Chapter 18
It had been three days since he’d first made love to her, and everything in her world had improved. Including the weather. Tori finally picked up her phone and blocked both Bella and Emily. She didn’t need to know if they changed their minds or tried to apologize again. She didn’t need them. That had been more liberating than expected.
At work, Penny announced that they had posted an opening for someone to run the farmer’s markets, so that Tori could focus on the social media portion of her job. Still no news about the grant, but at least now the stress of creating sales would be off her back.
She stretched and yawned and felt like the cat that got the canary. Les banged around and sang in her small bathroom. She loved waking up with him, loved having him sleep with her.
Their schedules didn’t exactly mesh, but for now having him curled up around her at night made everything perfect. They could work out the other details later.
She heard the water cut off, and Les hummed his way into the kitchen. She took her turn in the shower.
“If we are going to be together, you can’t see anyone else,” Les announced as she stepped out of the bathroom.
“Why would you even think that? That’s not a problem, I haven’t had a boyfriend for a while. Or ever.” Scott didn’t count as a boyfriend. He had been a mistake. Tori wiped water from her face and followed Les into the kitchen.
“Come on, Tori, don’t lie to me.” Les shook her phone in her face. “Just tell me the truth. Don’t tell me you’re always on your phone for work. You’ve been texting some guy.”
“What are you upset about?” Genuinely confused, she tried to think who he could possibly be referring to. There hadn’t been anyone in particular she had been trading tweets with on behalf of PnK that he might misread as a boyfriend.
“I thought we were a couple now. You said you wanted me to stay. Not a ‘one and done,’ or an ‘in the meantime.’ That’s not how I feel about you. You know that, but you’re having a long distance relationship with some guy, so what does that make me?” Les acted like he was going to hurl her phone, but he pulled his arms back and shook them over his head.
He stepped in a tight circle. “I can’t do this, not with you. I thought you were different.”
Tossing her phone on the couch, he walked out the door.
Tori’s not-quite-awake, water-logged brain was still not fully grasping what Les was going on about, so she picked up her phone to check it. He couldn’t get past her lock screen without her password, but he could see the last text she’d sent.
“I love you Sam.”
In bare feet, Tori ran out onto the balcony wrapped in a towel. The engine on Les’s bike was already idling loudly as he strapped on his helmet.
She waved the phone over her head, trying to get his attention. “She was my best friend!” When he didn’t look up, she scrambled down the stairs yelling. “Samantha’s a girl, not Sam a boy.”
But Les either didn’t hear her or he completely ignored her. His bike roared past her out of the lot and onto the street.
The lump in Tori’s throat felt like Gibraltar, and she couldn’t swallow. Her thumbs flew over the phone. Les had to read her text, he had to. She ran upstairs and got dressed.
Les wouldn’t be at work for another couple of hours, and she needed to be at the farm in thirty minutes. When she got things situated at work, she would hightail it over to the hotel, delivery day or not. This was an easy fix.
Except Les hadn’t shown up for work.
“Wasn’t Karen here yesterday?” Chef asked.
Tori shrugged. “I’m looking for Les, but Jen just let me know he called in.”
“Yeah, said he wasn’t feeling too good.”
“Chef, if you called him, would he pick up?”
“What’s the matter, Tori?” Chef crossed his arms.
Tori had intended on giving Chef a brief, noncommittal answer, but the words rushed from her of their own accord. “He thinks my friend Samantha is a guy named Sam, and he’s mad at me, and he won’t answer my calls. I think he has me blocked. And I can’t lose him over something this stupid.”
“What do you mean by lose him?”
Tori looked at the floor, not sure exactly how to tell Chef. How did she ever tell anyone when she got a new boyfriend? She didn’t, this was unknown territory for her. But Les wasn’t just a new boyfriend, and she didn’t even know if he had told anyone about them yet. “Me and Les, we’re sort of dating. And it’s still all new and wonderful, except for this.” Tori’s heart tried to pound its way up her throat.
Chef nodded and pulled out his phone. “Get your ass in here now. Your girl is all freaked out. Sam is Samantha. Now she’s here looking at me with big sad eyes.”
Chef lowered the phone and said, “I left a message. It’s the best I can do.”
With a shrug, Tori thanked Chef and dragged her feet back to her little car. She kept an eye open to see if Les’s motorcycle was anywhere. It was stupid, and she knew it. He never cruised off the beaten path. The road to the farm wasn’t exactly a thoroughfare with traffic.
Her car got her to work much faster than she expected. With a sigh, she grabbed her notebook of ideas and headed inside.
“What are you doing here?” Karen’s words were clipped.
Today, they felt a little sharper than usual. Karen didn’t have the best social skills, knowing that, Tori tried hard to not let Karen’s tone bother her. That was difficult today, especially after the fight with Les.
Tori forced a smile. The fight with Les wasn’t Karen’s fault, so there was no reason to be cranky at her.
“I don’t have any deliveries on my schedule, if that’s what you mean.” Tori answered. “And the new hire is handling the farmer’s market. Hey, I didn’t get her name. The person is a her, right?”
“You need to go talk to Penny. You’re not supposed to be here.” Karen continued out the door.
Tori watched as Karen walked out toward the green houses. What the hell had she meant when she said Tori wasn’t supposed to be there.
“Where else am I supposed to be?” Tori muttered as she stepped into the office and continued down the hall to her little space.
“Oh, good, I caught you. Can you come in here for a quick minute,” Penny said as Tori passed her open door.
“Sure, can I just drop this off in my office?”
Penny sucked in her lips, rolling them into her mouth. What kind of expression was that?
“This won’t take that long,” Penny said.
