No Weddings (6 page)

Dammit.
Just when I thought I had my shit together, something (or someone) proved me wrong. I silently cursed fate for throwing me into this situation. But I was unable to do anything but suck it up and deal, so I followed her inside and back into her kitchen.

She pulled a second, larger silver platter up from a shelf beneath one of her long counters and began loading the first tray with a balanced assortment of cupcakes. “Well, don’t just stand there—help me stock up. You’re carrying one this time. That was amazing, by the way. You’re a genius. They all wanted a card.”

I blindly obeyed her, lining cupcakes onto the platter, giving my body time to rush blood back into my brain so I could think rationally.
Business. Focus on her business.
“And those people are your walk-in customers. Pennies. You want the big bucks? Solicit backdoor business: hotels and restaurants. They could be your biggest regular customers and might mean the difference between your survival and failure.”

Pausing with a cupcake in midtransfer, she gave me one of those world-class scowls again. “I thought you wanted my exclusivity.”

“We do. As the team member of an event-planning company. But you can still supply cakes and cupcakes as menu items for restaurants and hotels who don’t have a pastry chef and want to outsource.”

“Oh.” She blinked, processing my suggestion as she returned to loading her tray.

While making sure to load two of each kind, I glanced beyond her at the enormous cake with green icing that I’d watched her finish yesterday. “What’s that one for?”

She looked up as I pointed. A blush spread along her cheeks. “For me.”

Confused, I cocked my head.

“I wanted to create a dragon. That’s part of the body.”

All I saw was a rectangle. “Where’s the rest of it?”

“In my head. It’s so intricate that I wanted to get the scales right before moving on to the detail in the tail, the claws on the arms and legs, the webbing in the wings, and finally the head, complete with horns and flames coming from its flaring nostrils.”

“Wow.” Based on the beautiful scales she’d done on the body, I imagined the final cake. “Where will you serve it?”

She tilted her head to the side, her gaze unfocused. “Not sure. If I accept your offer, I won’t have a chance for anyone to see it unless one of your clients requests a dragon.”

My attention focused on only one of her words. “
If
you accept our offer?”

“I haven’t even read the contract yet.”

I lifted her loaded platter, shoving it in front of her, forcing her to take it with her hands. “Well, hurry up, Ms. Martin. We have more unwitting customers to ensnare in our cupcake trap. And I have to make you feel so indebted to me for my brilliant assistance that you have no choice but to say yes.”

“
You’re
indebted to
me
, smartass. You’ve eaten how many cupcakes?”

Unable to think of a quick retort to her valid point, I blinked. Then my thoughts clarified, and I dropped a bomb. “I expect you to read that contract the moment you return home today. I’ve moved our deadline for your response up to tomorrow noon.”

Her tone was instantly glacial. “If that’s your decision, then it’s a no.”

While walking out of her kitchen, I stumbled as my mind processed her words. I spun back around and leaned my filled tray back toward her. “I’m sorry. Did you want the invaluable marketing and business advice to stop?”

Her eyes narrowed. “No.”

I arched a brow. “Then that’s a yes?”

“No.” She took a deep breath and sighed, nodding toward the front of the shop. “That’s a yes for you helping me now. A maybe for me helping you later.”

“Sunday. Noon,” I pushed.

She gave me a steady stare. “We’ll see.”

I exhaled a breath, relieved we were back on track again. Note to self: hardball tactics bring out the Ice Queen.

T
he rain had dissipated by the time my wheels hit the pavement that night for my shift at Loading Zone. Shiny reflections lit up Philly’s revived Old City Arts District where I called home four nights a week, for at least the next few months anyway.

Fifteen minutes from my house wasn’t bad. The ride was twenty to Kristen’s. Ninety to Mom and Dad’s on Fifth. Twelve to Sweet Dreams. Yeah, my head constantly spat out numbers. No surprise, the last was a hot little number I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about all day.

