone or, worse, had someone new in his room, in his bed, I’d know that somewhere along the line, I’d lost all common sense.