“Now you need to get to work, and I’m gonna go to the gym, again, not the right time. It hasn’t been the right time any time before that, either. So, until it is, baby, you don’t get my mouth, and I’m not taking yours.”
Why did that make me want his mouth (and what might come after it) more than my next breath?
“Cool?” he asked.
“Not exactly,” I answered honesty. “But I hear you so I’m with you.”
Because I want this to be special too, because this is special, I’m seeing that clearly now, and I’m not about to fuck it up.
“Thanks, babe,” he muttered, bent to kiss my nose, and since his hand was in mine, he used it to pull me to the door to his garage and beyond, so we could face our days.
I was filling the coffee cubby case.
Tex was outside with his bottle of white shoe polish, ignoring the line that was forming and drawing his coffee special on the front window. It was backwards from where I stood, and it looked mildly terrifying, which meant, as it always did, it appeared mildly threatening straight on.
You’d think Tex’s complete lack of ability to draw and his handwriting that veered toward hostile would keep people away.
But as I mentioned, the line was forming.
I’d closed the case and was heading back to the kitchen with the trays when I heard Tex call, “Hold up, Willow.”
Just inside The Surf Club proper, I turned to him.
He was clipping the cap back on the white shoe polish and heading my way.
He stopped and said, “Had a chat with Tito. Something’s gotta give, and it’s gonna.”
Confused, I asked, “Sorry?”
“You’re burning the candle at both ends. You can’t do that shit,”—he twisted to point at the coffee cubby and came back to me—“serve and run a business. It’s too much and it’s not working.”
It felt like my whole chest caved in.
Was he…?
Were they…?
Firing me?
Did I…?
Was I…?
Doing something wrong?
“Talked to Lucia. She said you two have a groove,” Tex carried on.
“I-I-I…yes, I think we do.”
“Right, and we got a contract with someone to deliver the shit we sell in the front case on the weekends, and that shit doesn’t move,” Tex informed me. “Your stuff is sold out by, latest, eleven. That shit, half of it we throw away. It’s waste. Money and resources.”
I said nothing.
Tex was feeling chatty.
“We think you should put a Willow’s Good Stuff sign in the other window, the one I don’t draw on, and you run it out of SC. We’ll become The Surf Club and Willow’s Good Stuff. You use the kitchen to do your shit, nix the delivery thing since they can come here and get it, and augment what you offer for SC. Like, éclairs and danishes, and I don’t know, cream puffs and shit.”
My heart was hammering in my chest so hard, I was sure I was experiencing a heart attack, to say nothing of the fact I was blinking rapidly.
