ASPEN
“FEELING ALL HOTand bothered, Cupcake?”
Closing my eyes and inhaling deeply, I willed patience to materialize inside my body. Setting down the tourist brochure I’d been fanning myself with, I gave my coworker a wry look as he passed by me with a steaming latte for a customer. The heat was on, and it was warm behind the counter.
“Just bothered,” I assured him flatly.
I’d always found the atmosphere in Common Grounds, the popular little café nestled just a few blocks down from Byron Bay University’s campus, to be enduringly relaxing. I’d logged a lot of hours as their employee, having spent a large chunk of my freshman year there. Now I was a sophomore, still making fancy coffee drinks and ringing up orders of pastries and cake pops. There was something just kind of inherently soothing about the lo-fi music always wafting through the speakers and the toasty aroma, even when we were slammed and the line up to the counter was close to being out the door.
The owners of the café, a married couple who’d immigrated from Greece a couple decades earlier, wanted to keep the place cozy and welcoming. The dining area, separate from the entrance area with the checkout counter, was filled with armchairs and low tables surrounded by puffy cushions. It was basically always full of people from the university, studying or playing tabletop games. It was a great place to bring a date to, if you just wanted to talk and not spend much money.
It was the kind of place I couldn’t hate, even when I would get a moron customer trying to order ahot caramel frappewhen they really wanted a caramel macchiato, or they’d try to order off some imaginary secret menu they found online that had nothing to do with our store.
Thatwashow I’d felt until my roommate, who I was unfortunately pretty fond of, begged me to put in a good word with my boss to get this other guy we both knew, Caelyx Vane, hired on there too. Ren, the traitorous roommate in question, only cared about it becausehisboyfriend Maddox was Caelyx’s housemate. And when Maddox wanted something, Caelyx getting a job in this case, Ren was all in for whatever that cause might be.
So that was how I’d ended up with the most annoying person I knew as my coworker. Ren had probably been rewarded for his efforts with an enthusiastic blowjob or ten, but what hadIgotten in return for my good deeds? The whole situation was a pain in the ass.
He’d never worked a day in his life before this, so I’d half expected him to somehow screw it up and get fired in his first week. But because I’d been the one to recommend him, I couldn’t blow off his training or I’d look like an idiot. And now, a month and a half later, my boss loved him because all the giggling, blushing girls and even sometimes giggling, blushing guys, showed up in droves to see him. And of course they bought drinks and food in an attempt to make it not so completely obvious that they were only there to flirt with him and be flirted with in return.
Suppressing a sigh as I glanced up to the ceiling, I waited for the last little group of the day, three girls I recognized from around campus, to stop yapping at him and come over to the register so I could ring them up and shoo them out. We were supposed to close in three minutes, and they’d been standingaround for way too long. We still had a lot to do once the doors closed, and we were supposed to be meeting our friends after.
To my relief, only after another minute or so, Caelyx found a somewhat tactful way to say his goodbyes. If there was anything he was good at, it was talking. He had plenty of charisma and didn’t usually hesitate utilizing it to get his way. He’d been hitting on me pretty much nonstop since freshman year, I think mostly because he liked getting under my skin and on my last nerve, but he’d never tried that fake ass fuckboy charm on me. He knew better. With me, it was the direct approach, which I could appreciate on some level, even if I had no interest.
“I’m sure you girls can find something more fun to do than keeping me company on a Friday night,” he pointed out. Not exactly the way I would have phrased it, but whatever made them scram.
They looked like they wanted to protest, that hanging around and basking in his attention fit their ideal for a fun Friday night perfectly, but after a few more simpering little comments they took the hint and brought their stuff over to my counter so I could ring them up.
They barely looked at me, one girl just tapping her card over the reader once I gave her the total. I was used to that. Most girls weren’t exactly captivated by my appearance, being that I was 5’5 and usually in all black, including my nails and eyeliner. That was fine. I didn’t have any interest in them either.
I followed behind them as they walked out of the door, cooing to him that they’d see him later, and that they hoped he would have a good night. Flipping the lock into place the second they’d exited far enough for the door to snap closed, I clicked off the neon light that declared us open. When I slowly turned back around to look at him, he was leaned forward over the counter, a smug smirk carved across his irritatingly handsome face.
“Eager to be alone with me, Cupcake?”
He’d been calling me that for so long that it barely even registered as weird anymore. It felt less like something worth getting mad over, and more like an unfortunately inevitable fact of life, like traffic jams and sprained ankles.
“Eager to be away from you,” I retorted. “Gather up all the dishes and dump them in the sink.”
He did as I asked, but only after holding eye contact with me for way too long before slinking his long, lean body up and off the counter and heading into the seating area.He was a pain in the ass, but he was good at following orders.
We’d closed together a lot, so we had the routine down to a mostly tedious science. Clean the dishes, take out the trash, wipe down all the surfaces, sweep and mop. Mostly basic stuff a monkey could do. I supposed that was why even he could do it with minimal supervision and direction.Although I’d actually had toteachhim how to use a broom and dustpan. And then a mop.
“You won’t be away from me, you know,” Caelyx pointed out, from where he knelt down just next to my thighs. Of course he’d waited until I was taking the screens and filter baskets out of one of the espresso machines to get down into cupboards for the sweetener packets. “You’re watching movies at my house tonight, in case you forgot.”
I hadn’t forgotten. Our little group had become pretty tight-knit, and we usually spent at least one weekend night hanging out, either at the house that Caelyx shared with Maddox and Cyprian, or we’d occasionally find something out to do in public. Sometimes a party.
“I’m aware of that,” I said, nudging him over with my leg as I moved on to the second espresso machine. He barely budged, and when I looked down at him, he was staring up at me, his face hovering dangerously close to my crotch, practically pressed into my dark jeans. He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively at me, andI rolled my eyes. He screwed around and joked about it so much, I half wondered what his reaction would be if I actually unzipped and told him to have at it. Shoving him over a bit once again with my knee, I resumed my task. “It’s different when there’s other people around to distract you. When it’s just us squeezed in together behind this tiny counter, you smother me.”
If my statement or the way I’d kneed him in the shoulder offended him, he didn’t show it at all. He stood, clutching packets of sweetener in his hands and headed past me to the dining room to refill the little baskets on the tables.
“Even if there’s other people around,” he said, once he’d returned, “I wouldn’t call myself distracted. You’ll still be the center of all my attention, Cupcake.”
Dumping the machine parts I’d extracted into the soapy sink, I didn’t bother dignifying his stupid statement with a reply as I scrubbed them. It’d only serve to encourage him and make him believe he was actually getting under my skin.
The owners made all the flavor syrups for the drinks in-house and brought them in the morning, so I needed to take stock of what was low and send them a text. The moment I pulled my phone out to start, Caelyx slipped a notepad over my screen. He’d already jotted down all the syrup flavors, and how much was left of each one.
“Already taken care of,” he informed me. “You might want to tell her to double up on the pumpkin tomorrow,” he added. “Everyone’s going nuts over it and we almost ran out.”
I glanced around at the pump bottles quickly, just to verify his notes, before snapping a picture and sending it over to Sophia, Yannis’ wife. She was the one who made all the syrups, as well as baking the daily limited selection of pastries, always fresh and scratch-made. She was sort of a genius in the kitchen, and it showed in the fact that the sweets sold out most days. The bakery next door, which she owned, was always bustling too. I’dhelped out there temporarily the year before, when she’d had a bunch of scheduling issues with employees, but I was glad they only needed me in the café now.
