8. Cassandra
I sailedthrough two shifts at the bar, glad to finish training.
While Becca had already paid for the rent, I had to pay for utilities and food and had already resorted to tapping my savings.
And I couldn’t rely on my savings for long. I didn’t have nearly enough for that. But just a shift or two bartending each week should cover my food and water. Throw in a ghost or city walking tour and I might even do some sightseeing.
The drink menu at the Crown Copper might be the death of me, though. The front side of the drink menu had been easy enough to learn; standard drinks with an upscale twist. An old-fashioned with a top shelf bourbon and a crystallized orange twist, a Tom Collins with an earl gray simple syrup, and a Moscow mule with Birchwood beer. When I’d visited the bar last time, though, I hadn’t turned it over.
“What kind of masochist would make up this menu?” I muttered at the list of adjectives written on the back of the menu.
“Um...” my manager interrupted my grumble. “That’d be me.”
I grinned at Kendall. She was only three years older than me but had worked her way up to management and even after just two days of training, I could see why. She was the type of person who could tell someone to fuck off with a smile and the person would walk away thinking, “Yeah, she’s right. I should fuck off.”
“What if someone orders a ‘spicy and luxurious?’ What am I supposed to do with that?”
Kendall shrugged. “You make them a drink with a top shelf liquor and the jalape?o simple syrup.”
“You make it sound so easy,” I muttered, shaking my head. “I’m going to get slammed one night and someone is going to ask for something lame, like ‘fruity’ and ‘oaky’ and I’m going to have a breakdown.”
“It’s fun,” Kendall said with a smile. “You get to make your own drinks. Isn’t that better than just repeating the same stuff all night?”
“I like repeating things over and over.”
“Then you should go find yourself a mill job,” Kendall said in a “fuck you,” voice and a smile.
“I don’t think the tips are as good on an assembly line.”
“Well, in the interest of getting you good tips, let me give you one. Wait until an hour before closing and convince your customers to order off the back menu. At that time of night, they’re just tipsy enough to tell you if it sucks and still tip well.”
“So, you want me to sling subpar drinks on people who are already drunk?”
“You got it. It’s the least I can do for one of Lucas’s friends.” The breezy words held a question. One I definitely would have asked had a new bartender been hoisted on my job by the owner. But no one had come out and asked outright.
“Not Lucas’s,” I admitted. “One of his teammates. I didn’t know he’d call in a favor, but he heard I was looking for work.”
“So, how did you meet Diego—” She pressed her palm to her mouth with a gasp.
“Oh, so you knew which player?”
Her cheeks flushed. “I got curious. Lucas is pretty…hands off.”
“Really? I figured the players would be in here all the time, considering a player owns the place.”
Kendall laughed. “There aren’t enough players to hang out at all of Lucas’s businesses. I don’t know if he’s some burgeoning mogul or just in love with a varied portfolio, but he owns a dozen places around town. And real estate. It’s insane. I don’t see how he has the time or the energy.”
“But if Lucas didn’t tell you, how did you find out I knew Diego?”
She pulled her phone from her back pocket, glancing around the bar before showing me the screen.
Well, I had to give it to the damn kids. They worked fast.
A few short days and the picture had made it online. Not just online, onto the Norwalk Breakers gossip site. I took the phone, pleased they at least picked a flattering picture of me. Diego, on the other hand, looked like a handsome deer in the headlights.
I wrinkled my nose. “We’re not really friends. Not exactly anyway.”
“You certainly look friendly.” Kendall took her phone back with a shrug. “Barton! You’re Rebecca Barton’s sister. I should have put that together.”
“Yep,” I confirmed. “So, you’re actually a football fan?”
My sister didn’t have a household name like Diego, but she’d shared a couple of features with him when she moved from college to professional football. A trainer following her most successful athlete and the athlete who credited her with his success. The headlines practically wrote themselves, but only the super fans remembered Becca’s name.
“I was raised a Steelers fan, but when Virginia got its own team, I switched allegiances.”
“Along with the rest of your entire family?”
She shook her head. “My dad nearly disinherited me, but he grew up in Pittsburg. He moved down here for my mom. So, how long have you known Diego? Since he was playing college ball?”
“We met once when he was in college,” I said, ducking my head to slice a lemon so Kendall didn’t catch me blushing. “Briefly. Barely. I flew to town for a game with my mom. Becca took us out to dinner, and I went to a booster’s party for a couple of hours. We ran into each other.”
“But he trains during the off season in your hometown.”
I shook my head. “I haven’t lived in Franklin Notch since I graduated.”
“Then how exactly did you…?” Kendall tugged her head toward her phone.
“We ran into each other when I was helping Becca pack her office. She took a job with New England to be closer to home, and I took over her apartment lease.” Mooched off her apartment lease, but Kendall didn’t need to know that. “He offered to show me around town. He was just being nice. For Becca.”
“Huh,” Kendall said with a huff of disbelief. “I wish my sister had friends like that. She only hangs out with my nephews, and they’re pretty lame.”
“Cuter than Diego, though, I’m sure,” I said with a laugh.
She rolled her eyes. “Speaking of which, your friend is calling you now.”
My eyes widened, skipping to my phone tucked under the bar countertop. Diego’s name flashed on the screen.
“It’s almost time for you to clock out, anyway. Get out of here,” Kendall said with a smile.
