Chapter 19
June
“…prick, so I told him to shove it.” Feminine laughter bleeds through my far-too-thin apartment door from the hallway. “Yeah, I said it to his face. POS deserved all that and more. He’s lucky I didn’t staple his tiny dick to his desk.”
More laughter rings out.
Wincing, I put down my fork, no longer interested in my scrambled eggs, and not just because of that violent image.
As I abandon my barely edible scrambled eggs, I continue to listen to the woman outside. It’s the day after I did my laundry, and after a long, nervy, and anxious night, where I prayed nothing would bite me, I finally fell asleep at three a.m., unmolested by any tiny biting bugs.
“I’ll find another job. Maybe they’re hiring at the grocery store. That hotel, though? Never again. Not even if he begs again, and he was desperate enough to call begging me to come back, and you know how shit I am at cleaning.”
More feminine laughter rings out. Then a curse as keys jingle.
My mind seizes on the words job and desperate, and I’m up off my wobbly two-seater dining set in my tiny kitchenette, and hurrying to my door to fling it open.
An olive-skinned, dark-haired woman is unlocking her door while holding her cell phone against her ear. She peers over her shoulder and raises her eyebrow at me. “Problem?”
“Sorry for startling you,” I say, hovering in my doorway. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but hear you say something about a hotel hiring?”
She gives me a long look and then says into the phone, “I’ll call you back, Beth.
” She hangs up her phone and tucks it into her handbag, then turns to face me.
“You don’t want to work at the hotel. The pay is shit, you’ll be called in constantly and made to stay hours later because they’re too cheap to hire more staff. ”
“It’s a job, and I can’t afford to be picky. Please?” Desperation is bleeding from my pores. That’s how badly I want and need this job.
“You’ll regret it, mark my words. It’s the three-star one on Douglas Street. You know it?” she asks, and I shake my head. “I’ll write the address down for you. Ask for Manny. He’s the manager with the wandering hands.”
“Wandering hands?” I recall the alphas from the end-of-year Haven Academy ball.
“Changed your mind?” She doesn’t look surprised.
“No. I thought I’d left wandering hands behind. I don’t have stilettos anymore, so I’ll have to deal with him another way.”
She barks out a laugh, a dimple forming on her right cheek. “I’m Lucia Di Marco.”
“June. Thanks for the tip about the job.”
She snorts. “Trust me, I’m not doing you a favor.”
“Well, you’re helping me out. If you ever need a favor, let me know.”
“Let me put my bag down, and I’ll get that address for you.” She flashes me a grin, and as she heads into her apartment to write the address for me, I hunt for my sneakers so I can ask about the job.
“I can start right away,” I tell the hiring manager.
With Lucia’s warning fresh in my mind, I stay firmly on the other side of his desk. I’m too desperate for this job to let Manny’s wandering hands get in the way.
His lack of scent marks him out as a beta.
He’s big, though not alpha big. Brown hair, a short brown beard, and intense blue eyes.
He’s in a white shirt, navy blue pants, and a blue tie, like all the male staff in the hotel, except he has a small gold pin on his tie that must mark him out as a manager.
His eyes slide from my face, linger on my breasts, then settle on the application I filled out that the receptionist handed me at the front desk twenty minutes before. “Sit. You don’t have any experience.”
“No,” I admit, slinking into the seat opposite his and taking it as a good sign that I might be in with a chance of getting this job.
His eyes flick to me. “You attended Haven Academy.”
I hadn’t been sure whether to use a fake name, but I figured a job in a hotel would come with a background check. Better to be truthful and maybe get the job than get caught out in a lie and definitely not get it. “That’s right.”
“Omegas don’t clean hotel rooms.”
“I need the work.”
He stares at me for a beat longer. When the furrows on his brow smooth and his mouth opens slightly, I figure he just worked out who I am. More so when his eyes flick to the bites on my throat. “Juniper Harrington.”
I said my name was June on the application. June Edith.
I nod. “My parents would prefer I no longer use the Harrington name.” I pause. “For obvious reasons.”
Namely, for daring to air my dirty laundry in the most public way possible.
The only thing worse would have been if I’d done a TV interview.
A nurse at the hospital had told me reporters were hanging around, looking for me to do one.
Maybe I should have. My parents had already cut me off, and I wouldn’t have had to sell my bracelet if a reporter had paid for my story.
Being in a coma for two weeks meant the reporters got bored waiting for me to come out of it, or a more interesting story had distracted them.
Leather squeaks as Manny sits back in his seat and steeples his hairy fingers together on the desk. “It’s $15 an hour. You slack, you’re gone. The hours are from seven a.m. to four p.m. See HR down the hall about a uniform and a bank account to get paid into.”
I sit up in my seat, my excitement about getting a job warring with alarm. “I haven’t got a bank account set up yet. Can I get paid in cash for now?”
He pierces me with a probing look. “First paycheck is in two weeks. You get paid biweekly, which gives you two weeks to set up a bank account for that first paycheck. You get a check. Don’t have a bank account? That’s your problem to solve, not mine to find a solution to.”
“Oh, well, thanks for giving me a chance. I’ll get the bank account set up.
” I jump up from my seat and rush to the door as if I’m so excited to speak to HR about my uniform that I forget to shake his hand.
