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“Not coffee,” I say wryly.
“Do you get lots of hours here?”
“Usually around thirty a week. Not enough to be considered full-time because then they’d have to offer me benefits.”
“Well, if you ever want to come to a Saints home game, let me know and I’ll get you some good seats.”
Why is he being so nice to me? I was unforgivably rude to him in front of his entire team and members of the Saints staff.
“Um, last time I was at the arena, I acted just a tiny bit too crazy. I’m not entirely sure I’m welcome there anymore,” I say with an apologetic look.
“Nothing I can’t take care of. And you’re not crazy.”
“Mindy!” Virgil calls from behind the counter.
Pike and I both look over to see my boss tapping the face of his watch. “Two more minutes!”
Pike turns to me, his brow wrinkled with confusion. “Mindy?”
“He refuses to call me Indie because he says it’s a nickname.”
Scoffing, Pike says, “What a fucking tool. Should I pretend to stealthily pass you a small baggie of unmentionable things across the table right now? We could totally fuck with him.”
I smile. “If I didn’t need this job so much, I’d be all for it.”
Standing up from my chair, I look down at him. “Thanks for dropping by so I could apologize in person. I appreciate it.”
“Hey, since we weren’t able to get coffee, can we get together somewhere else sometime? Maybe for lunch?”
I gape at him for a second, stunned. Is he asking me out?
“I can’t,” I blurt. “But thanks.”
He smiles, not the least bit put out by my rejection. He must not have been asking me out, for like a date. Now I feel ridiculous.
“I’ll see you around, Indie,” he says, standing up. “Have a good one.”
“You too.”
He walks out the front door, and I go back to the kitchen to wash my hands.
That was unexpected. And weird. But not weird in a bad way.
Drying my hands, I put my brief meeting with Pike out of my head. I’m staffing the cash register now, but I’m planning to see if Angie will help me learn more about making drinks during our downtime. I have to hold on to this job, and if that means making Virgil happy with my super foam abilities, that’s what I’ll do.
Chapter Eight
Pike
* * *
“Since when do you drink coffee?” my teammate Dane asks on the drive to Just Brew It.
I side-eye him. “Every time I’m hungover, which is like six days a week.”
“Yeah, but you usually just drink the free stuff from the hotel lobby. Not the fancy shit.”
“Some of the fancy shit’s pretty good, but mostly I go to Just Brew It because I like one of the women who works there.”
“Ah. There it is. Just make your flirting quick; I don’t want to be late for practice.”
As I pull into a parking spot near the coffee shop, I say, “I have to be at practice before you do. It’ll be fine.”
Dane is a first line forward whose baseline mood is surly bastard. He’s actually a good guy once you get to know him, but he never parties or lets loose. Several of us took his refusal to hang with us personally at first, but now we know it’s his norm, so we don’t ask much anymore.
Coffee or lunch, he’ll do, but never dinner unless it’s a required team event, and even then, he never drinks. I suspect he may be a recovering alcoholic, like Alexei, but he’s a private guy and I don’t want to pry.
“Kind of a cool place,” he murmurs as we walk in.
I scan the employees behind the counter, looking for Indie, but I don’t see her. One of them, a young blond, smiles from behind the register as we approach.
“Looking for Indie?” she asks.
“Yeah, is she here?” I respond while taking another look around to see if she’s maybe wiping down empty tables.
“No, but let’s see…” She picks up a paper from a shelf beneath the register. “She will be later. She works from one to six today.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Did you guys still want coffee?”
“Sure, I’ll take a medium black coffee.”
I glance over at Dane and nod my head toward the woman behind the register, gesturing for him to order something. “I’ll have a chai tea latte.”
I frown at him. “I didn’t know you had a vagina.”
He shakes his head and rolls his eyes at me. “Just pay for the drinks, dick.”
“You sure? Do you want a rainbow sugar cookie, too? Maybe a box of tampons?”
The woman behind the register laughs, and Dane glares at her.
“You could at least pretend to be a little offended. Don’t encourage him,” he says.
As she scans my debit card, I look at her name tag and see that her name is Angie.
“You were just here the other day and now you’re back,” she says. “You must really like Indie.”
