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“Bullshit. When was the last time you had sex in there?”
His tongue taps his upper lip as he looks away. He says nothing.
“Oh my God. Yesterday?Yesterday?”
When he gives me a halfhearted shrug, I force a laugh, but I’m weirdly unamused. It’s probably just that I haven’t had sex that I was conscious for in nearly a year.
But it’s strange how much it feels like jealousy.
* * *
The next day,we walk in through the saloon-style doors of Beck’s Bar and Grill together. Beck is technicallyJacobBeck, though I’ve never heard anyone call him “Jacob” other than Caleb’s mom, and the bar has been in his family for forty years.
There’s a new deck outside, but the interior is the same, and I have a sudden, sharp memory of the last time I was here with Caleb. We were fighting because I’d wanted to go to a concert later that night and he’d wanted to stay home.
I’ve been struggling so hard to get back to him...it’s as if I forgot we had bad times too.
The rest of the staff isn’t in yet, so Beck shows me to the office, which sits just past the bar. He swears he’s disinfected it and to his credit, it does smell strongly of bleach.
Aside from its theoretical cleanliness, though, the room is a grim, windowless place, with two desks reflecting back the gleam of fluorescent lights . . . and file boxes lining the walls.
“What’s in those?” I ask, pointing at them.
He stares at the floor like a kid who just got caught stealing. “Receipts, mostly.”
My jaw falls. There are at least twenty boxes, which means hundreds of files, and hundreds of files mean thousands of pieces of paper. “Jesus. All of them?”
“No, there are employee files in there too.”
My brow furrows. “You didn’t digitize all that?”
He just looks at me.Of course he didn’t.Because Beck has spent the past four years only handling the parts of his job he considers necessary, and that does not include bookkeeping or responsible file management. He shows me the payroll software and the purchasing system, both of which are ridiculously out-of-date. Just the act of showing them to me seems to be suffocating him. He looks toward the door longingly.
“In a hurry?” I ask. “Meeting your ten AM hookup in the alley outside?”
He narrows a single eye at me. “I just hate being in the office.”
“Yeah, four years of receipts and this computer from 1992 tipped me off.”
He’s already backing toward the door. “Just fix it and don’t involve me. I’ll pay whatever you want.”
I laugh. “Here’s a little tip they taught us in business school. Don’t ever say ‘I’ll pay whatever you want’ to a new hire. And I don’t want your money. You’re letting me stay with you rent-free. It’s the least I can do.”
His arms fold over his chest as he stares me down. “You’re not working for me unless I’m paying you. I need to be able to treat you like any other employee, which means I get to be a dick if I want to, and you’ve got to put up with it.”
“Yes, that’s so different from our normal arrangement,” I reply with a grin as he walks away.
Any amusement I felt fades when I open the first of many boxes, however. The receipts aren’t even organized byyear. It’s going to take me weeks to get this squared away.
Over the course of the next few hours, I begin separating the expenses by year and broad categories. By the time he returns, the floor is awash in piles of paper—with barely enough space for him to get inside. I’ve only made my way through four boxes, and I haven’t evenbegunto input anything.
He edges inside the room. “You already want to quit, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “But I want to keep you out of jail slightly more.”
“Come outside and eat. It’ll make you like me again.”
“I never said I liked you in the first place,” I grumble as he leads me into the restaurant.