I shook my head, clearing it of all things Hannah. Random thoughts had never skewed my focus before, and I refused to let an unexpected reaction to a girl I barely knew send it haywire. My world needed to remain exactly the way it was.

By the time I turned my bike down the back alley and eased between Ben’s Escalade and our bartender Lisa’s Smart Car—yeah, we got the irony, figuring the two cancelled each other out in Energy Karma Points—my head had cleared. The cool night air after a steady drizzle for the better part of the day helped too. Something about that heavy mineral tang in the air made me inhale deeply and feel reset again.

I parked my bike. Two wide-angle security cameras and three floodlights bathed the space. We wanted it bright as daylight to keep the vehicles parked in our six spaces as secure as possible. Barbacks coming and going with empties to recycle and trash to toss, not to mention rotations of our security staff, also kept the perimeter of our building secure.

My gaze fell on the rusty, disintegrating sign that had inspired Loading Zone’s name. At Kiki’s insistence, we’d had the thing sprayed with some kind of matte-finish coating to prevent further decay. But all the red lettering was intact on the white backdrop. I grinned, remembering how too many beers and lack of inspiration had us all sitting on crates out back tossing rocks at the sign in target practice before our name epiphany struck.

My smile faded when I noticed the back door was ajar. Again. I strode over and yanked it open, kicked the rock aside, and let it slam shut behind me.

“Ben, the back door was wide open again!” My shout bounced along the polished concrete floors and steel paneling to reach Ben’s office and his all-hearing ears, even over the loud music pulsing from up front.

Ben glanced up from the scattered paperwork on his desk. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Tracy’s been in and out stocking and told me she’d secure it when she’s done.”

It was well past nine. Stocking should’ve been done hours ago. “Well, either she forgot, or she’s the slowest worker in the world and needs to be fired. I’m a bad guy. I have a gun. I just emptied your safe and shot you ’cause I got sloppy and you saw my face.” I dropped a finger gun his direction and fired it with a snap of my wrist. “Bang. You’re dead.”

He gave me a dramatic eye roll. “Fine. I’ll have another talk with her.”

“Good idea,” I said over my shoulder as I left, heading into the employee area.

It took me exactly ninety seconds to change into the black, tight T-shirt we all wore, stash my stuff in the locker, and be behind the bar, filling my first order.

Lisa was a blur of motion, filling the orders of people already packed into the club. And without skipping a beat, I entered my Zen Zone—my private domain of Loading Zone—thinking about nothing but the next drink. This wasn’t work for me—it was stress relief.

I didn’t let pressure get to me here; I had plenty of that kind of demand at school. No drama made it into my ears, nor rumors past my lips. I tried my damnedest to remain a personable Switzerland, and everyone knew and respected me for it.

I filled my first tickets, which were electronically delivered on tablet screens mounted to the bar, as I rattled off beautiful numbers in my head.
Two Silver Bullets: buck a piece. Vodka Tonic: two. Strawberry Daiquiri, Cosmo, and Screaming Orgasm shooters: three each.

No, I wasn’t counting points. Sure as shit wasn’t calculating drink prices. Each pretty calculation was our take per drink in dollars. I owned a piece of this cash cow, and whenever I made drinks, I saw dollar signs flowing into our pockets. For simplicity, we created our prices from how much net we could make off of a sale. And I rounded things up or down in my head.

It was a game I played to pass the time, but it made every night I worked fly by. And we raked in the dough like nobody’s business. Seriously. No one else in our vicinity made as much money as we did. Because we didn’t get greedy with our prices, we ran a clean bar, and made the patrons happy.

And as it turned out, the rusted-metal industrial look happened to be eco-chic. Who knew? Kiki, apparently. Rather than throw out decaying twisted sheets of metal in the small warehouse, she repurposed it all. It covered the bar top, the walls in several places (but let the worn red brick show through in others), and even lined the walls up three feet from the floor in the bathrooms.

