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Fridays aren’t usually this quiet, but our last customers were out the door almost an hour ago, and we’ve had zip for walk-ins and only like three bookings since. For us, that’s flat-line dead. Thankfully, it’s almost closing time. We shut down officially in T-minus 30 minutes.
“Maaaatt?” Stacy calls. Her voice is cajoling, and I know what she wants.
I check my watch and grunt, “Your boy-man out front?”
Stacy sighs, instantly all bad-tempered. “My boyfriendiswaiting for me, yes.”
I fondly recall the day I learned his name. When forced to address him, I call him Norman, Ogden, Brandon, Adam, Lucius, Leonard, Silas—take your pick, really.
And the first time Stacy heard me roll call in reference to him, she’d growled.
I’d given her a look of perfectly patent confusion. “Tristan?”
“Christian!”she’d hissed.
“Whatever.” I liked mine better.N.O.B.A.L.L.S.
She peeks around the doorway now, making a face. “Do you have to be so mean to him?”
“Yes. I’m helping him build character.” I make a show of checking my watch, but I’ve already made the call. I give her a smile. “Get out of here, sis. Enjoy your night.”
I turn my attention to my computer.
Stacy squeals, “Thank you! You’re the best boss ever, and I totally consider this a good b-day gift, you don’t have to get me anything else now. Have a good ni—”
I jerk my head up. “It’s your birthday?”
Stacy’s eyes go wide.
“You turned… eighteen?”
My little Mediterranean-blooded sidekick has gone still as a statue, not saying a peep.
I’m up and out of my desk. I storm out of my office.
“Ahhh,” Stacy squeaks in dismay, messily throwing her purse strap over her shoulder, or trying to, as she rushes for the door, for freedom from the scene I’m heading out of the front to cause.
She hits the door first despite the fact that she’s wearing platform wedges, theclack! clack! clack!they make as she races me for the door makes her shoes sound terrified.
I glare down at the backs of her feet. Scarlet red siren’s heels adorn her, the blood red color starting just behind her toes and snaking high on her ankles in a crisscross pattern. How did I not notice that she was wearing these? “You change your shoes before you asked me to leave?”
“Gah,” Stacy groans, slamming the bar that pushes the door open, and racing out ahead of me, hoping to cut me off and make a getaway with her boyfriend before I can get there.
I shove the door open before it can close on me, and my longer strides mean I catch Stacy gently by the arm before she can clip-clop all the way across the parking lot and escape.
“Matt, this is not cool!” she whines, her legs scissor-walking to keep up with me.
I check my speed a little, but I don’t spare her a glance. I’m full-out death-warning her boy, who squeezes his eyes shut and drops his head back against his head rest while I stalk-march us to his car.
See, sometime last year, I had the misfortune of overhearing Tansy having girl talk with Stacy at her desk when business was slow. And Stacy dropped that she wasn’t having sex with her boyfriend until she turned eighteen.
Back then, I’d thought,Thank fuck.
Now?SONOFABITCH.
I halt at his passenger door.
Manning up, his chest bows out with his bracing inhale, and the skinny teen—probably also eighteen, now that I think about it, dammit—pops his door and unfolds himself to stand in front of us.
