Whipped! (Barbacks #3)

Chapter 1

Benji

Garfield built an entire empire on hating Mondays, but Mondays at least have the decency to be dramatically awful.

The alarm doesn’t go off, or the coffee maker dies, or you step in something suspicious on the sidewalk and spend the rest of the day pretending your left shoe doesn’t smell like the underside of a bridge.

Mondays are a villain. You can respect a villain.

But here’s the thing about Tuesdays: They’re boring.

Tuesdays are just . . . there.

They’re the lukewarm bathwater of the week, the unseasoned chicken breast of days.

Nothing interesting has ever happened on a Tuesday in the history of human civilization; and if you think it has, you’re wrong, and I will die on this very snooze-worthy hill.

All of this is why I should have known the universe was setting me up.

Because this Tuesday started well.

Suspiciously well.

I woke up before my alarm, which never happens, to find Princess Consuela curled on my chest; her wrinkly little face was tucked under my chin, and her naked body was radiating warmth like a tiny, angry space heater.

She cracked one eye when I moved, gave me a look that clearly communicated “how dare you have a skeleton that requires repositioning,” and then settled back down.

I took a selfie—obvi—then posted it with the caption, “She tolerates me (rare footage),” and watched the likes roll in while I made coffee.

Mug steaming on the kitchen counter a foot away, I nailed a new cocktail recipe I’d been tinkering with.

It was a lavender-honey thing with a rosemary smoke finish that was going to make Finn’s head explode in the best, most Irish way possible.

I filmed the whole process for TikTok. Magically, I got the lighting right on the first try and even managed a clean bottle flip on camera without shattering anything.

Princess Consuela tolerated her harness for a full thirty seconds during our “walk,” which was a generous term for the six-foot journey from my front door to the hallway and back while she stood rigid with betrayal, and I pretended this was exercise. She only hissed twice. It was a personal best.

By noon, I was riding high.

It was a good hair day, my new earring dangled just right, and the barista at the coffee shop spelled my name correctly for the first time in two years, B-E-N-J-I, not “Benji?” or “Beanie” or “Binky,” and absolutely not “Brenda,” which happened once. I have never recovered.

The point is: Everything was perfect.

Remember that. Remember the perfection. Hold it in your heart like a tiny, glittering jewel, because the universe was about to drop-kick me into next week.

But first—and this will be important later, so pay attention—I had to check the weather, but not on my phone like a normal person.

I needed the vibe check, the step-outside-and-feel-the-air assessment that tells you whether Tampa is doing its tropical paradise thing or its surface-of-the-sun-if-the-sun-were-also-a-swamp thing.

This distinction matters when your job requires you to look good for eight hours in a building whose air conditioning has opinions about which rooms deserve climate control.

If it was a ninety-five-and-humid day, my hair strategy would be fundamentally different from an eighty-and-breezy day, and I refuse to apologize for taking this seriously.

So, at one in the afternoon, I opened my front door and stepped into the hallway in boxer briefs, a cropped tank top, and slides, which is practically formal wear by my at-home standards, and immediately encountered my across-the-hall neighbor.

Now, I had lived in this building for ten months.

In that time, I had developed exactly one theory about the person in 4B: He had a dog with a snoring problem that could strip paint.

Every time I walked the hallway between our apartments, this dog, this “asthmatic wildebeest,” produced a nightly symphony of wheezes, snorts, and gurgles that I’d initially mistaken for a malfunctioning dishwasher.

I’d actually filed a maintenance request about it.

Terri from management had investigated, come back, and said, “That’s a bulldog, Mr. Kwon.” She’d said it with the weary patience of a woman who’d been working in apartment maintenance too long to be surprised by anything.

That, my friends, was the full extent of my knowledge about the 4B bulldog and his human. The dog was loud, and the human was probably a shut-in or a vampire, because I never saw him.

Until that moment.

The door to 4B was open. A man was bent over, retrieving a newspaper from the mat outside his door. It was an actual newspaper, one of those physical, printed, and delivered-to-your-door antiques, like he’d time-traveled from 1997 and brought his subscription with him.

To further complicate this scene, he was wearing a bathrobe.

It was not a cool bathrobe, not a sleek, silky, James Bond–after-the-seduction bathrobe.

