1. Mattie
I’d been in a cat-and-mouse game for over a year. Although, if you asked me, “cat and mouse” was a bit of a misnomer. For one thing, the expression assumed that the mouse was small and weak—pathetic. But just because I was on the run, it didn’t mean I was the one lacking power in our “relationship.” If anything, I had his handsome neck under my mousy foot.
For another thing, cat and mouse assumed that the cat was toying with its prey, batting it around and playing with the poor creature before it devoured it in one swipe of its clever tongue. But there was no playing here. Ghost had tried to catch me, and he’d even had me between his paws a few times, but in the end, I’d eluded him.
So, was I really in a cat-and-mouse game? Not really. We were in a Ghost and Bunny game, and it was a very different kind of contest. The kind that amused me almost as much as it terrified me, and although I’d managed to slip through his fingers like they were actually incorporeal, I had stayed on my guard.
As fun as it was to watch Ghost’s handsome face turn purple with rage every time I managed to give him the slip, I really hoped that my last stunt had finally deterred him from trying anymore. I had to assume it had, because I’d last seen him in May, and it was October, now. I’d eat my bunny ears if he bothered with me anymore. No matter how much my parents were offering for bounty hunters to pick me up and bring me back to New York, was it really worth the money if I kept handing his toned ass to him?
“Feel like handing someone’s ass to them?” Dylan asked.
I blinked, banishing thoughts of Ghost and his icy blue eyes. The steady hum of chatter and laughter accompanied by Bavarian folk music cranked back to an eleven in my ears, and I looked up from the order counter. Dylan stood in front of me, his soft features pulled into a grimace, and his bushy eyebrows contracted together. I blinked at him. “Do what, now?”
“Ass. Hand it.” He gestured behind him to the crowded Biergarten tent. He was wearing the same lederhosen server’s uniform the other waiters in our tent wore, and it somewhat unkindly accentuated his authentic beer gut.
I looked to where he was pointing, to the full tables lined up in the Oktoberfest tent. My gaze landed on Beth where she stood at a table full of rowdy frat boys. She had her hands folded over her dirndl uniform and her chin tucked close to her chest. It appeared that several of the boys had gotten sloppy drunk. And belligerent.
I threw my pen down on the counter. “I got this.”
Dylan’s expression shifted into gleeful anticipation. “Fuck yeah. Here she goes.”
I skirted around the order counter, breezing past patrons with frothy glass mugs and raucous groups of tourists. The pungent odor of beer mingled sourly with a shocking amount of BO given that customers had to be over the age of twenty-one to enter our tent and weren’t pubescent middle schoolers. I straightened my green apron over my uniform, pulling it down over my breasts a little and making sure to hike up my fluffy dress to show more thigh than was technically appropriate.
I sauntered past long tables stuffed full of increasingly inebriated partiers and came to a stop next to Beth’s table.
“… cost eighty dollars, sweetie. You got that stuffed down your bra?” One of the frat boys—short, stocky, entitled—gestured to his “Oktoberfest is the Best” T-shirt that had been fashioned to look like cheap lederhosen. From what I could tell, it looked like twenty-one-year-old Beth had spilled a beer on him. It happened—the mugs were fucking heavy.
Beth tucked a frizzy curl behind her ear, her face red and every inch of her vibrating with obvious discomfort. “I’m really sorry, sir.”
“Sorry doesn’t fix my shirt, bitch,” he threw back loudly.
A few people around them went silent in shock, but his buddies seemed to think this was the best thing since beer bongs. They guffawed loudly, some of them bent over and snickering, and the others making “ooh” sounds like he’d just handed out Leavenworth’s hottest burn.
I cleared my throat, leaning my hip against the paper-covered table so my skirt hiked up a little higher. “Something wrong here, boys?”
Mr. Fancy Shirt settled his eyes on my thigh. Then my face. I was pretty sure I saw drool pool along his lower lip. “You in charge?”
“Always,” I smiled coyly.
The snickering around the table turned suggestive, and the idiot with the beer-stained shirt brought his eyebrows straight to his sandy-blond hairline. “Well, what are you going to do about it? Your waitress spilled beer everywhere, and I just bought this shirt.”
I glanced down at his cheesy event shirt, lingering over his body until he drew back uncomfortably. Then I met his dull, hazel eyes. “We apologize for the unfortunate incident, sir. The beer steins are quite heavy. Accidents happen.”
“Oh, right,” the frat boy rolled his eyes and leaned back. “The girls can’t carry the beer steins.” He gave me an unforgiving glare. “Maybe you should have the men do the hard work, then. And have your bitch pay me for my shirt.”
“Ooh,” the party boys chorused, filling the rapidly quieting space with their soft jeers.
My answering, tight smile had the potential to snap in half with an errant breeze. “I’ll tell you what. If you can carry more steins than I can, then I’ll pay for your shirt.”
He snorted softly, folding his arms over his wet shirt. “Is that some kind of joke?”