“Do I have time to sit?” This didn’t feel right. Penny was acting weird, and Karen, who didn’t play games or mince words, had said she shouldn’t be there. Tori wasn’t sure if she even wanted to sit, or should she go clean out her office?
“Of course, sit.” Penny said. There wasn’t even a smile in her eyes. Tori saw pity there instead.
“You know, maybe I won’t. Should I just go clean out my office?”
Penny let out a long, heavy sigh. “What did Karen say to you?”
Tori closed her eyes. She hated being right like this. “What should she have said?”
Penny nodded slowly. “The grant didn’t get renewed. We’re terminating your contract.” There was a long pause.
Tori felt the news like a punch in the gut. “But I was able to increase revenue. I thought I proved my value to the farm.”
“We did have noticeable revenue growth. But we also hired two additional employees to run the produce stands.”
Those were my produce stands.Tori kept her mouth closed, pressing her tongue against the back of her teeth. Her ideas were now being used against her as reasons for firing her.
“You’ll need to leave any of the projects you had in development, along with all the logins for the farm’s social media accounts.”
Tori stood and stared at Penny. There was no offer of a severance, no apology for letting her go, no thank you for the work she had done.
Tori dropped the messenger bag over her shoulder onto the chair she hadn’t bothered to sit in. She tossed open the flap and unzipped. She pulled out the large binder that was everything she had worked on for Peaz’n’Karrits. It landed with a loud thud on top of Penny’s desk.
“That’s everything. All my work, all my justifications, spreadsheets, passwords, ideas, notes. I have a few things to remove from the desk. Um, I assume you have my last check?”
Penny nodded, and slowly pulled an envelope from under the binder Tori had dropped. Tori accepted it without a word. If Penny couldn’t say anything, Tori didn’t think she would bother trying. She turned and walked down the hall to what had been her office.
Tears burned as she blinked them away. There were only a few personal items around. All the office supplies she had purchased belonged to the farm, even if they were colorful and fun to reflect her personal style.
She booted the computer and made sure to remove any files and photos of hers that she may have kept on the hard drive. Fortunately, that was easy, all of her stuff was kept in a single folder. She logged onto her cloud storage account and uploaded the file before deleting it from the computer. Once that was done, she logged out, and cleared the browser’s cache and stored passwords. She then deleted the folder.
In all, it took about thirty minutes to clear everything out of the office. As she headed out the door, she stopped and remembered to grab her muck boots that she wore when she had to go into the fields for any reason. She didn’t bother to stop and say goodbye to Penny.
Back at her car, she tossed her bag into the passenger side, and then she sat on the seat and changed her shoes, putting on the rubber boots. There was one person she wanted to let know, and he deserved to learn from her that she was let go.
“Hola Tori,” Miguel said as she approached him in the back of the second greenhouse.
“Hey, Miguel. I?—”
“Don’t tell me Les said something stupid. That boy doesn’t know a good thing when it’s looking at him. You need me to pound some sense into mi primo?”
Tori laughed, but the laugh ended in a sob.
Miguel dropped the small biodegradable peat pot he had been examining. He turned and paused with his arms out as he looked at her. “I’m gonna get dirt on you if I hug you.”
Tori didn’t care and stepped in close so he could put his arms around her shoulders.
“What did that idiot do?” he asked.
Tori hitched a sniffle and tried to stop crying. “You’re right, he’s an idiot. But I’m just as stupid for liking him. But that’s not why I’m here.” She stood and stepped back from Miguel’s embrace. “I wanted to let you know that Penny decided to cancel my contract. I wanted to say I enjoyed working with you, and goodbye.”
Miguel let out a disappointed huff. “That’s crap, Tori. I’m sorry. But hey, I’ll see you around.”
Tori shrugged. “I’ve got nothing keeping here, so I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’ll look for a job around here. I don’t know if there is a reason to stay.”
“What about Les? Does he know?”
Tori wiped the tears out from under her eyes. “I don’t really think he’d care much right now. How do you know about us?”
“I’ve known there’s been something building between the two of you. I figured you were tired of him not figuring it out.”
“Yeah, well, he… we… We got together.” She nodded, a smile as the memory of being happily in love for a few days played across her face. “But then this morning he misunderstood something and left. He’s really angry with me, and I don’t know if he’ll ever let me explain. He’s not at the hotel, and he hasn’t responded to any of my messages. I don’t know how to find him.”
She left off saying nothing more with a shrug.
“What a moron,” Miguel bit out. “Okay. I will tell him to call you. You know about his other family?”
“Yeah, Caro said she was a cousin, right? He’s related to everyone, I swear.”
Miguel nodded. “They have a vineyard over in Sonoma. Tia Connie is there. Les tends to go to see her there. You might give her a try. I’m sorry you’ve had a rough morning, Tori. You didn’t deserve any of it. Mi primo needs to get his head out of his ass and realize the two of you belong together. And I can’t believe Penny let you go. She’ll regret it.”
“Thanks Miguel. Yeah, if you see Les, let him know I really want to talk to him. I’ll, um, see you around, right? Agave Grill.”
She meant to turn and leave, but instead she rushed close and gave Miguel a quick hug. Peaz’n’Karrits was the kind of place she could see herself working at long term, too bad Penny hadn’t thought the same.
As she drove back into St. Helena, she couldn’t decide what to do next. She drove through the backlot of the hotel, but Les’s bike wasn’t there. It wasn’t in the lot at Agave Grill either. She didn’t want to go home, her apartment was a sad and lonely place. She wasn’t making the best memories in that place, and she didn’t want to go back there.
Instead, she drove into Napa and went to the movie theater. She spent the rest of the day distracting herself with action movies and overpriced popcorn.