1. Things to Remember at Your New Job

ONE

THINGS TO REMEMBER AT YOUR NEW JOB

#4 a slice isnt the Same as a twist

Four months earlier

“ T ell me it’s over this time.”

Rochelle Ortiz twirled her straw in the Long Island iced tea, then took a long sip as she peered up at me.

About to start her shift at Diamonds, a strip club a few blocks away, my cousin had stopped into Opal for a free drink and to celebrate the fact that I’d just been promoted from shot girl/go-go dancer to bartender two nights a week. After recovering enough from ACL surgery to walk around, tonight was my first shift, which had mostly consisted of Tom, the middle-aged owner, teaching me the ropes. Sure, it took me three times to get Rochelle’s drink right. But I figured that wasn’t too bad for day one.

I shrugged as I wiped down the bar, trying to remember if I’d already cleaned this part again after spilling a bottle of bitters earlier. Opal was an odd blend of new and old, with the battered walnut bar top and exposed brick blending with velvet chaise couches and the sleek platforms built into the big violet wall at the far end of the lounge. Tuesdays and Thursdays were slow nights, and I was supposed to be helping to get things ready for the weekend rush.

So it wasn’t my best first day on the job. But I was trying.

“I think it’s over,” I said. “I mean, he kind of broke up with me too, don’t you think?”

“No, Shawn did that thing he always does.” Rochelle tapped her long nails on the bar. This week, they were pink with blue stripes that reminded me of a Barbie-themed racecar. “He loses interest, tells you he wants a space. Then he comes back a few months later looking to get laid. This time, you busted your knee, so he can’t brag anymore that he’s banging someone on Broadway. I could have put money on him asking for another ‘break.’”

I sighed. I couldn’t argue. Shawn was just one of many cycles I had seemed to slip back into lately.

“Well, this time, I’m done,” I said firmly. “And I told him that, too.”

“You did?”

I knew why Rochelle was surprised. Saying no to Shawn Vamos had never been something I was good at.

I chewed my lip. “It’s going to sound weird, but it was the music.”

My cousin gawked, making her thick, curly hair shake around her shoulders. “The music?”

“Yeah. We were driving back from Long Island, and he put on that shitty EDM he thinks is so hot. And I’m sitting there, and he knows I don’t like Dead Mouse Seven or whatever the guy’s name is, and he doesn’t turn it off or even ask me what I’d like to hear.” I screwed up my face, like I’d tasted something bad. “It’s small, but I realized that in all the car rides I’ve taken with him, Shawn has never once checked what kind of music I like. Just put on whatever he wanted, and that was that. So I was done.”

I shrugged. It really was that simple.

I hoped.

Rochelle took another long sip through her straw. “I mean, normally, I’d say that’s small potatoes, but I’m actually proud of you, mami . Fuck Shawn. He’s an asshole, and I’m glad you’re done with that loser.” She finished the drink with a noisy slurp and set it on the bar in front of me. “All right, I’m out. Gotta get over to the club. Sure you don’t want to audition?”

I tipped my head from side to side. Rochelle, a former dancer like myself, had been lobbying for me to join her at Diamonds since I got my brace off. The money was good, she said, especially for someone like me—a born flirt.

But I wasn’t sold. I blamed it on the six more weeks of PT I was supposed to do, but really, I just wasn’t ready to graduate from performance art to full-on exhibitionism. Not yet.

I traded kisses with my cousin. “Call me this weekend. We’ll go out.”

“Bet.”

Then she was gone, leaving me to continue serving drinks and daydream about the career that, up until two months ago, I thought I was going to have. The shiny wood reminded me of a stage I’d once danced on, and my fingernails were bright pink, just like the shoes I wore in that show. A community theater production of The Wizard of Oz . I was twelve, I think. I played a munchkin.

It’s funny. I barely managed to pass the sixth grade that year (still didn’t understand what the hell a square root was), but I remembered that choreo like it was yesterday.

