Chapter 5
Five
I forgot to bring a jacket. It’s late May, which means it’s spring, but that doesn’t mean shit when you live in Canada and it can snow in May at the drop of a hat.
We’ve been having a warm season, but the temperature drops at night, and today is no exception.
The skirt, crop top, and wedges are doing very little to keep me warm as I dash through Murphey’s parking lot and into the heated restaurant.
“Reservation under Jalen,” I tell the hostess when she greets me.
“Right this way,” she says, leading me through the restaurant.
The nerves didn’t really hit me until I sat in my car. I promised Emi and Kalani I’d text them when I got here, but that was less for my safety and more so they knew I’d actually come. As we walk through the restaurant, my heart pounds in my ears, and I scan tables to figure out who my date is.
“Here you are,” the hostess says, stopping at a booth and gesturing before walking away.
I don’t bother sitting down. “This is a joke, right?”
There’s a guy sitting in the booth: a hot guy, but the worst guy. It’s Pink Shorts, and he’s wearing a black button-up shirt with a nice silver watch on his wrist.
“I wish, Princess. But here we are,” he says with an amused tilt of his lips.
I cannot believe Kalani and Emi would set me up with Pink Shorts, or Jay, whatever. I ranted about him to Kalani for an hour after the ice cream incident! And Emi says he thinks I’m hot? As if!
“My name is Carina.” I should turn around and walk away. This would never work, and we both know it. Jay must’ve known who I was when he agreed to this date, and my curiosity about why he came is what prompts me to slide into the seat across from him.
Pulling out my phone under the table, I quickly open my chat with Emi and send her our bail-out code.
Jay glances down, then looks back at me. “Why did you just text me, ‘I have a hairy possum’? Is that supposed to be code for . . .” His eyes drop suggestively to where the lower half of my body is hidden under the table before moving back up to my face.
Mortification hits me as I realize I sent the message to him instead of Emi, and it takes a moment for his meaning to sink in. “Ew, what? No!”
Jay looks like he’s trying not to laugh. “Okay. On that note, are your panties pink today?”
My face heats up as I sputter a response. “I—you know—it’s—why did I even sit down?” I start shimmying out of the booth when he reaches out an arm to stop me.
“Wait, stop. I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.” His smile is wide, and my eyes narrow at him.
My curiosity outweighs my outrage, and I settle back into my seat.
“Not that you’ll ever see for yourself, but yes, they are pink,” I admit out loud for some strange reason. “I like matching them to my outfit.” It makes me feel like I have my shit together.
“That’s weird,” he says, that stupid smirk still present.
“You’re weird,” I huff, crossing my arms over my chest. Now I get why he agreed to this date— it’s because he enjoys making fun of me, and for some reason I keep making it easy for him.
His smirk widens. “Still quick with the comebacks.”
“Why are you here?” He doesn’t like me, and he’s aware that I don’t like him, so it’s not like he was looking forward to an actual date like I was.
“I’m on a date.”
It’s almost laughable that I thought my blind date would be anything like Emmett.
Emmett’s eyes are kind and as blue as the ocean, and Jay’s are teasing and captivatingly dark.
Emmett’s smile is sweet, and Jay’s smirk is annoying.
Emmett loves helping people, and Jay makes it a hobby to bother or embarrass me.
Jay would not take the time to nurse a baby bird back to health, not like Emmett did in tenth grade.
Jay wouldn’t stay up all night with me, helping me practice for the French exam, not like Emmett did in ninth grade.
Jay wouldn’t take me to the beach at sunrise with an easel and paints so we could capture the landscape together, not like Emmett did last year.
Jay wouldn’t do any of the things Emmett has done for me over the years.
“With me?” I ask. “Why did you agree to this?”
He leans forward. “Why did you agree to this? Why do you need to be set up? We already know you don’t know how to talk to boys, and you have very poor manners, but why a blind date?”
The judgment of his stare and his condescending tone cause my face to heat.
“I was forced,” I state.
“You were forced?” he repeats. “Are you sure it has nothing to do with the fact that you haven’t been on a date since eighth grade?”
I can’t believe Kalani told him that! “It was the summer after grade eight, thank you very much.”
“Either way, that doesn’t really surprise me,” he says, pausing before adding, “The ice cream came out of my shirt, by the way.”
