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“It’s fine.”
The girl was removing one of the wristbands on her arm to show me that she’d been talking about how much she was sweating. Not whatever Chris Rose’s immature ass was cackling about from the booth. It probably should’ve been off-putting, but I found it refreshing. She looked completely frazzled and out of her element as she plucked off the other wrist band, mouth moving so fast and words spilling at such a rate that I couldn’t absorb it all.
“It’s okay. Really,” I repeated.
“Oh, God. Griff,” she said, turning toward the little boy Ben was talking to at the bar.
“Griff” was putting on a sort of clinic for how to shoot straw wrappers at unsuspecting patrons while everyone was busy watching the waitress who had wiped the front of my pants with napkins.
Ben gave his straw a forceful blow, then turned with the biggest smile I’d seen on him in weeks to the boy she called Griff. The two boys high-fived, and at that moment, my feelings on hiring a nanny changed completely.
“You’ve just got-” she said, reaching for my pants again. I looked down and saw a thick clump of napkin fuzz that had torn off from the moisture and stuck to my jeans. I raised an eyebrow at the woman, and she jerked her hand back, nodding rapidly and backing away. “I should go check on your order, actually.”3NolaAfter particularly stressful shifts of work, I’d sometimes have nightmares about the restaurant. They were usually the kind where I’d realize I forgot to put in several orders for half an hour. The dream would kick off as I noticed my customers watching me expectantly, then I’d feel the soul-crushing dread of knowing I needed to go tell them all it was going to be another twenty minutes before their food came because I was a ditz.
But last night, the familiar nightmare had an unfamiliar twist.
This time, I saw a giant wave of water splash into Jack Kerrigan’s pants. Being the genius I am in my dreams, I decided I needed to help him take his pants off. So I got on my knees in the middle of the restaurant and started tugging his pants down, then his underwear...
Yeah. It turns out some latent part of my consciousness was apparently highly turned on by the idea of publicly going down on Jack Kerrigan. Because, you know, that was totally, completely normal.
I was sitting up in my bed with the sheets bunched around me, still breathing heavily as I pushed the last remnants of the dream from my mind.
God. I was probably still thinking about him because of the way the men had been looking at me after the ordeal. Jack had gathered his adorable little son, gone back to the table, and then the three men had launched into a quiet but urgent conversation punctuated by occasional glances my way.
They didn’t even complain when the Gut Buster arrived, and I was shocked that the men—mostly Chris and Jack—seemed to take it as a challenge and actually finished more of the pizza than I’d ever seen anyone manage.
The worst part was when they’d called my boss over at the end and, once again, the whole group had glanced my way several times. But Tony gave no sign of wanting to murder me afterwards, so my initial fear that they were getting me fired hadn’t turned out to be true.
And now it was just another day. No more crazy run-ins with gorgeous celebrities. In fact, it was highly likely that I’d go the entire remainder of my life without even brushing elbows with a single man as magnetic as Jack Kerrigan had been. I mean, I’d like to publicly put it on record that under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t lack the awareness to start rubbing at a customer’s crotch with napkins. But Jack and his muscles, tattoos, and dreamy eyes had scrambled my brains temporarily.
None of that mattered now, I guessed. The fun was over. Some little slice of an exciting, adventurous life had overlapped with mine for the briefest of moments, and now it had passed. It was like a page from someone else’s book had been torn out and accidentally fluttered into the mundane tale of work and work and struggle that was mine.
I sighed dramatically and threw the sheets off myself. Birds were chirping outside because they didn’t have to pay rent or work at dead-end jobs just to afford boxes of macaroni and cheese. Assholes.
I slid out of bed, flopping to the floor and debating whether I actually wanted to shower and get ready or if I could just roll into work this morning looking a little rough around the edges.
Eventually, I voted for hygiene. God knew I got way too sweaty at the sauna that was my work to pass up showers, as tempting as it might be.