“Joni, it’s last call.”

Step, one, pas de bourrée. Step, kick, plié, shuffle step. Turn, three, shuffle step, leap. I popped up onto my toes, my muscles silently begging to follow along with my fingers.

God, I missed dancing.

“Joni!” The husky voice of Tom, the owner of Opal Lounge, yanked me out of my inner grumbling.

“Who! What? Oh, shit!” The pint glass I was filling with club soda was overfilling onto the bar top. I jumped, barely avoided splashing myself with seltzer, then handed the wet glass to an annoyed-looking customer.

He didn’t leave a tip.

I couldn’t say I was surprised.

“You sure can zone out better than anyone I ever met, kiddo,” Tom remarked as he pulled a roll of cling wrap out of a drawer. “But I told you, if you’re gonna pour drinks, you gotta pay attention.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” I said for what was probably the thousandth time that night as I wiped up the mess. “I’m just kinda overwhelmed. First night and all. But I’m trying really hard, I promise.”

I offered him the biggest, brightest smile I could muster, the one that usually got me free coffee or scooted me into auditions five minutes late.

Tom might have been a gruff old guy, but he was no more immune to that grin than most. His face reddened over the edges of his silver handlebar mustache. “Let them know it’s last call, will you? I want to get out of here before four.”

“No prob, Bob.”

I turned to the mirror behind the liquor bottles, adjusted the girls in my favorite green crop top that matched my eyes, fluffed my dark hair around my shoulders, and retouched my pout with pink gloss. It was science: a little cleavage and lipstick increased my tips by a factor of…well, I don’t know. I never was never that good with math. They got a little honey, I got a little money. Simple arithmetic, right?

Slowly, I worked my way through the last few customers. I managed rum and cokes for some college kids that didn’t seem too horrible. I’m pretty sure I messed up that last round of cosmos for the ladies’ night, but they were too gone to care.

“Last call,” I told the patron sitting at the far end.

All I got was a view of silky brown curls while he stared down at a tumbler of something brown over half-melted ice.

“Hey, handsome,” I tried again. “Can I getcha anything else?”

When he still didn’t answer, I snapped my fingers under his gaze. The man jerked upright to stare at me with the biggest, deepest, chocolatiest brown eyes framed by thin wire-framed glasses. Looking into them was like falling into the coziest blanket on the planet…naked. Like staring at two steaming cups of hot fudge begging to be poured all over my…sundae.

Sure, that’s what I was thinking of. A nice, wholesome, PG-flavored sundae.

Until I got a look at the rest of him, and my brain zoomed from PG to NC-17 in half a second.

His lightly tanned skin was smooth, dappled with tiny freckles across cheekbones that could slice through any glass in the bar and a jaw rough with only the slightest hint of stubble. A neck corded with lean muscle and tension was literally buttoned up in a pressed blue shirt, which also pulled dee-liciously across a broad chest, even broader shoulders, and the forearms that flexed as he turned his glass back and forth between large, capable-looking hands.

His face was rugged yet refined. Sharp lines tempered by a few almost gentle elements. Some innate brutality soothed by a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a necktie.

It was like someone put a librarian’s costume on a UFC fighter. The combination shouldn’t work…but hot damn, did it ever.

Did I have a thing for sexy nerds? Maybe. Nothing was more fun than corrupting the dorks my grandmother hired to help me pass math and English. They never lasted more than a few weeks, since Nonna generally kicked them out once the tutoring lessons morphed into make-out sessions.

I always got an A in those.

The customer’s velvety eyes blinked through his lenses, and I swear I got a distinct whiff of hot cocoa.

“Did you say it was last call?” he asked.

The chocolate scent grew stronger. His deep voice was that smooth. In the back of my mind, I heard the opening piano riff of Sinatra’s version of “All the Way.” Cheesy, I know. But you’d be a sucker for oldies too if you were raised by a couple of Italian immigrants who graduated high school in 1957.