“No joke,” I smiled again, this time toothy and predatory. “I’ll even let you use a tray.”
His unremarkable eyes zigzagged down my body, taking in my tall, thin build and stick arms. “A shirt and free beers for my table.”
His “bros” erupted into hoots, slamming the table and starting a chant. “Beer girl, beer girl, beer girl!”
I held out my hand for him to shake. “It’s a deal, hot stuff.”
The answering cacophony of excited cheers seemed to pick up additional onlookers from around us as I shook the idiot’s hand. It was just as fleshy and moist as I had expected it to be. Like palming warm bologna. I gestured for him to follow me to the counter just as our manager met me on the way, her middle-aged features a caricature of worry.
With gritted teeth, she hissed, “What are you doing now?”
Oh, yeah. I was on the verge of being fired… for exactly what I was doing now. But what was I supposed to do? Let people be assholes?
“You can’t change assholes,” she whispered harshly, keeping pace with me. She didn’t have to wear our degrading, fluffy uniform, and her squeaky white tennis shoes worked overtime as she pumped her short legs to keep up with me. Her wiry, black hair had little tendrils of unruly gray that shot out from her messy bun, and the fine lines around her eyes had crinkled in disapproval.
“I’m not changing him,” I answered with a sniff. “I’m teaching him a lesson.”
“Oh my God,” she moaned.
“I’ll win, don’t worry,” I assured her seriously.
“I’m not worried about you winning, Matt,” she snapped back. “I’m worried about you pissing off our customers.”
We were almost at the counter, so I stopped and put a hand on her shoulder. “Lisa, I mean this with the least amount of snark possible. That unbuttered piece of white bread was born pissed off. It can’t get any worse.”
The chanting picked up in volume suddenly, filling the tent with the crowd’s demands.
“Beer girl, beer girl, beer girl!”
Lisa groaned an unintelligible string of curses and zoomed off for the back rooms, presumably to fret and try to come up with a damage control plan. Or she was shredding my paycheck.
I met Kappa Dick at the counter where his buddies had crowded around him and were slapping the table in time with their chanting. He stacked six full beer steins on the black tray, which in its own right would be heavy and unwieldy, and then to a roar of approval from his minions, stacked another four on top of those, balancing them precariously. He looked up at me with a twitch of his eyebrow before stacking a third layer—two more beer steins on his ten, making twelve in total.
The room went nuts, cheering him on and encouraging him to lift the tray without spilling any of the artisan brew. He had sixty pounds on that tray at least, and with two hands, he hefted the loaded tray, spilling some of the liquid out of the top tier of his tower, but managed to get his arms under it. Staggering a bit, he teetered over to the nearest table.
The occupants of the table clapped and whistled, pulling all the steins off the tray for him so he didn’t lose his balance and topple over. Then he looked over at me and flipped me the bird.
“I love this day,” Dylan said with undisguised savagery next to me. “It’s a good day. Really. It’s like Christmas.”
Beth had gone behind the counter and started lining up beer steins, her features equally appreciative and amused. “You sure about this? They’re going to be really mad.”
“I hope so,” I answered cheerily.
The tent started up the chanting again, egging me on with shouts of, “Beer girl, beer girl, beer girl!” Beth lined up thirteen full mugs, the froth sloshing over the rims. As the excitement in the tent reached a fever pitch, drawing a crowd from outside where ticket holders taste-tested artisan brews, I lined up the first six mugs.
“Beer girl, beer girl, beer girl!”
I turned all the handles inward, making a beer stein flower with bubbly petals and joined handles for a center. With a wrist as thin as mine, it was easy to slip it between two of the mugs and then grab all six handles with my long fingers. Beth helped to stack the next six on top in the same configuration.
Beer girl, beer girl, beer girl!
I grasped the second tier of six handles with my right hand, adjusting and making sure my grip was tight.
Beer girl, beer girl, beer girl!
Beth met my eyes over the tower of glass. “You ready?”
“Give me the last one,” I grinned.
“No fucking way!” one of the asshole’s friends shouted from somewhere to my right.
Beth stacked the last stein right in the middle of the second layer, wedging it firmly in the space between the six glasses. “Thanks, Beth,” I winked.
When I lifted them off the counter, to be fair, my muscles fairly screamed in protest at the weight. But with the mugs pressed together and balanced back against my body, it was all too easy to lift them, swing around, and then breeze straight past the collection of entitled frat babies who looked on in stunned horror. The sweet, slightly nauseating smell of beer right up against my face filled my nose as I sashayed through the crowd.
The tent went absolutely feral. Clapping, shouting, whistling, and roars of approval followed me as I smirked my way across the enormous, green-patterned tent. I made sure to go all the way to the furthest table before depositing the beers to the customers. “They’re on him,” I said with a tilt of my head to the loser behind me.
When I turned to face him, he met my gaze with silent, shaking fury. I flashed him my teeth and flipped him off. “Pay for my beers, bitch.”