And don’t get me started on the bathrooms. Troughs of molded steel sprayed with a protective coating
to protect the rust
—works of art according to Kiki—formed the sinks, with motion-sensor faucets made to look like spigots pouring from the wall.

Maple-wood accents and concrete floors that had been roughed up to prevent slipping, along with all of the rest of her suggested décor, made the place just the right amount of “shabby” according to Kiki. The customers, and all their flowing money, resoundingly agreed. So did
Architectural Digest
,
Design Magazine
, and
Coco Eco Magazine
, who’d clamored to do feature articles before and around our opening.

That was almost seven months ago. Things flowed seamlessly now. My role remained as mostly a silent partner and part-time bartender. I’d fronted a larger monetary investment to be out of the spotlight and work when I wanted, with the luxury to stop working anytime I decided. Ben put in less money and ran the place as he saw fit, taking the more visible role. Our third partner, my dad, stayed relatively undisclosed and uninvolved. The amount of money we made kept him a very silent and an extremely satisfied investor.

“Hey, Cade.”

Flirty and sexy Jillian walked up to the bar, displaying her pushed-up rack for my approval. Which she didn’t in any way need, but it was our thing.

“Lookin’ fine, Jill Baby.” The same words were exchanged every night. But it made her beam with happiness, which made me smile, cementing the positive ritual between us.

Her T-shirt was a black, ultrathin baby tee, standard-issue ripped like all the girls’ shirts to reveal a glimpse of the hot-pink pushup lace that cupped her perky C’s. No, I’d never personally verified that fact. Yes, my eyes, hands, and mouth could nail with accuracy the cup size of any woman. But in this case, she was an employee.

And Ben and I had taken our hiring process very seriously. First, we established written guidelines, then agreed not to vary from them. All the waitresses had to be C, D, or DD cups. Not smaller or larger. Then, among those candidates, they needed letters of recommendation from a former employer but couldn’t have worked for more than two of our competitors. They also had to have a great personality that never slipped during their shift, be honest and loyal to a fault, and serve drinks to a customer’s satisfaction like their life depended on it.

Not too much to ask, really. We demanded a lot from those we employed. We also paid them handsomely for it. Not many bar owners gave their employees—every last one of them, from the bartenders to the janitors—a percentage of the take.

But we did.

It had always seemed a sound theory of mine, one I’d tossed around to my dad on our occasional talks. He seemed impressed with the notion every time I’d brought it up but had never heard it in practice before. Now he was a part of the test run in action.

Our experimental gamble paid off. We didn’t earn less by giving away more. We made more.
Hand-over-fist more.
Amazing how motivated every cog in the machine became when a portion of every dollar flowed into their pockets just like it did ours, in an appropriate percentage to their level of contribution and ranking, of course. But it didn’t matter how much one received compared to others in our company. Even the barbacks and janitors made way more than any competitor offered.

Happy employees equaled happy customers which, in turn again, equaled happy employees. The sound business theory had proven itself in practice.

Damn.
10:30 p.m. The time seemed to drag tonight.
Kamikaze shooter: three bucks.
A dozen Sex on the Beach shots: thirty-six bucks?

I glanced up at April, another one of our waitresses, then pointedly at the drinks, opening my hands up in question. She grinned. “Bachelorette party.”

“Niiice. Keep ’em happy, my friend.”

She winked. “Always do.”

April picked up the tray, and I watched her tight ass weave through the crowd in those low-cut jeans. No, I didn’t want to tap that fine body. It was pure common sense from an owner’s perspective that we did not fraternize with the employees. It also fell under the no-drama, no-gossip personal clauses I had. I’d even inserted the rule into our business plan, and Ben had agreed, adopting the standard as well.

I’d never once thought about breaking that rule. And nothing in the world would ever make me. I enjoyed the bar too much. Was proud of what we’d accomplished, taking it from a figment of our drunken imaginations one night into a larger-than-life reality.