“Hello?”

I refocused. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

Those brown eyes watched me, deep and brooding. “I asked why you were staring at me.”

“Oh, sorry.” I tapped my fingers against my hip, feeling like I’d been caught shoplifting, not staring out into space. “Just zoned out there for a minute, you know?”

The customer frowned. “Not really. I never ‘zone out.’”

I balked. “Never? Not even when you’re staring at a drink you barely touched?”

He shook his head. “No.”

I waited for him to answer my little dig about his drink, but he didn’t. “Lucky for you, then. I do it, like, all the time. It’s pretty inconvenient.”

“Surely not all the time,” the man repeated as he pushed his glasses up his nose, which would have been perfect if not for a charmingly crooked bridge, like he’d been in a fight once, and it had never healed correctly.

Interesting. Was Clark Kent a fighter? Or was that only when he turned into Superman?

“Yes, all the time ,” I parroted him right back, this time with a really bad English accent, even though he didn’t have one.

I used the same voice when I teased my sister’s English husband. But Xavier at least rolled his eyes and chuckled at my shitty imitation. This guy just looked at me, zero comprehension in those big, beautiful browns.

Some people really can’t take a joke.

“Ah, never mind,” I said. “So, yeah. It’s last call.”

“I gathered.”

“Well, do you want anything else?”

He examined his still-full glass. “I don’t think so. I didn’t particularly care for this anyway.”

“I can see that,” I said. “What did you order?”

The man rotated his glass another half inch on its cardboard coaster. “I asked for something strong. That gentleman brought me this.”

“Hard day?”

The man’s jaw tightened. “Hard night. I got off at two.”

Graveyard shift, I figured. Probably a train operator or maybe a custodian somewhere, even with the collared shirt and tie. Yeah, that’d be tough on anyone.

Without asking for permission, I picked up his glass and sniffed. “Oh, you poor man, that shit is toxic.”

I laughed. He did not.

Tough room.

“FYI, hon, if you want something good, you have to ask for it,” I told him. “Otherwise, you’ll just get well crap. Hold on—I’ll get you something that isn’t gasoline.”

The man reared, then calmed when he caught me watching him. “That was a joke, wasn’t it?”

I snorted. “Um, yeah. We don’t actually serve gasoline. So long as we’re clear.”

I dumped his glass out in the sink before getting a fresh one and moved to the other side of the bar in search of the few bottles of decent booze we carried.

Glenlivet or Macallan? When rich men were trying to impress young women, they tended to order the latter. At least, Shawn always did.

“I would definitely hit that.”

I turned around, confronted with a posse of dudes who really wanted to be that kind of man. It was like they all ordered the same “Financial Douche” costume from Party City, complete with the striped shirts, loosened ties, and overpriced suits. One, two, three, four investment bankers looking to score.

Sure, fine, I’d gone home with a few of those in my day. The investment banker. The car salesman. The party promoter. And so on.

They were all the same at their core. Men who thought the world was made specifically for them to use as they saw fit, who swaggered around New York looking for their next buck and their next prize.

Why not be the prize myself, even for just one night? Or ten years, in Shawn’s case.

I grimaced. No, I was not going to think about Shawn right now. Not after he’d broken my heart—or maybe just my pride—for the millionth and final time.

No, no, no.

Maybe this one wasn’t an asshole. Maybe he was just gross, the way he was ogling my boobs. They weren’t even that big.

Down the bar, my chocolate-eyed customer watched our interaction carefully. I winked at him as I pulled the Macallan off the shelf, but he didn’t smile or anything. He didn’t look away either.

“Look at that,” said the Finance Bro Number One. “I haven’t seen an ass that nice since we were in Vegas.”

I tensed, then turned from the liquor bottles, Macallan in hand. “Can I help you?”

