So yeah, of course we discussed it. Everybody noticed that thing. I’d even go as far as to say it was mesmerizing. Implants or not, it was something special.
And of course, that was when Gunner walked by and caught us.
Because we’d been too distracted talking—and staring—to notice the side door opening. We’d gotten really good at keeping an eye out for him and immediately making it seem like we were busy so that we wouldn’t get caught. Like we had. Like fucking rookies.
“We’ve talked about this before,” Gunner kept going, oblivious to the fact we were both tuning him out as much as humanly possible.
We’d gotten really good at this in-one-ear-and-out-the-other thing.
Deepa and I had hit it off from the moment we’d met right after I got hired. She was my work best friend, and she helped me out a few hours a week at my apartment when I filmed. We’d met when she was eighteen, and she had reminded me a lot of myself at her age—young, alone in a different place than where she’d grown up, and just trying to get by. But she was an only child of a single parent who lived too far away to visit regularly. I felt protective of her, and I wanted the best for her.
She was the only person at Maio House who knew about my “side business.” But as friendly as we’d been before—because she really was the only reason now why I hadn’t walked out of the gym like so many of our coworkers had—nothing had brought us together more over the last couple of months quite like our mutual hatred for the same person: Gunner.
“You get paid to work, not to stand around chatting,” our new boss complained. “If you need more things to do, let me know. And if you don’t want to work, then that’s fine with me too. The McDonald’s down the street is hiring. They posted a sign.”
I hated him.
And I wished I knew Morse code so I could tell Deepa that with my eyelids.
“Have I made myself clear?”
Had he made himself clear that we were paid to work the front desk—and in Deepa’s case the juice bar—and couldn’t exactly walk away from the counter to go do other things?
I didn’t trust myself, so I just nodded, and so did my friend.
“It’s business, ladies. Don’t take it personally. One day, if you’re lucky, maybe one of you will be a business owner and understand where I’m coming from,” the asshole went on.
If this dickwad only knew.
He could suck on his condescending advice.
I was my own business. And the only reason I was still around was because of the dumb decisions I’d made in the past—financial and personal.
A few days ago, after I’d gotten home from eating dinner with Zac and Boogie, I’d laid in bed and thought about my future more than I had in a while. I thought about what I wanted. Mostly though, I thought about what I dreamed of—after I’d beat myself up for being so cold to Zac and not answering his questions or asking my own.
For not telling him what I’d been doing with my life the last few years.
I hadn’t exactly started filming videos of myself cooking on purpose. It had just kind of… happened.
As far as I could remember, I had always loved making things in the kitchen. It was something I’d inherited from all the time I’d spent with Mamá Lupe. It had been our bonding time. Our happy time. Even our sad time. Some of my absolute favorite memories had been in her house, making empanadas and cakes and mole and guisado. She’d even bought an Irish cookbook so I could make some things that my dad’s family would have liked… if he’d still had any of them. And when we hadn’t been cooking, we loved watching talk shows with cooking segments. We’d binge Emeril. She had made it fun and TV show-like when we made things together, and it had sucked me in and turned into a place of comfort and love.
When there were a ton of other things in my life I couldn’t control, I had always been able to pick and choose what I made; that was something I didn’t have to rely on other people for.
And later on, being in the kitchen made me feel closer to the woman I had adored who I missed so much. She had left me with a