This was a robe, enormous and plush. The color of oatmeal or possibly a very sad cloud, it engulfed him from neck to ankle and was belted at the waist with a tie that was knotted with the precision of someone who might’ve been attempting to moor a boat.

He had wire-rimmed glasses, dark hair that was sticking up on one side in a way that suggested he’d recently been horizontal, and an overall energy that could best be described as “Victorian gentleman disturbed during his private hours and clearly displeased at the disruption.”

Also, there was a dog.

Behind him, in the doorway, was the wheezing culprit himself, the most decrepit, deflated, structurally unsound bulldog I had ever seen.

The poor creature was shaped like a beanbag chair that had been left in the sun.

His face was ninety percent wrinkle and ten percent a look of profound, philosophical exhaustion.

He was sitting and producing a soft, continuous wheeze that I recognized instantly from ten months of lying in bed wondering if something inside my wall was dying.

The man straightened with his newspaper in hand, saw me, and froze.

I should mention what I looked like at that particular moment.

My cropped tank top was fabulous. It was the one that says CHAOTIC GOOD in rhinestones, which I’d bedazzled myself during a wine-fueled craft night that Mia still has photos of.

My boxer briefs were bright coral, because I believe underwear should have ambition.

I wore slides with socks, because I wasn’t going outside outside.

My hair was in its natural post-styling state, which is to say it was aggressively blonde and pointing in four directions at once.

Last night’s eyeliner still smudged under my left eye because I’d been too lazy to properly remove it, and there was—I would discover later—a small streak of glitter across my collarbone from TikTok filming, because glitter is my cross to bear, and it follows me everywhere like a sparkly haunting.

So, to recap:

Me, in the hallway, looking like a disco ball that had recently been in a minor traffic accident.

Him, in the hallway, clutching a newspaper with vigor while wrapped in an oatmeal bathrobe like a man who had never once in his life seen a disco ball.

We stared at each other.

“Mornin’,” he said.

Oh no.

That was a drawl.

A Texas drawl.

It was warm and unhurried, like honey being poured from a height, the kind of voice that took its time getting to the end of a word because it knew the word would wait. There were only two syllables in “mornin’,” and he gave each one a full, leisurely lifespan.

“Hi!” I said, at a volume and pitch that I immediately wished I could take back. It came out like a parrot who’d been startled and immediately shat itself. “Hey! Hello! Good morning! I’m Benji! I live”—I pointed at my door, which was barely a foot away and plainly obvious—“here.”

He looked past me toward my door, then looked at me. His expression didn’t change, which was impressive, because I was giving him a lot to react to.

“I know,” he said. Then, after a pause so long I thought maybe he’d finished speaking, had a nap, and come back, “You come home at 3 a.m., and your door sounds like a gunshot when it closes.”

“Oh.” I winced. “Sorry. I work late nights at a bar. I try to be quiet, but—”

“And your cat,” he continued, in that same unhurried way, “sounds like she’s being murdered once a day. It happens around noon, regular as clockwork.”

“That’s her mealtime yell. She gets vocal when she’s hungry.”

“Vocal. Right.”

“Enthusiastic,” I amended.

“I thought someone was being harmed.”

“She’s very passionate about wet food.”

Another pause.

He looked at me, at the rhinestones, the coral underwear, the glitter, and the smudged eyeliner, with an expression I couldn’t quite read.

It wasn’t hostile, but it clearly wasn’t amused either.

It looked more like a man cataloguing a natural phenomenon he hadn’t expected to encounter in his hallway.

The bulldog wheezed.

It was the loudest sound in the hallway and also, somehow, the most eloquent commentary available.

“Well,” the man said, then folded his newspaper under his arm. “Enjoy your weather check.”

He glanced pointedly at my boxer briefs, then stepped back into his apartment and closed the door with a soft, definitive click.

I stood in the hallway for a full five seconds.

“Okay,” I said to no one. “He’s awful.”

From behind my door, Princess Consuela meowed. Once. Sharply. It was her “I agree, and also I’m still hungry” meow.

I went back inside, checked the weather on my phone like a normal person, and began getting ready for work with the comfortable certainty that I would never need to interact with Newspaper Robe Man again.

Narrator voice: He would need to interact with Newspaper Robe Man again.

I was three hours into my shift at Barbacks when my phone rang.

Not buzzed. Rang. Like, the actual phone function that no one under forty uses unless someone is dead or in jail.