The speaker, who had short blond hair with at least a metric ton of gel, offered a white-capped smile. “Sure. Can I get a to-go box?”

“For what?”

We didn’t sell food beyond stale peanuts, and he didn’t have anything with him.

“I’d like to take you home with me, baby,” he said, then glanced at his buddies, who obediently chuckled at the lame come-on.

I rolled my eyes. “Good one. But I’m actually helping someone right?—”

“We’re having a little after-party at my spot around the corner,” Gel Head interrupted, leaning across the bar so he could drag a finger down my forearm. “Wanna come?”

“Why? Is your mom gonna be there?” I cut back, stepping out of reach. “Hands off, fun boy.”

I glanced over to where Tom was, but my boss had disappeared to the back office, leaving me out front alone for the first time all night. Of course.

“Oh, we got a hot one tonight. Come on, baby. How often does a girl like you get to party in a penthouse? Where do you live, a basement in Queens?”

I scowled. As it happened, my grandma’s spare room in the Bronx—but fuck him anyway. “On the corner of Tenth and none of your goddamn business. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

I focused on pouring Mr. Chocolate Eyes’s drink, trying to ignore the twist of something sour in my gut. Like that time I ate nothing but oranges for two weeks in order to drop five pounds before an audition. I didn’t even get the part, and all that citrus gave me heartburn. Apparently, so did assholes.

Gel Head followed me down the bar, then touched my bare shoulder this time.

“Yo!” I slapped his hand away, tossing a plastic bowl of cut limes to the floor. “Looky, no touchy! This ain’t for sale, asshole.”

“Aw, I love a bit of spark. And you got plenty. Don’t she, boys?”

“She said to leave her alone.”

We all turned to find Mr. Chocolate Eyes standing right next to Gel Head, glaring at the man like he was gum on the bottom of his shoe. He was taller than I realized, at least three or four inches over six feet, easily towering over the rat-faced hacks next to him.

They shriveled like raisins. Every last one of them.

“You should go,” he told them. “Unless you’d like them to stay.”

When he turned to me, those gorgeous brown eyes met mine and were full of clear, honest concern.

No motives. No games.

“I would not,” I confirmed with a smile.

My surprise savior turned back to the group of four. “Well?”

He set a palm flat on the bar in a way I didn’t think he meant to be threatening, but it certainly came off that way. You know, the way things normally do when you’re obviously stacked and able to kick the other guy’s ass with one hand tied behind your back.

Gel Head swallowed. “Fine, yeah. On our way out, man.”

Mr. Chocolate Eyes and I both watched the men fumble their way to the exit.

“Well, now the drink is on me,” I said, handing him his Macallan. “Thanks for the rescue. They were harmless, though.”

Maybe not totally harmless. That sour feeling had lessened some, but it wasn’t completely gone.

My customer accepted the glass, put it on a new coaster, and sank onto another stool in front of me. “I didn’t like how they were treating you.”

“I’ve gotten a lot worse; I can promise you that.”

His expression shone full of something like sympathy, but not quite. “Well, someone like you shouldn’t.”

Someone like me?

What did that mean?

What kind of girl did he think I was?

Someone worth saving, I realized. Someone worth protecting.

With a hot face, I picked up a clean glass that suddenly needed a lot of polishing. “I guess I owe you one, then.”

“Owe me?”

That chocolate gaze melted over my body, then floated back up. Unlike the sleazebags he’d just dismissed, there was nothing cheap about it. He didn’t hide what he was doing, but it wasn’t lewd. Just appreciation, pure and simple.

And hot. Very, very hot.

When he was finished, his gaze met mine again. And didn’t move at all. “What could you possibly owe me for doing the right thing?”

We blinked at each other across the bar top like a couple of stunned deer. I didn’t need to look to know my nipples were basically conducting a staring contest of their own. Meanwhile, my brain had gone completely blank as I searched for something, anything , to say in return.

