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“Obviously,” she snipes, frustration in her tone. “But I didn’t d?—”
“Did you steal money from Purgatory last night, Skye?”
Rather than maintain her annoyance, she does something that completely throws me off balance…
Skye bursts into tears.
CHAPTER 8
SKYE
“Um… It’s not the end of the world. No need to get so upset about it.”
Sobs and hiccups erupt from my chest, and Rogue rubs the back of his neck nervously. Apparently, dealing with a hysterical female wasn’t on his top list of things to do today. This isn’t exactly how I imagined my day going either, but all the stress over the systems going down and not sleeping last night is finally catching up with me.
“Y-y-you can’t tell me not to be upset,” I stutter. “Last night was a shitshow. I know it, Waylon knows it, and now you know it.”
“Yeah, it was,” he agrees. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”
No way in hell do I want to relive that shit. I shake my head and jump to my feet, turning toward the office door. “I’m gonna go clean out my locker.”
Time to run. It’s what my grandma says I do best: run from my problems instead of facing them head-on. That’s probably why I struggled so much in school. I dodged learning, and now, here we are.
“Stop,” Rogue commands, and for some reason, my body obeys. “Sit your ass back down.” Moving back to the chair, I slowly lower myself to the cushion. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what the hell happened.”
Narrowing my eyes, I sit ramrod straight. “I didn’t steal anything. I stuffed the drawer with extra money.”
“Why?” Rogue’s tone matches his stony gaze. “Gotta say, it sounds like you were stealing, but your conscience kicked in. You were taking money from the customer’s change, weren’t you?”
“N-n-no, I swear.” Another tear escapes down my cheek. “You don’t understand.”
“Make me understand,” he snaps. “Start from the beginning. I think I’m missing a big chunk of the story here.”
I swipe the wetness from my cheeks and take a deep breath. “After the systems went down, I used my phone to make sure I was charging customers the right amount for their orders.”
“Okaaay,” he draws out.
Before I lose my courage, I throw everything at him. “I videoed Apple’s first set and put my phone down when she was done. I forgot to swipe the app up to close it and opened another without realizing it. That drained the battery. I’d been using the calculator on my phone to total tickets and give back change.” Rogue nods for me to continue. “The next time I picked it up, the battery was too low. I looked for my charger but realized I left it at home along with my backup pocket calculator.” I take several deep breaths before continuing. “Math isn’t my strong suit. Hell, it never has been, but at least when I have a calculator, I can figure it out. When my phone died, I was extra careful and even threw extra tip money into the drawer to be sure, just in case I did mess up. Waylon heard a customer yelling at me about his change because he thought I was trying to take a tip he didn’t offer. I swear Rogue, I wasn’t keeping anything that wasn’t freely given.”
“What did Waylon do when the customer accused you of keeping money?”
“He stuck around to ‘watch me’, which only made me more nervous.”
“It’s his job to make sure everything is accounted for.”
“I know, and I’m not blaming him for doing his job.” I pick at the hole in my jeans to avoid looking at Rogue. “I was trying to go slow so I wouldn’t make a mistake, but having him hover put me in panic mode, and I tried to hurry along each transaction, so I’m sure that’s when I started to mess up.”
“Luckily, this is a very rare occurrence for the computers to go down like they did,” he says. “Going forward, I’ll make sure that we have calculators placed around the bar. We should’ve had them anyway. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that sooner.”
“You probably never hired someone too stupid to do simple math before,” I grumble.
“The fuck you say?” he growled, and I flinch at his tone. “No one called you stupid. It was a mistake by everyone involved. As your boss, I could’ve been more prepared for something like this. Technology doesn’t always cooperate,” he says gently.
“We can’t all be number geniuses like you.”
He chuckles. “No, my brothers hate doing the books, and to be honest, I hate doing them if they touch them. Someone is always messing the spreadsheets up, so you’re not alone.”
“That’s reassuring.”
