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“Youneedto be more flexible.”
Andy slammed the drawer shut.
Plans change, Andygram. Try and be more flexible. Spontaneity is the spice of life.
Yeah, she’d heard the criticisms more than a few times in her life, and while she was self-aware enough to know there might be something to them, she grew frustrated with the neurotypical notion that this aspect of her pathology was always some sort of deficit.
Straightening, she gave Luke her full pissed-off attention. “Carson’s a good friend. I won’t flake on him. Like I said, I made a commitment. That might not be how you roll, but it is how I roll.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, come on. Like you’re not the love ’em and leave ‘em type.”
Luke took a step back, gaze swinging to the floor as he drew in a breath.
Shit. She’d actually pissed him off with that one.
Looking back up, he gave her nothing. Totally blank expression. Andy swallowed, vastly preferring the man’s scowl because that was far easier to interpret.
“I think you may be right,” he finally said.
She was?
Well, of course she was. Luke was a confirmed bachelor and made no bones about it with his balcony girls and wild nights at the club. But that’s not what he was referring to as he tapped his watch.
“We do need to get back to work.”
As awesome as her shift had started out, it all went downhill after her argument with Luke.
Andy had a hard time masking her feelings all evening, and while she wasn’t outwardly rude to the guests, neither was she scoring any major upsells.
Reg — clearly sensing her mood swing — tried to cheer Andy up with his favorite topic of conversation, but after getting little more than a few unenthusiastic remarks from her in response, the man decided to take his break. At which point, Andy was hit with a massive line of customers.
Okay, the line wasn’t massive. But all three women in it were massively annoying.
The first lady needed a pair of sandals from the top of the shoe wall, and of course the dang hook was nowhere to be found, so Andy had to pull out the ladder since she wasn’t about to ask His Tallness in the back for an assist.
The second woman wanted to return a shirt she’d just bought a few hours earlier. A shirt that had subsequently gained a huge red stain on it, smelling suspiciously of strawberry margarita.
Oh, but the third gal… this one took the taco when it came to raising Andy’s irritation levels. Or maybe it was that she took the chip since the woman grabbed a bag of Cheetos hanging from the front of the cashwrap, ripped it open, and strode right back in line to munch on the unpaid-for concession. If there was one customer peeve Andy had, it was this one.
And seriously, the munching was nails-on-chalkboard loud.
After Margarita Lady finally left — still wearing a stained shirt but having scored a club soda and the one bar of Mary’s soap Andy could scrounge up from the employee bathroom — Cheetos Lady sauntered up to the counter.
“Dylan here?”
Crunch, crunch, crunch.
Andy took a couple steps back to get away from the obnoxious chewing. And the reek of cheesy-chip breath and booze. The woman smelled several times more flammable than the one who’d preceded her. She also looked a helluva lot meaner.
“What’s wrong with you?” she snapped, smacking the counter with a hand covered in rings twisted every which way on her bony fingers. “You deaf or something? I saidDilll-aaan.”
“I heard you,” Andy said, holding her breath between sentences. “And no, he’s not here.”
Literally true. Dylan certainly wasn’t anywhere on the sales floor. Whether he’d left the workshop for the night yet, Andy had no idea. And she wasn’t about to check.
Because this woman was being a total bitch.
