4. Parker
4
PARKER
M y life sucks. As much as I try to look on the bright side and search for a silver lining, there’s no getting around the fact that my life sucks so freaking hard.
Staring cautiously around me, I try not to make eye contact with any of my coworkers as I take a bite of my sandwich. I don’t know why I still eat my lunch in the lunchroom with the others. When I first started working here, they all made it abundantly clear that they resent my presence here. At first I was shocked, then I was pissed, and now it feels like I’d be hiding if I go and sit in my car to eat my lunch, and I refuse to hide from them no matter what.
But after months of eating in silence while they all talk and laugh, deliberately, loudly conversing about the women they’ve fucked, the side pieces they’re cheating on their wives with, and how disgusting they find fat women, I honestly have no idea why I’m still putting myself through this six days a week. But my pride refuses to allow me to climb down off this hill I’m slowly dying on.
Not once have any of them ever spoken to me or tried to engage me in conversation. If I force them to talk to me, they’re curt and dismissive and almost always call me darlin’ or sweetheart or sometimes just bitch. I’m a pariah here, and it doesn’t matter how long I sit in this awful, dirty lunchroom and listen to them behaving like chauvinistic pigs, that won’t ever change.
I don’t know how much longer I can take it. I’ve always considered myself a fairly robust person. Someone capable of enduring whatever I need to in order to be happy. But I’m not happy. I’m fucking miserable. I hate this job. I hate my crappy apartment, and I hate that my dad isn’t here, and nothing I do or say will ever bring him back.
After he passed, my mom insisted that we all go to grief counseling. I understand the stages of grief, but I feel like I’m stuck in the anger stage, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get out of it or that I want to. Accepting that my dad is gone and that’s it, is such a horrible thought that I just can’t get there. I know he’d be appalled at my life right now, but unless I completely retrain for a new career, this was literally the only mechanic’s job I could find in the entire state of Vermont.
Talking and gaming with Danny is the only bright spot in my life right now, and even that’s mostly a lie. I talk to him more than I talk to anyone else. We text and chat and sometimes it feels like he’s flirting, but I know that’s just my hopeful imagination running away with me.
I’m not stupid, Danny is a player, and flirting is his superpower. But it’s impossible not to be affected by him. His playful, suggestive words are sexier than they maybe should be, but I refuse to take it personally when he probably flirts with everyone he meets. Some people are just naturally flirty; that’s just the kind of guy he is, and he doesn’t mean anything by it.
“Seriously, man, this girl’s pussy was fucking loose as anything. I didn’t even feel bad when I slipped off the condom and went in bare. If she gets pregnant, I doubt she’ll have any idea whose kid it is,” one of my obnoxious coworkers says, laughing as he talks about what he did to some poor woman that would constitute as sexual assault in some states.
Nope.
No.
That’s it. I can’t do this anymore. I cannot work with these fucking assholes a moment longer.
Dropping my half-eaten sandwich back into my lunch bag, I push up from my seat, unscrewing my bottle of soda as I do. Fisting my brown bag in one hand, I stomp across the room and unceremoniously pour the soda all over the asshole’s head.
“The reason that poor girl didn’t notice you slip off the condom is because your dick is so tiny she probably had no idea you were even inside of her. I just hope to God you didn’t give her anything nasty from your pathetic, disease-ridden cock,” I snarl, tipping the last of the liquid over his head and dropping the bottle to the floor before storming from the break room and straight into my manager’s office.
“I quit!” I yell as I step inside, not bothering to knock.
My eyes go wide when I find the most disgustingly vulgar one of my coworkers, Carl, on his knees, sucking my boss, Terry’s, dick.
Looking from Carl to Terry, then back to Carl, a laugh bubbles in my throat, and I slap my hand over my mouth to stop myself from giggling, only the sound bursts free before I can stop it.
“Oh wow.” I snicker.
“Parker,” Carl starts, his hand lifted like he’s going to try to convince me I’m not seeing the man who only days ago was boasting about making his wife suck his cock after they did anal on the weekend, sucking another guy’s dick.
