AllFreeNovel
Share Us
X
“I still don’t see why you bothered hiring someone for the holidays,” I grumbled, pouring the freshly-steamed gangdo seed milk into the balbo-shell tea. The crimson balbo-shell tea foamed as the gangdo seed milk hit it, and I swirled the milk jug, creating a delicate white leaf outlined in the red before handing it to the waiting customer, a beetle man of XrkXrk. He disappeared into the crowds with a grateful flash of his antennae, and I turned to give my boss Shelly, the owner of Hallowed be thy Bean, my full attention.
Her greying hair curled around her wizened face. Well, that hair had been greying yesterday. She’d had it freshly tinted bright green for the season. She often did so, changing her hair to match her mood and the time of year on her people’s old planet of Earth.
“You know why I had to hire someone, X. This place runs way better with two people than one. And neither of us could have predicted a Hadorian prince sweeping Aiden off his feet and spiriting him away for our busiest time of year, could we?”
I grunted. I liked Aiden. He was half-human, half-Hadorian, and he did his job well. He didn’t get in my way, and though he tended to talk my damn ear off, he was still good to work with. His dimpled smiles and constant flirtations with the customers belied his hard-as-steel work ethic. And I had a feeling that whoever was coming to replace him during his vacation wasn’t going to live up to what I had come to expect in a co-worker.
“So, without Aiden, you know I had to get someone else in. Her name is Sophie.”
I grunted again, letting the sounds of that name roll around in my head. It sounded... soft. I didn’t particularly like soft things. Too vulnerable. Too hard to take care of.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Shelly said, narrowing her gold eyeliner-rimmed eyelids at me and pursing her lipsticked mouth. “You’re thinking she’s going to get in your way or that she’s not going to work hard. But I interviewed her myself. Well, virtually at least. She seems solid. And she’s from the manufacturing district of New Toronto on Terratribe 1, so you know she’s gotta be used to hard work.”
“Hmm...” That all sounded... OK. I guessed. With a sigh, I looked around the tiny coffee shop. It was more a kiosk than anything, but built into the wall, not out in the middle of the bustling aisle the way some of the other kiosks were. We didn’t even have a door for patrons to come through – just a window sectioned vertically into two parts with a counter to pass drinks and payment scanners though. “I hope she isn’t much bigger than Aiden,” I grumbled, running out of things to complain about. My own frame took up a huge amount of space in the tiny area. Aiden had been wispy, even for someone with Hadorian blood, and he was quick on his feet, too.
“Well I didn’t ask for her height and weight in the interview, X,” Shelly said with a roll of her eyes. “You can’t be the one to complain about size when you’re the one taking up all the space in here anyway!”
She had me there. I looked at Shelly’s kind face, softening and forcing my broad shoulders to relax. When I’d arrived on Elora Station after my term with the Galkor forces had ended, she was the only one who’d taken a chance on me and given me work. Ex-members of the Galkor Chimera Guard tended to stand out in human-run spaces like Elora Station. Our reputation always preceded us. It was a reputation well-earned, but still, it made people wary. The only other job I probably could have gotten here was as a bouncer for one of the clubs in the lower levels of the station. But after a lifetime of doing violent shit for work, I’d needed a change. Shelly had offered me that, to my eternal gratitude.
She’d always been good to me. So I forced myself to smile, my snout pulling stiffly.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” I ground out.
Shelly grinned broadly.
“You bet your Chimera hide it will be! Because you’re the one who’s going to be training her!”
With that, Shelly turned and pushed at the full length of the window so that it opened like a door, flouncing out into the crowds.
“Wait,” I called as her five-foot-nothing human frame began to disappear. “When does she get here?”
I couldn’t see Shelly, now. But I could hear her bright voice, calling through the bodies obscuring my view.
“She’s already here! She just arrived, and she starts tomorrow!”
Tomorrow. That was... soon. I sighed, rolling the tight white cuffs of my sleeves up my thick forearms. Tomorrow I’d be sharing this space, a space I considered almost as much my own as Shelly did, with a stranger. Some Terratribe girl. I felt my face falling into a scowl, and the Navaret woman who’d been approaching the counter squeaked and turned the other way, her feathers flaring up along the back of her neck, an automatic fear response.
Get a hold of yourself, you dolt. You just lost a customer because of your mood.
I started polishing the counter behind the window, trying to keep the glower off of my face. Shelly was a damn good businesswoman. I had to trust her to make the right choice here. As much as I loved Hallowed be thy Bean, it was her business, after all, not mine.
With that thought in mind, I got my ass back to work, ready to face the next customer coming my way.