I ignore the pang in my chest from his insult. “Aw, it did?” My frown is exaggerated. “I hoped it wouldn’t. I wanted to give you something to remember me by.”
Just like I’ll always remember him as the jerk who threatened to throw me off a cliff.
“Oh, I remember you, all right.” His gaze is heated and makes me squirm in my seat. I suddenly remember that I bent over and basically exposed my entire almost-naked ass to him.
Desperate to change the mental image in both our heads, I say, “If it makes you feel any better, I got written up at work because of the ice cream incident. And my dad lectured me for an hour about being a representative of his company.”
He raises an eyebrow. “That’s right. Kalani told me your dad owned Ottavio’s, so getting written up doesn’t mean much. You could’ve done a tap dance on the counter while cussing me out and you would’ve been fine.”
My dad made me wash the floor three times each night before closing my first month there because I didn’t do it to his standards, when the other workers barely even move the chairs out of the way.
He makes me count, balance, and close the tills without using a calculator when everyone else gets to plug their numbers into the spreadsheet and be on their way.
I’m always expected to pick up shifts when people call in even if I have other plans.
He definitely doesn’t let me slack off because I’m his daughter, and he’s probably trying to teach me a bunch of lessons about working hard, but Jay’s right that I enjoy a certain level of privilege and protection with my dad as my employer.
“There might be a mutiny if I did that and still got to keep my job, but I see your point,” I tell him honestly. “That was my very first time doing something that got me written up.”
I can tell by the way he’s looking at me that he doesn’t believe me.
“I’m serious,” I defend myself. “Apparently, I only risk getting in trouble at work when a jerk who threatened to throw me off a cliff comes into the bakery and purposely gets on my nerves.”
That earns me a cocky smirk. “I’m nothing but charming.”
He’s got as much charm as a pop quiz on a Monday morning.
“Do you have a job?” I ask.
“I’ve been at Delphine Chophouse for just over two years. Started as a busboy when I was fifteen years old and worked up to serving.”
That’s a really pricey steakhouse and one of the most popular restaurants in town. He must make really great tips from working there, but he also must deal with way more snobby people than I do at the bakery.
“Have you ever done something like what I did? Pour gravy on a rude customer? Knock a drink over in their lap?” For some reason, I’m genuinely curious about the answer.
He threatened to throw me off a cliff for simply existing within his vicinity, so I think there’s a good chance he’d snap at an obnoxious table.
Jay raises an eyebrow at me. “I’m a Black teenager from the lower-middle class that got a job at one of the most prestigious restaurants in town. I can’t afford to risk my job like that.”
He’s right. I didn’t think about that when I asked the question or when I acted out at work. I sink a bit lower in my seat, feeling like an asshole and ready to apologize, then Jay says, “But there was this one time . . .”
I perk up, immensely interested. “Do tell.”
Jay’s lips curl up in the corners, like he’s trying to fight off being amused by my reaction.
“Last year, I was training a new server, Imani. It was her first job, and she was young and shy and very grateful to get a server position—Delphine usually prefers their servers to be at least twenty-five years old, but we were short-staffed and needed good people.” Jay pauses, likely thinking about his trainee as he adjusts the menu lying on the table in front of him.
“I’m not sure what it is exactly, but something about her reminds me of my little sister; they even hold a pen in the same weird way and only wear that one aggressively bright shade of pink nail polish.
Imani has a good head on her shoulders and is really sweet, and it turns out she grew up only a few blocks away from me.
She wants to be a veterinarian and has a spreadsheet calculating how many shifts she needs to afford that amount of schooling.
” A smile begins forming, but he drops it just as quickly.
“The first shift she had by herself was on a fully packed lunch, and our sections were on opposite sides of the restaurant. She was mainly responsible for a group of seven senior guys from your school, celebrating some asshole named Preston Whitmore’s birthday— and I only remember his name because I couldn’t make up a more pretentious one if I tried.
” He adds the last part quickly, like he’s justifying why he bothered to remember the guy’s name.
I immediately recall the tall athlete who graduated last year.
He’d walk in the middle of the packed hallway and expect people to jump out of his way, not caring if he hit them with all his lacrosse equipment.
He and his friends were jerks, and I hated sharing a lunch period with them because they were so loud and obnoxious in the cafeteria.