I grabbed the phone. “Hey!”
“Hey yourself,” Diego answered, his voice low and warm. “So, guess what I saw today?”
I groaned as I grabbed my purse from under the bar and waved goodbye to Kendall. “Is this about our bet?”
“You owe me a round of disc golf.”
“Those damn kids!” I walked out the back door and into the darkened parking lot, illuminated by the cars rushing past downtown on their way to the suburbs. “I can’t believe I trusted them.”
“Yep, you could have just rested on the laurels of beating me with a four stroke per hole handicap and never touched another disc in your life.”
“The dream,” I laughed, pulling open the door of my car.
“Where are you?”
“Just getting off work. What about you?”
“My place. I had practice this morning and a massage scheduled for the afternoon.”
“I really missed out by not taking up sports professionally, didn’t I?”
“Well, maybe it’s time to take your natural disc golf ability into the pro league.”
I grinned. “I have been called a once-in-a-generation athlete.”
His laugh rumbled over the phone, my stomach flipping at the sound. “Who called you that?”
“People. Lots of them.”
“Aren’t you the woman who once told me you’d never willingly stepped foot into a gym?”
“I don’t think that has anything to do with my athletic prowess.”
“Oh, it’s prowess, now?”
“You’re going to find out when I beat you at disc golf for a second time.”
“Tuesday?”
I bit my lip at the tempting offer “Can I get back to you? I don’t have a schedule for next week yet.”
“Oh.”
I couldn’t tell if he thought I was blowing him off or disappointed. “I’ll let you know on Saturday.”
“Sure, no problem. I might not get back to you until later in the evening, though. We’re playing our last preseason game on Saturday.”
“Exciting. Who are you playing?”
“Tennessee. At home, so that’s nice.”
I frowned. If Diego was anything like my sister, I wouldn’t hear from him much during the football season. Disappointing.
“Hey, the picture. You’re not in trouble for that, are you?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Not really. James, my agent, found out who you are and thought I’d gone for the whole ‘fake dating’ route. He was pretty thrilled. Or at least as thrilled as he ever gets.”
“People don’t do that, do they?”
Diego didn’t answer right away. The silence on the phone pounded in my ear. Did people fake date? No, of course not. Probably.
“My agent seems to think so, and he’d know better than me. But until this point of my life, all my dating has been one hundred percent legitimate.”
“We could, you know.” The words slipped out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“We could…what exactly?” Diego asked after a beat.
“Fake date. If it’d help you out.” Diego’s silence only solidified that he thought I’d lost my mind. And maybe I had. “I mean, the gossip sites are already speculating about us, and it’s not like you’ve got time to date during the season. I’ll be gone by Christmas, so really there’s no risk.”
No risk? What the hell was I talking about? I clamped my mouth shut to stop babbling. Maybe Diego would politely retract his invitation for disc golf so I could assume a fake identity and flee the country.
“You don’t mean that, do you?” Diego said slowly, parsing out each word.
The invitation to speak renewed the torrent of absolute madness coming out of my mouth. “I mean, it’s not like it’d be a big deal, right? We’d get photographed a few times. Maybe I’d get some free football tickets. And then I’d disappear over the holidays. You get to start the new year with a clean slate.”
“I thought you didn’t like football.”
“I don’t,” I admitted. “But I do like free things.”
“So, I just need to bribe you with some swag rooms and VIP tables, and you’ll be my fake girlfriend for the season?”
“Swag rooms? There are entire rooms of swag? I’m in.”
“Are you serious, Cassandra?”
No one called me Cassandra. Not even my mom. But the way he said it felt like swallowing warm honey. His voice caressing each syllable, resting on it like it deserved all the time in the world.
If I’d had any sense, I’d take that aching in the pit of my stomach as a surefire sign that this wasn’t a good idea. That the best idea I could have would be to tell Diego thanks for all the fish and see you never. Good luck with the reporters and the gossip columnists and a life in the spotlight.
“I’m serious.”
Seriously out of my mind.
“It would be an enormous help,” he said tentatively. “I’m not sure I should ask you that, though.”
I shifted in my seat, fingers reaching for the keys in the ignition and then dropping them again. “You didn’t ask me. I offered.”
He sighed, and I could envision him in his living room. An industrial gray couch, a spacious floor plan, and sumptuous furnishings designed by someone famous. Someone who bought furniture for a living and had been hired without knowing Diego or anything about him. I saw his head thrown back on an expensive couch, eyes on the ceiling as he weighed my offer. He didn’t want to piss off Becca. But he also wanted the bad press to die down.
“You don’t know what you’re agreeing to.”
I laughed. “Probably not. The closest I’ve ever gotten to celebrity was making out with some guy in a treehouse in college.”
“I hope you’re talking about me.”
“No,” I lied. “An actor. He’s in a superhero movie. Calls me once a month but I would never get with a guy like that.”
“But you’d pretend to date me?”
“Like I have anything better to do.”
Which wasn’t exactly a lie. The bartending job was barely part time. A fill-in position. Sure, the tips were better on the weekend, but I didn’t need the tips that bad. And the walking tours were sporadic and could fit around my schedule.
“Cassandra,” Diego’s voice dropped low.
I prepared myself for a laugh followed by “Absolutely not.”
“Can we talk about this in person?”