And there was…nada. For the first time that I could remember, my racing thoughts were perfectly still.

“I—um—er—” I cleared my throat, suddenly annoyed.

I’d had about enough of this. I was Joni freakin’ Zola. Neighborhood flirt, voted “Most Likely to Marry for Money” in her senior yearbook, she who had charmed her way out of not one but three speeding tickets. I was not about to be tongue-tied because of a guy.

“Here’s your payback.” With a quick glance to make sure Tom was still in the back, I popped up onto my toes and across the bar to deliver a quick peck to Mr. Chocolate Eyes’s cheek.

Or so I planned.

Instead of sitting still like a good boy, he turned, and our lips mashed together in a—well, I wouldn’t call something that awkward a kiss. More like a collision of soft lips, five-o’clock shadow, and that chocolatey scent married with scotch, soap, and man .

It lasted less than a second. At which point I flew back to my side of the bar as if I’d been shocked and found my target standing up again, fingers to his mouth like he’d just been stung by a bee.

“I—” He took a step backward. “You?—”

“Sorry,” I blurted. “I was, um, going for your cheek. You know, like some men ask for a kiss on the cheek in repayment for things?”

“Some men…” Mr. Chocolate Eyes drifted off, clearly still stunned, though his shoulders relaxed a bit. “People pay back favors in kisses?”

“Sure,” I said as I twirled a bit of hair around my finger. “My grandfather had me do it all the time when he was alive.”

Now I was comparing my knight in shining blue button-down to a grandpa. Smooth.

Mr. Chocolate Eyes seemed to meditate on that for a moment. “Well, then, I suppose I owe you one now.”

“A kiss?”

I’m not going to lie. At the idea of kissing him, every cell in my body basically jumped up and screamed, “Encore!”

“No. You bought me a drink. I helped you with those men. You gave me a…whatever that was. Now it’s my turn to owe you, according to your calculations.”

Math joke. I knew he was smart. A big, delicious, super-stacked nerd.

Eyes still glued to mine, he picked up the drink I’d just set in front of him and poured every bit of it directly down his throat.

“Jesus,” I said. “Savor it, why don’t you? That’s an eighteen-year-old scotch.”

When he set the glass back down, his eyes were watering, and his voice was hoarse as he spoke. “It is much better than the other one.”

Fuck it , I thought. I had some bravado left in here somewhere. Might as well put it to good use.

“I get off in thirty minutes,” I said quickly. “Do you, um, want to go somewhere? Get to know each other better?”

I traced a fingertip across the bar provocatively, then leaned over, giving him the good solid view down my shirt that the previous investment dicks had been hoping for earlier.

But those chocolate eyes didn’t move an inch. Instead, he offered a shy, sweet not-quite-smile that suddenly made the dim lounge feel very, very bright.

“It’s all right.” He pushed his glasses up his nose and stood. “I’ll pay you back another time.”

I watched as he dropped a couple of bills next to his empty glass, then turned to leave.

Lord, he looked almost as good walking away as approaching. The man had an ass that wouldn’t quit. Like two scoops of ice cream molded specifically for my hands to grab.

“Wait.” The word jumped out of my throat.

Mr. Chocolate Eyes turned. “Yes?”

“What’s your name?”

One brown brow lifted. “My name?”

I dug deep and unearthed the smile that I delivered to any man when I wanted something.

The stranger swallowed but seemed otherwise unmoved.

Damn.

“Yeah,” I said. “Your name. I like to know the names of people who owe me something. I’m Joni.”

I held out a hand. But instead of accepting it, he put two fingers on the crisp hundred-dollar bills on the bar and pushed them toward me—at least twice what was necessary for the one shitty drink he’d ordered and the much better one I’d bought him.

“My name is Nathan.”

I swallowed as I picked up the cash. “And you’ll be back…Nathan?”

That half-smile appeared again as he nodded. “I’ll be back. I always pay my debts.”