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She was going to kill me. “So, about that...”
“You look so guilty right now.”
And then, she did it. She freaking squinted. Thayle hated wearing glasses, and for the longest time, she had a problem with contacts. Or more precisely, getting her contacts into her eyes. If only I had a video of some of her attempts. She simply couldn’t touch her eyeball without being freaked out. In the interim, while she’d kept trying with the contacts and insisted she didn’t really need glasses, she’d developed a bad habit of squinting. Now, though she’d successfully been wearing contacts for years, she still squinted. But only when she was thinking. Or skeptical.
I found it adorable.
“You’re squinting.”
Her eyes widened. “Am not.”
“Are too.”
“You’re evading my question.”
“I am,” I admitted. “Gotta run.” I held up the donuts. “You know how Min gets when she’s hungry.”
“I will find out what you’re up to.” As I turned away, she called out, “Ugh, I didn’t even see you put this here.”
She must have found the twenty dollar bill I left. I was about to call back,You’d be surprised how quick my hands can be, but thought better of it. I was constantly skirting the edge between being playful and flirty. According to Min, I was far more flirty than playful. And maybe it was true, but there was really only one woman I actually wanted to flirt with.
And she was the one woman strictly off-limits to me.
FOUR
thayle
Exactly two peopleknew about my massive crush on Neo.
One of them was Rich. My pseudo-grandfather knew everything. He knew my mother, before she ran out on us. He knew my dad, before he’d become an alcoholic. Living next door to us, he had an up-close-and-personal view of my life. While I adored Dorothy, experiencing such a screwed-up childhood under the watchful eyes of the town gossip hadn’t necessarily encouraged me to share more than I needed to with her. But Rich was a different story.
Except Rich had bigger problems at the moment than the fact that Antonio Grado was becoming impossibly difficult to ignore. So I called the only other person who knew that my childhood crush had become a very adult one.
“Are you up?” I asked my former colleague.
“I am now,” a cranky, sleepy voice answered back.
I adjusted my earbuds. “Hold on, I have a customer.”
Tuesday was typically a slower day than most, and the morning rush was over, but a passerby had wandered in. I made a quick coffee, handed over two donuts, and jumped back on the call.
“Sorry, Werner.” It was a tradition for all of the employees at the bank where we both used to work to address each other by our last names instead of first. Garrett was now a banker on Wall Street with some fancy-schmancy job, but during his college years, he worked part-time, and we became good friends.
Most importantly, he wasn’t from Kitchi Falls, which meant he hardly knew the Grados.
“You wake me up to put me on hold?”
“I’m covering at Devine Bakery. Rich just got out of the hospital—”
“Oh man, I’m sorry. Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine. It’s just an infection. But while he finishes recovering, I’m doing double duty for a few days.”
“Thayle, you’ve got to slow down. Are you still waitressing too?”
“You’ll be happy to know I quit last month. It was just too much.”
“Good.”