Lucia warned me about his wandering hands.
I have no intention of getting any closer to Manny than I need to.
“Sure.” He waves me out of the room, and as I walk out, I feel his eyes on my ass.
Two weeks pass in the blink of an eye, and I build a simple life for myself.
It’s sometimes plagued by a fear of roaches crawling on my face as I sleep and anxiety about my little sister, but it’s my life, and I don’t have a cruel or neglectful alpha to ruin my day.
I have a job, though it comes with a manager with wandering hands when I bump into him in the hallway. I have a bank account and a refrigerator half-filled with simple ingredients I’m learning to cook with.
My bed doesn’t have things that itch and bite, and the last time I saw a roach, my scream didn’t threaten to puncture anyone’s eardrums.
I still screamed, and my hands shook as I gave myself a stern talking to in the bathroom mirror (I’d run into the bathroom to hide).
Then I grabbed one of my big Tupperware and spent thirty minutes catching the roach and throwing it—and the container—in a dumpster halfway down the street.
I have an irrational fear that it was the same roach from before and it crawled back into my apartment looking for revenge.
On my days off from cleaning at the hotel, I visit everyone who knew River to see if they might know where my sister is. Since they’re mostly my parents' friends, I rarely get past the front gate. On the rare chance I get to speak to a servant, they apologize and say they haven’t seen her.
And if I occasionally cry myself to sleep, it’s only because I miss River, not because I still feel like a piece of my soul is missing and I’ll never feel whole again.
After another long day of cleaning, I yawn as I push my apartment door closed behind me, hang up my denim coat, and take off my sneakers.
Getting to the hotel to start work at seven means waking up at 5:30 to brush my teeth and trying not to fall asleep as I spoon cereal into my mouth. Then, I rush to catch the bus that will get me to work on time. I wash my face in the morning. In the evening, I take a shower and wash my hair.
“Shower then food,” I mutter to myself, yawning again as I stretch out the kinks in my neck and start unbuttoning my uniform on the way to my bathroom.
I turn on the shower and immediately switch it off when the pipes rumble, the showerhead violently shakes, but no water emerges. I haven’t needed to see the super for anything since he slammed a door in my face. Twice. This rattling pipe is a sign that my luck just ran out.
I need to shower, and I have no clue how to fix this on my own.
In the living room, I pick up my tote bag and fish the cheap cell phone I bought with my first paycheck to call the super.
His phone rings out. I hit redial, tuck the phone between my ear and my shoulder and re-button my uniform.
When it rings out again, I hang up with a sigh, step into my sneakers, and grab my keys to go for a seriously unwanted face-to-face visit with my super.
Three loud knocks on his door go unanswered.
A TV is on though, and the smell of Chinese food is strong. He's in there watching TV, eating Chinese food, and deliberately ignoring me.
“Bill, I need some help,” I call out.
Silence.
I knock again.
“You’re wasting your time, hon!” a familiar voice calls out.
I turn to smile at the woman stepping out of her apartment a few doors away. “Hi, Gia.”
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve slowly been getting to know the other people in this apartment. Almost everyone works low-paid jobs with long hours, and they have no choice but to put up with things breaking down because there are no cheaper apartments in the city.
Gia is a 41-year-old beta and a single mom of three, often working more hours than I thought there were in a day. Somehow, she manages to do it with more energy than I will ever possess. Some people are strong physically. She’s tough mentally.
“I have no water in my shower. The pipes just rattle.”
“Ah.”
“It happened to you too?” I perk up.
“You've gotta hit the pipe with a wrench.”
I stare at her. “Hit it? But isn’t the super supposed to…”
She barks out a laugh. “Hon, it might say Super on his door, but that man is as useful as a steel box in the middle of a pitch-black room.”
She doesn’t even try to keep her voice down, and I edge away from his door in case he takes out his anger on the first person he sees should he fling it open: me.
“But what do you do if something breaks that you can’t fix yourself?” I ask, moving toward her. Try as I might, I can’t imagine hitting pipes will get me hot water for a shower I desperately need after cleaning hotel rooms for the last eight hours.
“We’d ask Hugh at the hardware store down the road.
He’s helped us out a bunch over the years.
I'd better go; I’m running late.” She locks up her apartment and tucks her key in her purse.
At five, she’s probably on her way to start her shift at Bar Louis’, a cocktail bar on the other side of town.
In the morning and early afternoon, she works at a customer service call center.
“See you, Gia. Hope you have a good shift.”
She snorts. “There are no good shifts. Only nights with good tips or shit ones. I’m back at four. If you’re still struggling, come knock on my door.”
I smile at her, but I won’t do that, even if I can’t get the hot water working. She doesn’t need to come home from work and help me with my broken pipe. She needs to rest for the three hours she has before she needs to get her kids up for school.
I watch her go and then turn back to the super’s door, wanting to kick it.
The owner of this building must pay him to fix things that break, but it seems like all he does is sit around eating Chinese food, stealing packages, and ignoring people knocking on his door.
Lucia, my neighbor who got me the job at the hotel, is visiting family, or I’d have asked if she had a better solution than to whack my pipes with a wrench.
“Looks like this is my problem to deal with,” I mutter.