Before I can stop myself, I pull my cell from my pocket and snap a picture.
“What the hell are you doing?” Carl screeches.
“Terry,” I say, ignoring Carl entirely. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I quit and I’ll be leaving today, but you’re going to pay me three months full severance pay, or I’m going to accidentally send this picture to corporate, along with a full review of exactly how inhospitable and toxic a work environment every single male member of staff here has made this job for me.”
“You can’t do that. I’m married,” Carl growls, rushing to his feet and prowling toward me, trying to intimidate me with his size.
“Social media is a wonderful thing, Carl. I bet I can find your wife in less than three seconds and have this picture in her inbox a moment after that, so I suggest you back the fuck up and stop trying to threaten me, or else I’ll be adding filing a police report to my list of things to do today,” I say with a sassy arch of my eyebrow.
“I could just take your cell,” Terry threatens.
“Go for it.” I hold it out of him. “But my pictures automatically back up to my cloud storage as soon as I take them.”
“This is blackmail,” he says sullenly.
“Don’t think of it as blackmail. Think of it as a lesson on why you shouldn’t treat someone like shit just because of their genitalia.”
“Two months severance,” Terry says.
“Four is a nice round number,” I counter.
“Fine three,” he concedes quickly. “But you need to delete the picture.”
“Just as soon as that money hits my account,” I agree.
“Fine.”
“I’ll wait, I have online banking,” I say, crossing my arms over my tits with a smirk.
“I’ll need to speak to corporate.”
Shrugging, I lift my cell up and tap into the screen, opening the email app. “To whom it may concern, I was employed as a mechanic in your Sutton branch several months ago. After consulting your discrimination policy, I was confident that this was a place where I could find a fair, inclusive working environment, however, after handing in my notice today, I’d like to share my harrowing, and quite honestly, traumatizing experience working for your company,” I say aloud, like I’m dictating into my cell.
“Fine, fine,” Terry hurries to say. “I’ll do internal payroll.”
Smiling, I wait as he hurriedly taps at his keyboard.
“You’re a fucking bitch,” Carl says, his tone hateful and frightening.
“Well, you’re a fucking homophobic asshole who proudly boasts about being anti-queer while secretly enjoying sucking cock. I feel sorry for your poor wife. Wake up and smell the twenty-first century, Carl. We don’t discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation. We celebrate diversity and happily cheer on everyone, regardless of how they decide to live their lives.”
“I’m not fucking gay,” he hisses, like I’ve insulted him.
“I didn’t say you were, and quite frankly, I don’t care. But every single guy here has openly been homophobic, sexist, and sometimes even racist, while you all just sit there and laugh like being a bigot is something to be proud of.”
Carl opens his mouth to speak, but Terry interrupts. “Done,” he hisses.
Turning my attention away from Carl, I open my banking app, check my balance, and smile to myself when I see the payment that just hit my account.
“Thanks,” I say, spinning on my heel and prancing out of the office with the biggest smile I’ve had since I started working here on my face.
It doesn’t hit me until I’m in my car and halfway home that I just quit my job. I might have gotten three months full pay, but this was the only job I could get, and as shitty as it might have been, there is literally nothing else on my job horizon right now.
“Oh fuck,” I say aloud.
Pulling to the side of the road, I grab my cell and quickly type out a message to Danny before I can think better of it.
Me: I just quit my job!!!!!!!!!
My cell starts to ring the moment the tick to say the message has been read appears.
“I quit,” I say as I answer.
“Holy shit, you quit,” Danny replies, his voice excited.
“Oh god, what did I just do?” I ask, even though I know he doesn’t have the answer.
“You left a toxic work environment. I’m so fucking proud of you, Parks.”
And this is exactly why he’s the one I wanted to speak to. My mom would have suggested I move home and get a job in the local diner so I could wear a dress every day instead of dirty coveralls, and my sister would have told me I should finally go to school so I could get a proper job. But Danny just said exactly what I needed to hear—the way he always does.
