ONE
“Thank you so much,”Penny, the waitress I was covering for, said as I stepped into the restaurant through the back door. She was holding a plastic grocery bag in one hand in case she vomited, and her other hand was around her bloated stomach. Still in her first trimester of pregnancy, she was puking like a fiend.
“Any time. And hey, you’re going to pay in baby snuggles when your little dude gets here.” I winked at her, grabbing my apron. “Go home and rest. Hydrate. All that good stuff.” I waved her toward the door.
The gratitude in her eyes was more than enough of a thank you. I might not have needed the money I earned from waitressing, but I sure as hell needed the friendships. And considering that most of the shifts I worked were picked up to help someone else, I needed the positive juju, too.
Penny slipped out of the restaurant, and I grimaced as I heard her puking before the door shut.
Pregnancy.
A uniquely beautiful misery.
Something I’d probably never experience, given that I had yet to convince a guy to see me as anything more than his book-obsessed friend with a vagina. Even that wasn’t common—I definitely didn’t have many guy friends. And I’d been attempting to find a werewolf mate for years, but that hadn’t happened, either.
Not for lack of trying, though.
My phone was buzzing in my pocket as I looked over the list of scribbled orders and table numbers that Penny had left for me.
They were not great notes.
Sigh.
I’d have to check to see which food orders had already been submitted, and have to go back and re-take orders for whichever shitty ones she’d left.
My phone continued buzzing.
“Phones away,” Zed growled at me from across the kitchen. Somehow, the bastard always managed to catch me with that one.
“It’s Dax,” I protested, pulling the phone out and glancing down at the screen. He was wondering where I was—shocker. I’d told him to meet me there, but one of my online besties had just lost someone close to her, and needed to rant about books for a few minutes to get her mind off life. So, I was late.
I ran a huge book review blog and social media pages, so my online besties were some of the most influential people in the reader-world. They were my friends, too, but online friendship was too weird for me to really rely on them.
But I was there for them when they needed me. So yeah, I was late.
Dax had gathered a handful of unmated werewolf dudes for me to meet, but honestly, I was feeling pretty down about the whole thing. He’d helped me meet more than fifty single werewolves already, and none of them had so much as growled at me.
It would only take a minute to walk up to his table, look into each of their eyes, and realize that none of them were my mate.
I guess fate had decided that I needed to marry a human guy. Hopefully it would find me someone who loved the same kind of books I did.
Though honestly, how many attractive, straight, single men were there with an obsession for steamy fantasy romances featuring morally-gray men with wings and big dicks?
Double sigh.
Men needed to get on the fantasy romance train already. They were seriously missing out.
“He’s not your mate, leave him alone,” Zed called after me, as I dropped my phone in the metal bin where the damned head chef required they be left if he saw or heard them in any manner. I unlovingly called it phone-jail, and mine almost always ended up there.
But the customers loved me, and my best friend was mated to one of his best friends, so Zed couldn’t fire me.
“Fuck off, Chef,” I called back.
He swore under his breath, but focused on yelling at someone else instead of me.
I liked to consider him and I frenemies. We didn’t particularly like each other; if we had been in a romance book, we probably would’ve been one of those enemies-to-lovers, hate-sex couples. But he was happily mated, so that was definitely off the table.
No hate-sex for me.