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I had to know who he was talking to.
Kali stopped in front of the window first, giggling as she tugged off her wool hat.
She was one of the waitresses. Young, like the rest of them, but had a kid I knew she was raising on her own, considering how much all of them fucking talked around that window. She didn’t say much to me, though, never did, and unlike two of the others, didn’t get up in my shit every other second like they were getting paid to do it. I didn’t mind her too much.
“Don’t you have heat?” she asked J.R.
“Not heat that’ll shoot up to my balls,” he replied. “Why hasn’t someone invented that yet? There needs to be one of those vents below the wheel, shooting straight at my junk.”
“How lovely.” She chuckled.
“My balls are fine!”
Hearing that voice, my shoulders pulled back and I sucked in a breath. I watched Shayla smile and laugh as she walked toward Nate’s office.
Our eyes locked—hers so fucking big. Almost too big for her face; it should’ve looked weird, but it didn’t.
They were one solid color—a rich brown, shiny like wet soil, and Christ, they were beautiful. I’d never seen eyes like that before. I could look all fucking day at a pair of eyes like that.
But, like usual lately, my time for looking was limited.
Shayla immediately turned away, her cheeks a shade redder, which I’d put money on having absolutely nothing to do with the cold, and knocked on Nate’s door. He called out, and she disappeared behind it.
Gritting my teeth, I turned back to the stove and kept stirring my pot of crab soup, reminding myself how fucked up it was to be wanting attention from someone I had no business getting attention from.
This was the way it needed to be. She should be turning away. She should be avoiding me and keeping all those sweet words to herself now. So what if I felt like a giant piece of shit for doing her the way I did. I had to do it. She shouldn’t be wanting anything from me anyway. She deserved better.
I had no idea why she took to me in the first place. I sure as fuck didn’t ask for it.
I wasn’t particularly nice to her. I didn’t go out of my way to talk to her or even so much as look at her back when I first got hired on. I kept to myself and worked. That’s what I got hired on to do, so why the fuck would I do anything else? I didn’t give a shit about anyone here. And they shouldn’t give a shit about me.
But for some reason, that girl felt inclined to push her way in, like talking to me was something she not only wanted to do, but enjoyed doing. And I couldn’t keep ignoring her. I tried. Motherfucker, I tried. I didn’t give her anything in return those first couple of days, not even making eye contact with her when she’d drop off a damn ticket. Just let her ramble on and on. She told me about everything. Everything she was thinking, feeling, wishing for, and wanting more than anything. I kept my focus on my work and nothing else, until I slipped up and looked up after hearing something in her voice, something I didn’t like that sounded an awful lot like fear, and for the first time I saw who the fuck was talking to me like they were in some sort of competition for most words spoken in a minute.
I saw her eyes first. That stopped my breathing.
Then I looked over the rest of her face, taking in all those sweet features—pale flawless skin, cute little nose, and full pink lips. Her hair was dark and stopped just below her chin, cut choppy, and held out of her face with a skull bandana. She looked young as fuck, couldn’t have been much older than twenty. She looked tiny as fuck too. I could see most of her, since she was sitting up on the counter and peering at me through the window, but I didn’t get to check out much more than her face before I watched those pretty lips stretch into a smile, shutting my brain down completely from further functioning.
It wasn’t just the fact that she had a good smile, a fucking great smile, actually. One that somehow made that mouth even prettier. She had a smile that lit up her whole damn face like she was standing in a spotlight, making her shine from the inside out.
It was the fact that she was giving it to me and giving it good, like she’d been waiting for me to look at her and couldn’t have been happier about that wait ending. And then she further fucked me up when she opened her mouth and spoke, saying something I shouldn’t have heard and further, shouldn’t have given a shit about.
