SNAPPED (The Slate Brothers 1)

“They’re in my section! Yes yes yes,” another waitress says in a squealing voice, bouncing up and down on her heels.

“They’re just football players. They’re literally just big guys who are good at getting hit in the head,” I answer.

“You’re such a downer,” the other waitress says, rolling her eyes, and making no attempt to hide the fact that she’s bounding over toward the players. They’re crowded into a booth, two on each side and one— Sebastian— in a chair at the end. I watch him through the stacked cup skyscrapers.

I need to get to work on investigating New Recruits Week, of course, but I also feel a disturbing tingle low in my belly when I look at Sebastian Slate.

I remind myself that if I try and talk to him again, it is purely to put a stop to the sleazy antics that he and his fellow teammates get up to at our school.

And a little payback for what his dad did to my aunt doesn’t hurt matters either…

Maybe I can say hello or drop off some cheesy bread or something. Something small and casual.

Yeah, I can do that, I think, nodding to myself. I begin filling soda cups with ice, and when the other waitress returns, I help her carry their drinks to the table.

“Here we go, I’ve got two diet sodas, a Mountain Dew,” the other waitress says, collecting drinks from my hands and passing them out. “Annnnnd—“

“It’s you!” one of the players says. The drinks slosh a little— he said that so loud and sharply that it startled me. I look toward the voice— it’d come from the end of the table. It’s the guy who answered the door last night, the one who insisted on getting that #ImAPapaPig picture.

“It’s me,” I say in the strongest voice I can muster, which isn’t saying much.

“You totally sat on half our order last night, then snuck out,” the guy says in a condescending, I’ll-be-speaking-to-your-manager way.

“You did what?” the other waitress asks.

I’m starting to turn red, but I forge ahead anyhow. “I tripped over some girl. It was an accident,” I saw quickly, with a shrug and a smile that I think looks like the one the player house girls were wearing.

He scoffs in the way that only a guy who has never heard “no” can scoff. “Yeah, an accident, but our—“

“Conor, chill, it’s just pizza,” Sebastian says in tone that brooks no argument. His voice draws my eyes to him, and I inhale sharply at how dark they are. How beautiful they are, even here in the crappy pizzeria lighting. His voice is calm and firm, and it does that hypnotizing thing to me again, where I feel like I can’t look away or move or swallow or—

I snap out of it, shivering a little from surprise. “It’s fine,” I say to Sebastian without looking at his eyes— don’t want to get trapped again. “And Conor, right? Conor, I’ll bring you a cheesy bread on the house for the trouble last night.”

Conor looks smugly pleased; I flash him a quick smile. I hear Sebastian clear his throat, but turn away. I walk back to the station, punch in the cheesy bread order, and try very, very hard to not think about Sebastian’s eyes. Or the way he put his arm around me last night. Or the way his eyes moved over me. The way he spoke to me. The way he kissed me—

Nope, nope, nope. I roll my eyes at myself, and decide I need some fresh air. No one’s sitting outside tonight, so I slide out to the patio for a few moments. The night air clears my head; it’s quiet out here, sort of. There’s plenty of noise from the downtown strip, and I can hear the bar next door’s live music, but everything feels muted and far away. I flick on the string lights arcing over the patio space, and sit down on hearth of the old outdoor pizza oven (it’s just for show— we use a sleek steel industrial thing inside, which is probably why our pizza is a grease-fest). I don’t have long out here— I have tables, and a boss who won’t understand the need for fresh air. I close my eyes and tilt my head back, trying to shake the memory of Sebastian’s eyes from my mind.

The door clicks. I jump and duck down, worried it’s a manger out for her not-so-secret smoke break. But it’s not my manager. It’s Sebastian.

His face is hard; his face, not his expression. It’s something about how angular he is, that ninety degree thing I noticed when he and I first met. It looks like you might cut yourself on the line of his jaw, or the turn of his eyebrows. His expression itself is unreadable, at least from where I’m sitting— I can’t see his face without rising up so high he’d see me.