Chapter Five
FIVE
Ginny hopped off stage to do her job as the dinner rush started trickling in. Mr. Martin whispered in Deandra’s ear, and she nodded, smiling. She grabbed Ginny by the arm as she attempted to dart past.
Shepherd rolled his eyes and manned the hostess table for her.
He grabbed a stack of menus and shuffled through them like trading cards.
The plastic lamination was sticky on more than one; he set those aside for Ginny to wipe down later.
Taking the two cleanest menus of the bunch, he looked up to locate who he’d seat first.
A mistake. Because Mr. Martin and Deandra were walking out of the restaurant, Martin’s hand on her ass.
What a day for twenty-twenty vision.
“See you tomorrow,” Mr. Martin said.
Which was a weird thing for the landlord to say after picking up the rent.
Shepherd wanted to ask what he meant, he really did, but then Ginny was running up to him and enveloping him in a side hug. “Can’t wait!”
The couple left—praise Jesus—and Shepherd glared down at his fake girlfriend. She was staring up at him with fluttering lashes and pouty lips.
“What the hell, Ginny?”
“I’m so sorry. They invited us to brunch. I panicked and said yes. But I’ll clean your car, OK?” She kissed his cheek, her lips soft on the five o’clock shadow growing on his face. “I’ll clean it this week and next month. OK? Please, Shepherd? Please, please, please?”
The line for dinner was getting longer—the usual mixture of tourists trying to grab a bite before going out drinking and locals who were coming in to grab a drink before going out to eat. The door was stuck open as people waited to be seated, the hot outside air forcing the A/C into overdrive.
He waved her away. “Fine, whatever! Just get to work.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” She hugged him tight. He tried to weasel out of it, but she didn’t let go. “You won’t regret it. I’ll make it up to you so hard.”
If she kept holding him like that, something else was gonna get up and hard. He gently disentangled himself from her and the hostess stand. “Seat people, Ginny. I gotta go parent or something.”
Ginny saluted him. It was adorable and annoying. He stomped away in the direction of the boy child’s last known location, hoping to find him before the snake scared too many of his dumb customers away.
He ordered Max and Chris to watch over the kid with the snake or be fired.
After mocking his tone of voice relentlessly (those two idiots never took his firing threats seriously, for some reason), like he was some high-pitched, well-to-do British lady from the 1800s, they did what he asked, and Shepherd focused on the dinner rush.
He worked behind the bar and kept an eye on Lex, who enjoyed bussing tables.
Well, she enjoyed stacking as many plates and glasses as she could in a tub and seeing how far she could walk without spilling them, which was not very far, and charmed the older women who sat at the bar.
They came in every week, twice a week—on Thursdays for karaoke, and again on Mondays for trivia.
His smiles and coolada jokes always worked on them. Take that, Deandra Kent.
A group of men ordered multiple rounds of pizzas and flirted heavily with Ginny, not that Shepherd cared or even noticed.
So what if four well-dressed dudes who kept flashing wads of cash flirted with his fake girlfriend.
She was only his fake girlfriend. And yeah, since now he knew what her tongue felt like, he’d piss on all their pizzas if it meant kissing her again, but rent on Perfection Avenue was as expensive as hell, so he did absolutely nothing about it.
Even when one of them took an actual, factual rubber band off a stack of fifties like he was auditioning for the Goodfellas sequel.
He was busy managing the dinner rush and managed to lose track of time; otherwise, he would’ve changed before his ex and her husband returned from the movies. His pants were still wet from the whole daddy thing earlier.
Damn them and damn her.
Where was Ginny, anyway?
The last thing—on his list of many, many last things—he needed right now was for Hayley to get wind of this fake-dating scheme. She’d never, ever let him live it down. He’d be absolutely humiliated and—
“Mom!” Lex yelled, hopping off the barstool and running to his ex with a wad of cash in her fist. “Look what I won!”
He helplessly tried to call after his daughter, glancing around the restaurant for backup. Help. Something, anything, to make this not happen.
Hayley narrowed her eyes at the cash. “Won it? How? Karaoke?”
“Oh, nice, Lex!” Oscar offered her a high five. “You nail Iron Maiden every time. Haha, nail? Get it? That was funny.”
Lex did not high-five her stepfather. Shepherd grinned, even as he swung his head from side to side looking for someone else. Noah was busy behind the bar. And Ginny, at the back of the restaurant, was still dealing with that table of flirts.
Those assholes. Smiling at his employee and telling jokes and making her laugh. He hated them. Not as much as he hated Oscar, and it took everything in him not to flash his daughter a thumbs-up in approval as Oscar awkwardly put his hand down.
Oscar cleared his throat. “I’ll get your brother. Where is he? The kitchen?”
Lex nodded.
Oscar started off for the kitchen. Shepherd yelled after him, “Don’t forget the snake!” just as the current karaoke performer finished their set.
The room filled with a heavy silence. The kind of silence where everyone in a large group decides to stop talking at once. Everyone in the restaurant looked at him, including the men flirting with Ginny, and Ginny herself. He cleared his throat and smiled, forced a fake chuckle.
“A joke,” he said. “A joke.”
His customers went back to eating. Ginny spoke to the table of assholes and started walking over to him. Phew, he could say something to her, whisper it in her ear, remind her not to make a fool of him in front of his ex, and everything would be—
“Dad has a new girlfriend,” Lex announced.
For the love of God. Why? Why had God forsaken him?
Lex licked her thumb and counted the bills in her hand. “This is Ginny,” she said, not looking up from her ill-gotten gains. “She’s OK.”
Ginny paused mid-step at his side. Her neck on a swivel, she looked from him to Lex and back again. “Oh,” she said. “Yes. Thank you, Lex. Now, if only you’d approve my friend request, I’d—”
Hayley stuck out her hand, with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m Hayley, Lex’s mother. Don’t feel bad. She hasn’t accepted my request yet, either.”