AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER1
LUCAS
No one buys coffee at nine at night.
Okay, yeah, during college exam season, we’ve got strung-out last minute studiers coming in at a quarter to nine buying triple red-eyes, but on a normal day? Business dies after about five.
Then I get to spend four hours scrubbing the shop to a high shine so it’s ready for the lucky assholes who work the morning shift. I’d kill to work the busy hours, serving up our fun drinks instead of scrubbing the gummy tables and doing load after load of dishes.
But a guy does the job he can get these days, and this was what a guy could get, with a degree in history.
Yeah, I know,what was I thinking?
I wasthinkingthat history was cool, and I was good at learning about it and making new connections. I sure wasn’t thinking about how I didn’t want to teach history to bored teenagers for a living. Or just as important, that there were already a whole lot of history teachers out there, so jobs were pretty damn scarce.
So yeah. I spent my nights slinging coffee.
Or not slinging coffee.
And of course, getting that one last minute customer at five till, just so I’d have to rewash everything and recount the cash drawer. By the time I was finishing cleaning up for the second time at a quarter after, I was about ready to go home and sleep for a week.
That, naturally, was when someone started banging on the door.
Seriously?
My coworker, Katie, in her hideous grasshopper-green, ruched bridesmaid’s dress. Once, months before, I’d considered Katie my friend, but then Morris moved out of our apartment, and somehow, he got all my friends, including the ones who worked with me, in the breakup.
He’d abandoned me in a lease I couldn’t really afford, moved in with and gotten engaged to a guy he’d been seeing behind my back for months, and somehow, he was the one everyone stuck by.
Oh, to be fair, Katie seemed to think we were still friends. But she hadn’t hesitated to say yes when dear, sweet David asked her to be one of his bridesmaids. He’d done it right there, by the front door of the shop, while smirking at me.
I didn’t know what I’d done to make him hate me, or to make Morris leave—okay, no, I knew what had made Morris leave. I was a burnout working for minimum wage at a coffee shop. Dear, sweet David was a teacher.
Not so hard to get those teaching jobs when science is your field of expertise.
“Lucas!” Katie yelled, banging on the door. “I need coffee, you gotta open up.” Then she held up a half-full bottle of Jack, and the motion almost sent her careening into the glass door. She barely caught herself at the last second, leaning her shoulder hard against the doorframe and giggling. Already drunk, then. “I thought you’d wanna hear about the wedding.”
The wedding. Morris and David’s wedding, that very evening—the reason I’d ended up closing alone, because literally everyone else I worked with had been invited, even the people David hadn’t liked. Like somehow insulting me was more important to him than his own wedding. Either way, the wedding was literally the last thing on the entire planet that I wanted to hear about.
I grabbed my coat, checked my pockets for my wallet and keys, and headed for the front. If I could have slipped out the back and left her there, I would have, but she would have seen me climbing into my car.
So I unlocked the door and opened it just far enough for me to slide out, pulling it shut and turning to lock it behind me.
Katie fell into me, giggle-whining. “Noooo, Lucas, you gotta let me in. I need coffee.”
“Closed,” I told her tersely. “And I’m not cleaning the shop again just so you can sober up.”
“Aww, don’t be bitter, baby. You didn’t wanna marry Morris anyway.” She petted me like I was a sad dog, and I wanted to snap my teeth at her. I also wanted to stay there, because no one had touched me on purpose since Morris had moved out.
He’d done it while I was at work one afternoon. Hadn’t even told me anything was wrong in our relationship. Just took his stuff and left.
And took the cat, too. The cat we’d bought together, and let me tell you, Donna Meowble was my goddamn cat. He’d wanted a cat, and picked her out, and then proceeded to completely ignore her at every turn. I’d fed her and changed her litter and petted her when she demanded attention.
I missed her.
But Morris hadn’t even talked to me since he’d left, so I’d never had a chance to demand her return. When I’d brought it up to David dearest, he’d laughed at me and told me that “Fluffy” was Morris’s cat, then he’d walked away.
Next I’d seen him, he’d been asking my two female coworkers to be his bridesmaids. He’d worked at the coffee shop during college, the same as I had, you see, so they were his friends too. We’d been coworkers for three years, David and I, before he’d moved in with my boyfriend and stolen my cat.
