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“Nope,” he replied, striding toward his hoodie. “Looks like the starter went out.”
“Fuck,” I hissed. “Can I take your truck?”
“Can’t, sugar,” he reminded me as I pulled the hoodie on and simultaneously stepped into his boots. “Got the car seat in my truck, and I gotta take Michael to my mom’s on my way to work, remember? That’s why I’m not on my bike.”
“Oh, my god,” I whispered, looking around the room. “I’m going to get fired.”
“You’re not gonna get fired.”
“I am if I show up late!”
“You’re not gonna be late,” he assured me. “Go get in the truck. I’ll carry Rhett down, and we’ll drive you.”
“He’s going to be a monster if we wake him up this early,” I replied, grabbing his arm to stop him. “And your mom will have to deal with it all day.”
“They can deal,” he replied as my nose started to sting.
God, why did I think this was a good idea? If I screwed up at Charlie’s business, it wouldn’t just be a job I could leave. There would be repercussions throughout Michael’s family if I looked like a flake. Any mistakes I made would be fodder for the gossip queens.
“Em, go,” Michael ordered, lightly smacking my ass. “We’ll be right there.”
I grit my teeth and held Rhett’s hand while he whined for the entire ride to the coffee shop I was working at that day. He didn’t understand why we’d woken him up, he was seriously pissed that we’d put him in the car, and I had a feeling that when I tried to leave, he was going to lose his mind.
“Hey, it’s gonna be good,” Michael reassured me, his hand on my thigh tightening. “Stop stressin’.”
“It’s going to be a disaster,” I grumbled back. I was so nervous that every muscle in my body was tight, and when we met Charlie outside five minutes late, I felt like I was going to throw up.
“Emilia’s car shit the bed this morning,” Michael announced as he let me out of the truck.
“Likely story,” Charlie joked easily, glancing at me. “It’s fine, dude. You made it.”
“I’m so sorry I’m late.”
“Seriously,” she said, glancing at Michael and then back at me. “It’s not a big deal.”
“I tried to tell her,” Michael said as Rhett began to wail inside the truck. I turned to go to him when Michael stopped me. “Go, baby. I’ll settle him down.”
I felt like I was going to throw up as I nodded and followed Charlie into the little lit-up trailer. A few moments later, I heard Michael’s truck leave the lot.
“Rough morning, huh?” Charlie asked sympathetically.
“It was going good until my stupid car refused to start,” I replied with an embarrassed laugh.
“Happens to the best of us.” She shrugged. “Can’t plan for everything all the time. You ready to clock in?”
The next few hours would’ve been funny if they hadn’t been so horrific. Charlie had chosen the cart that had the least amount of customers in the morning when we’d be training, but it still felt like I didn’t have a single second to stop as car after car pulled up to the window. They wanted everything from drip black coffee to flavored energy drinks and while learning on the fly might’ve been how Charlie trained other new hires, it clearly didn’t seem to be working for me. I grabbed the wrong syrups, made a gigantic fucking mess that I never had time to clean up, messed up orders, dropped an entire latte between the window and the car outside, and somehow took down the entire system that Charlie used to process credit card transactions. It was a complete shit show.
By the time I did something very concerning to the espresso machine, causing it to make a loud screeching noise, both Charlie and I were so frazzled that I was surprised she hadn’t ordered me not to touch anything ever again.
“What the fuck?” Charlie yelled over the noise, staring at her machine in confusion. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know,” I yelled back, my eyes starting to water. “I did it exactly how you showed me.”
When the espresso machine was unplugged from the wall and the screeching had finally stopped Charlie and I were sweaty, disheveled, and our ears were ringing.
Charlie reached for a switch on the wall, turning off the lights. “Looks like we’re closed for the day,” she said with what was either a laugh or a huff—I couldn’t tell. “Can’t run a cart without the espresso machine, or we’ll cause a riot. I’ll come back later to see if I can get old faithful working again.”
“I amsosorry,” I replied quietly.
