Within minutes, I started to feel light-years better. I wasn’t diabetic or even hypoglycemic. But I had burned an insane amount of calories at Pilates and Jen’s today. I should have taken better care of my body.
“Okay, we’ll keep talking about this,” Will finally said, wrapping up the meeting. “This is good. I’m glad you’re on board, Ada.”
Will and Eliza walked away, back through the kitchen door. There were only a couple minutes till open. And even if we usually started slow in the late afternoon, I didn’t want to be out here stuffing my face when customers entered. I tucked into the few bites that were left and decided to give Joey whatever days off she asked for.
She didn’t need a reason at this point. She could just have PTO whenever she wanted.
Well, maybe not quite that. But something close to it.
Charlie stood there staring at me long enough that I started to feel self-conscious. “What do you want, English?”
“What’s going on with you today?”
I immediately felt exposed. Like he could see inside my head and read all my self-pitying thoughts. “Nothing’s going on today. I just forgot to eat. I worked out too hard.”
He shook his head. “Saturday’s your light day.”
What?How did he know that?It was the one indulgence I gave myself in my workout schedule. Light day Saturday, rest day Sunday, beast mode every other day. “Well, it wasn’t today. I hit it too hard. And then I got too busy to eat.”
“That’s what I’m trying to get to, Kelly. Why did you hit it so hard you almost passed out at work? What’s got you all riled up?”
Now I was doubly annoyed. It wasn’t only that Charlie saw me better than anyone else today. It was that I worked really, really hard to make sure I didn’t get riled up. Or at least look like I was riled up. I was always calm. Always in control. Always poised.
Did that mean I didn’t yell at Will and Charlie to sometimes knock it the fuck off? No. Those moments would always be necessary. But when it came to my own personal shit, I kept it off the table.
There was never a whiff of Ada’s personal life out there for people like Ally to exploit. I kept that shit locked up tight. And people might get a feeling that I was annoyed with them. But that was as deep as the public perception of my emotions went. I was not a tell-all kind of girl.
I was a keep it secret, keep it safe girl. Didn’t matter if my world was falling apart or if my dad had shown up out of nowhere or if I was pending homelessness. It was not available for public consumption. It was mine to carry and mine to keep.
Now that I had some calories in me, I could get back to playing off other people’s concerns like a normal fucking grown-up. “Nothing. No reason. I just... felt like it.”
His mouth twitched with an almost smile. “You’re mad I got you drunk last night.”
“What?”
“Listen, you need to take better care of yourself, Ada. It’s not my fault you’re starving yourself.”
“I am not starving myself,” I snapped back. “I take immaculate care of myself. These two outlier events hardly constitute a crisis. I had a weird day, and I forgot to eat. End of story.”
His green eyes flashed. “So you did have a weird day.”
I felt like screaming. Instead, I took a steadying breath and reached into my arsenal of self-defense tactics and pulled out my favorite weapon—sarcasm. “Okay, Detective English, you caught me. I had a weird day, so I went hard at the gym, then I was running late, so I forgot to eat. And then I showed up to work and ate. Mystery solved.”
He was unamused by my tone. “Why was it weird?”
“Why do you think it’s your business?”
He shrugged one deceptively casual shoulder. “Why are you deflecting?”
God, sometimes I worried we were two sides of the same coin. Charlie was equally, if not more so, obsessed with pulling off the laid-back vibe as much as I was. But of course, for totally different reasons.
When Charlie cared about something, he usually cared about it too much. Like his obsession with clean and uncracked bar glasses. Nobody asked him to compulsively check our inventory every night. But early on, he’d watched some stupid video about how glasses can carry bacteria if not properly cared for and how cracked glasses can be very dangerous—especially if an unknowing guest were to swallow bits of glass.
So he’d taken it upon himself to make sure each glass was put away perfectly.
But somewhere in his childhood, that whole image of him caring too much had become a bad thing. So he covered it with this laid-back lie that he didn’t actually care about anything. When, in fact, he cared about everything.
I had never judged him, though, because I was just as bad. My reasons were different, obviously. But literally nobody could out cool-girl me.
