Sweating bullets.
“Did you really just tell me to calm down and be quiet?” Her eyes narrow slowly in a way that honestly terrifies me. “Did I walk into a Wrench Kings chain or did I walk through a portal to 1950?”
It’s not the tiny tear that breaks through her thick lashes that causes it, but it certainly doesn’t help. Because right then, the wretch that has steadily been climbing my throat since I woke up an hour ago finally makes its presence known.
Delane, on instinct, reaches under the desk and hands me the gray can lined with a black garbage bag. I clutch it to my chest as I repeatedly heave into the can, turning away from the beautiful, angry woman with the hot curves and the single tear.
Another ding from the side door and Atticus and Miller are in the front of the shop, standing next to Delane.
“Again, huh?” Atticus questions rhetorically to Delane. They murmur between them because that’s what everyone is always doing. Murmuring about me.
Miller, who is my exact age at twenty-six but seems like he’s barely twenty due to his soft-spoken demeanor and complete teddy bear persona, takes my place at the counter. Around my gags and wretches, I hear him apologize to her so easily that I wonder why it’s so hard for me.
Instead of telling her to be quiet, how come I couldn’t just say I’m sorry and move forward? The can sloshes with sick as I stumble toward the employee bathroom at the back of the space, leaving the door cracked as I amble inside. Holding my head in my hands, I sit on the single toilet and try to get my bearings.
“And it just, it stopped getting cool. After it made that noise, it just stopped,” the woman says, finishing her complaint.
“Okay,” Miller answers in that uncomplicated soothing tone of his. “Atticus will pull it in, alright? We’ll get going on it right now.”
I look up and through the cracked door to see the keys move from her hand to Miller’s, then slide onto Atticus’s grease-stained fingers. He disappears out the service door, leaving the woman looking more relieved. But still upset.
Delane pulls a bottle of water from the mini fridge beneath reception, and raises a basket of snacks to the woman. “Take some cookies, and if you don’t need a loaner vehicle, I’ll just grab my bag and drive you wherever you’re heading today.”
“No car. Just the courtesy shuttle,” the woman says, waving off the snacks but taking the bottle of water.
Delane types on the computer for a second, locks the screen, then slides her purse over her shoulder. “And I know it doesn’t take back the asinine things he said and I’m not asking you to forgive Beau, but,” she shrugs, pulling her long dark curls out from under the purse strap. “He’s been suffering from BHS.” I can see from all the way back here her sympathetic head tilt.
“BHS?” The woman questions, sipping from the sweating bottle of cool water. God, I need water right now. I tie off the top of the garbage can liner as I peer through the cracked door, waiting to find out what ailment Delane’s given me. I guess sheiscoming to my rescue, albeit a little late, but still.
“Broken heart syndrome,” Delane says.
It isn’t the phony concoction or bullshit lie I expected.
The truth of those three words make all of me ache, and I turn to finish puking up the vodka into an actual toilet.
What the beautiful, sad stranger and Delane talk about as they walk out of Wrench Kings is a mystery to me because all I can hear is the loud flushing of the toilet and the inflamed ache in my broken, still-beating heart.
* * *
After I eattwo bags of the courtesy cookies, drink two bottles of water, and wash my face in the bathroom sink, I’m feeling a lot better.
Just in time to feel shitty again.
Atticus comes into the shop through the service door, his steel toe boots thudding loudly with each step. I refrain from grabbing my head. I’m back in Delane’s chair while she’s out, and Atticus stretches across the desk next to me, torso flat, one elbow propping his head up.
He stares at me. I blink at him.
“You were an asshole to that woman.”
“You weren’t even here,” I wave him off, even though we both know he’s right.
“Delane told me what happened.” His bottom lip rolls beneath his teeth. “IfI’msayin’ you were a dick, you were a fuckin’ dick.”
Atticus is gruff, careful, sparse with conversation, and definitely not warm at all. He’s one of my closest friends but the man is a fairly big asshole, most of the time.
If he’s saying I was an asshole, I wasn’t just an asshole. I was aroyalfucking prick.
I ignore him because this isn’t the first time he and I have had a talk like this. I’ve never needed a lecture for being a prick to a beautiful woman with a broken AC, but I’ve been the bad guy in more situations than not in the last year.