“I was sitting in the break room listening to one of the assholes talk about basically sexually assaulting the woman he had sex with last night, and he was so awful that I just couldn’t take it anymore. Every day I’ve worked there has felt like another day that I’ve lost to misogynistic Neanderthals, and I just knew I was losing more of myself with every moment I spent there. If I thought it would ever get better, I’d have stuck it out, but I’ve worked there for months, and if anything, it’s gotten worse. So, I just got up, dumped my lunch back into the bag, and tipped my soda over the guy’s head.”
Danny’s whoop of laughter is so joyful that I can’t help but smile in response to it.
“So, you actually quit?” he asks, still chuckling.
“I stormed right into Terry’s office and walked in on him getting a blow job from Carl.”
“Carl?” Danny gasps. “Ass to mouth, Carl?”
“Yep, apparently as well as disgusting hygiene, he also likes to suck dick.”
“Holy shit. What happened?”
“After I stopped staring, I pulled out my cell and took a picture. Then I told Terry that I wanted three months of full pay as a severance package, or else I’d email the picture to corporate and tell them exactly what my experience as a woman working for their zero-discrimination company was like. I waited there until the money hit my bank, then I just left,” I blurt.
Danny’s chuckle is so warm and full of proud amusement that goose bumps pebble across my skin. “You’re such a fucking badass.”
“I quit my job,” I whisper, some of my panic slipping back into my softly spoken words.
“You had to, Parks, that place was destroying your spirit,” he whispers back, echoing my tone.
“What am I going to do?”
“You’ll find another job. Or you can open your own shop again. You’re a fucking great mechanic, Parker.”
“You don’t know that. I could be a shitty mechanic. Maybe that’s why they all hated me?” I say, wondering not for the first time if that’s maybe the truth. Was my dad just being an indulgent father when he said I was great at what I do?
“Bullshit,” Danny snaps angrily. “Don’t fucking doubt yourself because you’ve been working with a bunch of small- dicked assholes who were threatened by a hot, sexy girl who was better at their jobs than they were.”
Heat fills my cheeks. Did he just call me hot and sexy?
“You’ve got this, Parks. Quitting was the absolute right thing to do, and you know it.”
Inhaling sharply, I nod, pretending I didn’t hear his obviously just supportive compliments.
“You’re right. I had to quit.”
“You did,” he immediately agrees again.
“I’ll find another job.”
“Of course you will.”
“It’s been a month. Why did I quit my job?” I whine through the headset as I pop up on the screen from where my avatar has been hiding behind a box and shoot a zombie in the head.
“You had an interview last week,” Danny argues.
“Yeah, and they took one look at me, said they didn’t realize I was a woman, and told me they’d filled the vacancy,” I moan.
“Something will come up,” Danny says, still as hopeful as he was the day I texted him, freaking out that I’d quit.
“My mom keeps texting me about waitressing jobs, and my sister sends me daily college recommendations and keeps offering to pay the application fees.”
“My friends are still looking for a new mechanic for their shop in Rockhead Point. They don’t care that you’re a girl. They just want someone great to help pick up some of the slack now that they have a football team of kids between them,” Danny says for the twentieth time in the last four weeks.
“I can’t move to Montana on a whim,” I tell him yet again, but it gets harder and harder to convince myself that it’s the truth each time I say it.
“It wouldn’t be on a whim, it’d be for a job,” he argues.
“And what if it doesn’t work out? I’ll have given up my apartment and moved across the country.”
“But what if it does work out?” he says enthusiastically.
Every time he suggests I take the job with his friends, in his hopeful, seductive tone, it gets harder and harder to reject the idea, but I refuse to be the stupid girl who moves across the country because of a crush on a guy who will never be interested in being more than my friend.
But it’s been a month, and I’ve applied for every single car-related job I could find, and I’ve only gotten one interview, who immediately dismissed me the moment they saw me. Once garages realize I’m a woman, vacancies miraculously get filled, or suddenly, I’m no longer suitable. I know quitting my job was the right thing to do, but the more time that passes without a single job opportunity, the more my hope is fading that I’ll ever get a job doing the thing I love most.
