Chapter 20 Bad Choices and Incompetence
“Yeah… congrats on the new job. Wish I was so lucky.” She sighed. “And thank fuck the owner stepped in to get you to stay for the shift. I would have never made it dealing with that table of beautiful men…” She sighed deeply. “The face cards, the body cards, it’s hard to believe most of their teeth aren’t real.”
Lydia snorted. “They make enough money to afford damn good dental insurance, unlike the rest of us.”
Riley laughed. “True.”
“You never told me the owner’s name.” She hesitated. “If it starts with a ‘D’, don’t tell me.”
“No, it’s something with an ‘A’… Like Annikin or something.”
She thought of the name printed on the black card that had paid for most of the section and the incredibly beautiful man with long hair framing his face in the linen suit sitting across from a literal Greek god look-alike. Apollo, maybe?
He’d also been the one to slap Dorian over the head twice for being an asshole.
Nice.
Dorian’s friend, but not an asshole.
“I’ll keep it in mind. Love a man who follows through on his promises.”
“You talking about the tips?” She giggled. “I didn’t think he could order them all to tip.”
“Love the energy. Since Jason’s definitely going to take me off the schedule for the next week or five, I’ll tell you now, I’m going to look for a replacement.”
“Me, too.” Riley shook her head. “I’m really hoping to get out. The Clubhouse is having a hiring event tomorrow. I think I’ll start there. They make way more money.”
“Fortuna native strikes again! How do you know that?”
“My aunt told me.” She shrugged. “You wouldn’t think it because she’s so chill, but she’s got a lot of connections.”
From what Lydia remembered, Riley’s aunt owned a studio of some sort on the island. She’d grown up on Fortuna, but other than her aunt, she wasn’t connected to the wealthy upper class that populated the island. She didn’t attend Aegis. She wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted to do, and she had the time to figure it out since her parents’ only rule was that if she wasn’t going to college, she had to find a job.
“How are classes?” Lydia asked. “You got into the summer semester, right?”
She nodded. “Remote. Dad’s relieved I’m finding something of interest even if it’s just poetry.”
“It’s good for the soul. You could be the next Yates.”
“Yeats,” Riley corrected. “And that’s not my style.”
“Slam poetry?”
“What’s that?”
Lydia snorted. “Oh, I have so much to teach you. Your place? Considering my current roommate situation?”
“Sleepover!” Riley cooed as the cart came to a stop on the other side of campus. Their phones chimed.
Riley opened her first, and her shoulders slumped. “What the hell? He can’t write me up for not being a dishwasher!”
Lydia opened her messages and scoffed. The bullshit warning about the dishes being left was not from the bar’s management email, but the message about her being “on-call” for the next three weeks was.
She opened the employee portal and set up five weeks of blackout days because fuck him.
“Let him bus tables and wash dishes by himself. Go hang out with your aunt for five weeks if you don’t get that job at the Clubhouse.”
Dorian’s feet pounded against the sand. He was lucky, he’d left a pair of running shoes at Animkii’s sometime at the top of the season. He hadn’t been ready to go back to his fucking villa and deal with the guilt the sight of his baby sister being back on this island brought.
He also shouldn’t have opened the fucking email, but old habits died hard, and honestly, there was no chance he could convince himself resistance was the answer.
His life had more or less already been decided. The same didn’t have to be true of Becca. Heather wouldn’t protect her daughter, and Vincent was probably already scheming about who he could hitch Becca to for the sake of his family’s company and prestige.
He snarled and pushed forward, streaking across the sand. Seagulls cawed and circled overhead. The waves lapped at the shore. The beauty of Fortuna graced hundreds of travel catalogs and conservation magazines, but it didn’t reach him today.
The ocean was murky with all the bodies the Society had thrown into it for years, literally and figuratively. The sand might as well have been heaps of ash for all the lives the Society had burned. Somewhere on this beach, the last remnants of his teenage self had burned out.
He cursed himself. These fucking melodramatic thoughts weren’t what he needed. Anger. He needed to remember how fucking angry he was, but his mind swung to dark, mysterious eyes rimmed in black and topaz and glinting with just enough malice to make his dick hard.
He always liked a fucking challenge. Always reached for what didn’t want him when he was looking to keep it. He hated that. Hated that it was so much like Vincent and his father, but there was no helping it.
He’d woken up hard and pissed off, dreaming of what it might feel like to skim his hands over Lydia’s hips because she wanted him there. What that malice and challenge might look like focused on not putting him in his place, but demanding more of him or taking her pleasure from him.
He’d had a girlfriend like that once, back before things got murky and complicated, back when he still had hope that maybe not every part of his life was a string to be pulled.
He shoved that thought away as he headed up the stone steps that led back to the trail that wound through the owned villas. He took the lower path rather than keying in the code that would let him cut through Animkii’s property.
There was no need to add adrenaline to his shitty mood, and he couldn’t think at Animkii’s. His guard would drop, his mind would settle, and he’d probably end up asleep on his couch again. Animkii’s place was too much of a place of refuge, and he didn’t need that right now.
He needed a fucking plan.
He’d skipped the whole slide deck, along with all the notes his new administrator had put together to get to the profiles. There were only two candidates. No photos, just a neat dossier on each.
He hadn’t needed a photo for Amber, and it had been a slap in the face to see her name there.
Amber, that fucking girlfriend who had always known what she wanted, sleazy, user, airhead, cheating puck bunny, had been on top. Not surprising given their history, and the fact that, unlike Mason, he hadn’t broadcast to all in sundry why he and Amber hadn’t worked out. He’d just ghosted her ass and spent his rookie season fucking, drinking, and partying through every city.
She was a non-option unless he wanted to chance an STD or was committing to making more bad decisions.
The other option, though…