Her Dirty Bartenders (Men at Work #5) - Mika Lane Page 0,7
of glass providing a view of Denver and the mountains beyond.
“I don’t care how beautiful it is outside,” I snapped.
She wrinkled her nose. “Is something wrong, Stell?”
Oh my god. I loved her but I was about to kill her.
So I spoke as fast as I could, before she interrupted me again. “The insurance company is not paying me. At least not yet.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh, no.”
The frustration of the non-conversation with Dan suddenly bubbled up in my chest, and my bottom lip quivered.
“I don’t have the money to pay for the repair myself, and if insurance doesn't pay, I can’t get to LA.” I plopped down on one of her kitchen counter stools and buried my head in my hands.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck. I should have known something like this would happen. It’s karma. I have fucked up karma for all the horrible things I’ve done in my life.”
Marni rubbed a hand over my back. “You haven’t done anything horrible, honey, except maybe leave Vaughn at the altar.”
I nodded, the tears flowing. “That was big one. But not the only one.”
“Well, what else have you done?” she asked gently.
“I don’t know,” I sniffed. “I shoplifted some gum, once.”
I heard a snicker that was promptly extinguished. “Um, Stell, how old were you when you did that?”
“Ten. Maybe twelve.”
“Stell, are you saying you’re broke?”
I hated for her to know what a loser I was. But if she didn’t know by now, since we’d been friends most of our lives, she needed to.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Come with me while I dress for work.”
I followed her to her bedroom, my head hanging in shame and watched her pull a uniform of black workout pants and a fitted, racerback tank on her perfect figure. She topped it off with a cropped black hoodie with the name of the gym on it—Altitude Fitness. So appropriate for the mile-high city of Denver.
“We need a plan, Stell. I can make some calls for you, but for the short term, I can find something for you to do at the gym, where you can make a little money. It won’t be much, but it’s a start.”
No. Way.
“You can get me a job at Altitude? Are you kidding?”
Altitude was the most exclusive gym in the entire Denver metroplex. At least that’s what Marni had told me.
She laughed. “Of course I can hire you. I own the joint. Now go get dressed and we’ll be on our way.”
“Oh my god, Marn, I love you,” I screamed, almost knocking her over with a hug.
“Okay, okay,” she said, peeling my arms from around her neck. “We need to hurry. I don't like being late, it sets a bad example for the rest of the team.”
I rushed to my room and pulled on the same gym clothes I’d worn the day before, without even stopping to see if they stank. I didn’t have time to worry about details. I was a big picture person now, and I was visualizing LA with its palm trees, beaches, and movie stars.
In fact, while Marni drove us to Altitude, I scrolled through my Pinterest pin board of LA pictures. I tried to look at them every day to manifest my dream.
So far, I was halfway there. That was the positive way to look at things.
When we arrived, I was so excited, I was bouncing in my sneakers. “Okay. Tell me what you need me to do. I’ll do anything you need, Marn.”
She looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “We need all the dirty towels emptied out of the bins in the workout rooms, and brought to the laundry in the basement.”
What?
Dirty towels? Basement?
“Oh. Okay,” I said.
She pulled a wheeled cart out of a closet. “Don’t forget to get the ones in the women’s locker room. We’ll get one of the guys to get the ones from the men’s locker room later.”
I pushed the cart towards the first towel bin I saw.
“Wait,” she called after me. “Here, put on this shirt so you look like an employee. And wear these gloves. You never know what people might have.”
Oh god.
I pushed the cart as my hands sweated in the cheap disposable gloves, retrieving towels that looked like they’d never been used, and some that looked like whoever had used them hadn’t bathed in weeks.
More than once I held my breath.
Wow. Was this what the universe had intended for me? It could be. I’d read that sometimes you got knocked down before your big win came. It was called paying your dues.
And