If I didn’t have very unrequited feelings for Danny, then the job working in his friend’s shop would be absolutely perfect. But I’m not sure that my heart and fragile self-esteem can watch him date and hook up with other women and not get my feelings hurt.
After he suggested the Barnetts Auto Shop was looking for a mechanic, I did a little social media stalking, and honestly, it’s the kind of shop I know I’d love working in. They’re the only auto shop in the small town they’re based in, and their Yelp rating is literally all five stars. According to their website, they do basic car repairs, recovery, and restoration.
I know I’d be a perfect fit, especially as Danny has talked fondly about the entire Barnett family so many times it practically feels like I know them already. Every time he tells me the job’s mine if I want it, another layer of my resolve to keep saying no is whittled away. But before I can even think about saying yes, I need to figure out a way to ignore my childish infatuation with Danny. Maybe seeing him in person will shatter this foolish image I have of him, and he can go back to being my friend and not the friend I secretly lust over.
“I booked you a ticket,” Danny says, his voice hard and unrelenting.
“What?” I ask, distracted by the hoard of zombies that just poured through the broken window and into the room I was hiding in.
“Your flight leaves at one fifteen p.m. tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at the airport.”
It takes me a moment to process what he’s saying, but when I do, my controller falls to my lap. “What did you just say?” I ask again.
“Enough is enough, Parks. You’ll never be happy serving people coffee in a diner and you don’t want to go to college. You’re a mechanic, you love working on cars, it’s your happy place. So, I booked you a plane ticket to come to Montana tomorrow. Bay and Penn are looking forward to meeting you.”
“You did what?” I parrot, half elated at the idea of being in the same place as him, half furious that he went behind my back to arrange all of this without even speaking to me about it.
“You heard. I’ve arranged a taxi to pick you up from your apartment and take you to the airport, so you don’t have to leave your car there, and I’ll be waiting at the airport to pick you up once you land in Bozeman. It’s been ten weeks since you quit, Parks, and every time you don’t get a job you apply for, you get more and more miserable. I fucking hate hearing you sound so down. If you hate Rockhead Point or the Barnetts, then you’ve lost nothing and only wasted a couple of days. But I think you’re going to love the job, and the shop, and my buddies, and then you’ll have a great job in a great town with me. It’s win-win,” he says, like it’s simple and obvious and not at all high-handed.
“Danny, you can’t just make these kinds of huge decisions for me, that’s so…” I trail off, struggling to articulate how angry, and touched, and fucking turned on I am at him taking control and handling things.
“I know, and I’m sort of sorry, but not that sorry, because I think you needed the push to do something, so I pushed.”
He doesn’t sound sorry; in fact, he sounds almost…smug.
“I can’t just go to Montana tomorrow. Do they expect me to do a trial? I’ll need to bring my tools. I’m supposed to have lunch with my mom tomorrow, and Becca wants to help me write college essays,” I ramble.
“I already spoke to your mom and Becca.”
“You did what?” I ask, sounding like a broken record at this point.
“I spoke to them. I told them what I had planned so they wouldn’t call the cops when you weren’t at your place if they dropped by for a visit.”
“My family won’t come to my apartment,” I say, like that’s the most important thing to point out right now.
“Well, now they definitely won’t come tomorrow because they know you’re going to be in Montana with me.”
My lips snap shut with an audible pop as I stare at my TV screen and the zombies that have been devouring my avatar’s body while we’ve been speaking.
“Are you still there?” Danny asks with a chuckle.
“Why did you do this?”
“Because I’m selfish, Parks, I’m hoping if I bring you here, you’ll fall in love with the town and the job, and you’ll move here. You’re my best friend, and I want more than just talking online and texting. I want to be able to hang out and game together. I want to see you and not just through social media.”
I feel my eyes widen. I’m his best friend? I guess he’s probably my best friend too, but not like the girlfriends I used to have at school. Danny is the kind of best friend who I adore but whose dick I’d also like to have pounding my pussy until I’m a sweaty, cum-soaked mess. And therein lies the problem. He wants his bestie to move to his town so we can hang out and game. I want to lick his abs and survive on his cum for sustenance.
God, I’m so fucked.