Mostly because of this lovely human being.
He sucked.
I purposely made my smile go even bigger while I waited for the crappiest boss I’d ever had to tell me if he actually needed something.
Because we both damn well knew he didn’t. He was just being a micromanaging butt-munch who loved harassing his employees, and today was my lucky day. Yay.
“No,” Gunner the retired United Fighting League fighter replied with that annoyingly blank glare that had me wondering if he’d tried using it in the cage back in his prime. I’d looked him up the first day he had bitched me out for drinking a smoothie behind the front desk. “I don’t know how they ran things here before,” the nightmare had tried to tell me two days after he’d started working here, “but no food is allowed behind the counter, even if it’s a smoothie from the juice bar. And no discounts either. You pay the price that’s on the board just like everybody else.”
First off, I hadn’t even gotten a discount when my coworker had made my smoothie. I’d bought it for the full price. The only time I ever got discounts had been if one of the managers or owners had offered it up in the moment. Secondly, it hadn’t been like I’d been drinking it in front of customers. I’d sipped at it between people coming and going, while crouched behind the counter because I’d had to skip my lunch. And why did I have to skip my lunch? Because my coworker had quit the day before after Gunner had griped at her for asking to come in late so she could take her son to the doctor.
“I don’t pay you to stand around watching TV, remember that,” the man said in that tone that had me fighting not to roll my eyes.
Remember that.
Douchebag.
Feeling my fingers instantly curling into fists on their own, it took everything in me to keep my face neutral and my eyes normal width before I managed to say to my boss as sweetly as humanly possible, smiling sarcastically, “I know. Don’t worry.”
What he needed to worry about was getting a foot up his ass.
How the hell I’d gone from really enjoying working here, enjoying my coworkers and most of the members, to sitting in my car, waiting until the absolute last minute to clock in and having my keys in my hand a minute before my shift was set to end was beyond me. Mostly. I had even started checking the schedule to see what days Gunner was supposed to come in so that I could mentally brace myself.
Gunner’s annoying ass rapped his knuckles on the counter one last time before he pushed off. I watched him walk around the desk and to the door that led to the pathway connecting the gym part of the building that I worked in with the other building next door that held what we called the MMA section since the majority of the people who trained over there were fighters.
I needed to get out of here.
And one day—one day soon—I would.
First, I just needed Deepa to find another job so that I wouldn’t feel bad leaving her to fend for herself with this asshole. I’d been bringing it up at least once a day, but she still hadn’t committed to quitting no matter how much she hated putting up with Gunner too. Hopefully sooner than later, she really would go through with it because I wasn’t positive how much longer I was going to last here even now that I was only working part-time.
I needed to talk to her about it again ASAP. Maybe tomorrow morning when she was supposed to come over to my apartment to help me. We could look through job listings during our break. Yeah, that was a good plan.
Now, what was I thinking about before I’d gotten distracted?
A recipe. I’d been trying to work out a new recipe in my head. That was what I’d been thinking about when TSN—The Sports Network—had flashed that familiar man across the screen and I’d instantly gone for the remote to change the channel. It took me a second to get back to where I’d last been on the recipe train. Bananas and chocolate were about as far as I’d gotten before I’d been weak and got sucked into what the commentators were saying, even though I knew better. It wasn’t like they ever said anything nice.
But anyway.
All the time I spent standing around thinking had been my favorite thing about this job before. It was time I could use working out recipe ideas in my head, weighing their pros and cons while I got paid. I liked getting out of the house and had made friends here. It had been a win-win.
And then Gunner happened.
My phone vibrated against my butt cheek, and I looked around to make sure Asshole 1 hadn’t come back in and wasn’t hiding around the corner, waiting.
He wasn’t. At least I was pretty sure he wasn’t.
Pulling it out, I took a peek at the screen, half-expecting a message from my sister since I hadn’t heard from her all day.
I wasn’t disappointed.
CONNIE LOVES PECKER: Do I need to help you find a date to Lola’s quince?
Wasn’t that… months away? And did you even need a date to a fifteen-year-old’s birthday party? Sure, that part of the family was spending something like twenty thousand dollars on my second cousin’s party; my sister had called to tell me how dumb they were for throwing money around like that when we all knew they couldn’t really afford it. For Connie’s fifteenth birthday, our parents had bought
