If you remember this story from before, yes, I'm TGBMcCray. I pulled it. Then I finished it. I'm posting it on AO3 and have had many requests to put it back up here. There are currently 24 chapters over there. There are about 40 total. Over the holidays, I will have some time off work and will be posting a bunch of chapters here to get it even with AO3 so I can update in both places concurrently.
Author notes: This story is about cheating. You will hate both B & E many times before the end. The are perfectly imperfect people who make a lot of stupid mistakes. There is drug use, at times dubious consent (I will warn before that chapter goes up), allusions to previous physical abuse, an eating disorder, a shit ton of drinking and oh yes, eventual cheating. There is also a guaranteed HEA but not until after the slowest burn in the history of the world. Also, so much sarcasm.
Oh, and if you're ones of those bitches who left me so many flame messages last time, kindly fuck right off. You're too damned old to act like high school brats.
Keeping up with this woman makes me feel like a massive joke. She's got ten years and sixty pounds on me, but I am drenched in sweat as we move behind the bar, grabbing tickets and filling frosty glasses. How the fuck does she make pouring just the right amount of head on these beers look so effortless? She's not even sweating. I'd hate her, but I am taking her job, and she's off to have a real life as a bank teller and be home when her kids are off the bus or some shit. Plus, she's trying really hard to be patient with me. I can see it clearly because I am five inches taller than her, and all day, all damned day, she has been looking up at me like I am a sad little thing to be pitied but so far she hasn't given up.
"Hey, Lauren!" Jesus. That construction worker with the crew cut, what's his name? Taylor? Tyson? Tyler? He's yelling at her but I'm supposed to be covering him, and I bet I've fucked something up again. My hands are freezing, and they are the only part of me that is, as I stick my hands back into the coolers again and come out with the wrong fucking bottle of beer. No, no, no. Bandana Guy drinks Coors Light. And this is? What the fuck is this? Rolling Rock? No. I take two big steps, and yank open another section of the cooler, managing to break my nail on the aluminum sliding top, but I catch myself before I curse out loud because there's an old guy with a shot of Wild Turkey in front of me, and he is already looking way too fucking amused with me.
"Lauren!" I watch her shift over to him as she fills another giant pitcher with beer from the taps behind us, but she makes him wait till she's handed it off to a server and stabbed another white ticket from that never-ending ticker tape of orders that keep generating at the end of the bar. "Pour me a beer," Tyler says, real loud, so that everybody sitting along the glossy black bar and all up section B 1-13 looks up. "New Girl doesn't know shit about head. Look at all this foam. What's she trying to do? Choke me?"
My cheeks are burning as the entire section, which is mostly filled with construction workers on lunch break and annoying students, bursts into good-natured guffaws. Squeezing my eyes shut, I stick my head nearly inside the horizontal cooler, pretending to be searching for just the right long neck of Coors Light from the rows of shiny silver tops winking at me. Breathe. Oh, you fucker. I wish you would choke on the foam. I hate this. I want to do a good job, and I don't want Lauren to tell the Cullens I can't cut it here. I need this job. Four fucking years of college, and I've got bills to pay, and I don't know anybody here, and I need this job. I do. I just need some time, damn it. I've never done this before – waited tables or served people or got my tennis shoes all black on holey rubber walking mats. Lauren keeps telling me I'll be glad these things are here by the end of my shift, but I don't believe her. I feel like a gladiator, trying to stay on top that stupid rubber pedestal.
When I come up for air, Wild Turkey smiles at me. "Can I get another?" he says quietly from behind big, dark sunglasses and a shaggy dog beard.
"Oh! Yeah, okay. Sure."
I ring it up, and actually manage to find the right buttons on this register, but when I turn to the daunting array of plugged liquor bottles behind me, I'm lost.
"Third one from the left, about middle ways up the back," he says, and oh, relief. I like this guy. I manage to pour it without spilling, and he swallows it in one gulp without looking like a greedy, creepy old bastard somehow. He slaps a five on the bar, smiles at me, and bobs his head in that way that old men have that could mean hello, goodbye, or fuck off. "Keep the change." He's out the door.
I grab the cash and make change, throwing the tips in a big clear pickle jar behind me, because since Lauren is training me, they aren't mine to keep. She'll give me a cut at the end of this shift, which is kind of crap because even though I'm not very good, I am running my ass off, and I wish I could keep what little I am getting from the ones that feel sorry for me.
It goes on like this for a while till Tyler is yelling again, and I can't avoid him anymore because Lauren is in the back changing a keg, and she doesn't think I'm ready to learn that yet.
"New girl!" I take the bar towel from the back pocket of my jean shorts and put it between us, wiping up his water rings, and trying to deflect. "Where you from, New Girl?"
"G-Georgia."
This little foot of the bar is going to shine.
Tyler smirks. He won't stop smirking. I hate smirkers. James is a smirker.
"You work tomorrow, bumpkin?"
"I…yeah. I work tomorrow."
"All right. Tomorrow, you pour me a decent beer." He lays the money for his meal on the table, and I scoop it up, managing to drop one of the quarters in the ice well as I do. He laughs, and he just won't stop laughing, and what an asshole anyway. He's what, five years older than me? Eight? Not enough to act this high and mighty. I'm working here, damn it. I'm not the one sucking down pissbeer on my lunch break. Fucking awesome success story, he is.
Lauren comes back from the keg room and blows out a breath at smartass with the wide smile and three-day scruff. "Pack it in, Tyler. You're gonna fall off your beams if you drink as much as you want."
He smirks again. "Maybe I need me something to break my fall." His big dark eyes creep over me. "When you lose this job, come find me."
Lauren snaps her towel at him. "Get."
She steps back toward this end's register and smooths out a wad of cash from her pocket. She faces the money quickly, puts some in the register, drops some in another pickle jar, and sweeps her hands toward the wreckage of lunch hour. Bottles, plates, pitchers, glasses, and squeezed up and soppy rinds of lemons and limes litter the great expanse of black polished wood.
She sighs, and her chin quivers. "Listen, we'll get this in a minute. I'm gonna give you a tip way more important than anything to do with Tyler, okay?"
I twist my white towel with the blue stripes in my hands and try not to think about how sticky my thighs are with God-knows-what and how sweaty I am.
"The Cullens drink Diet Coke."
I look up in amazement, but no, she's not jerking my chain. "What?"
"Just what I said. All of them drink Diet Coke. Never regular. Never anything else. Always Diet. One of them comes up here, you pour them a Diet, and you stick one of these little black straws in it." She gestures to a plastic cup of stir sticks. "Every Diet gets a black straw, and every Cullen gets a Diet. Don't mess that up, and you're golden."
"Oh…kay. How, how many of them are there?"
She arches a brow at me. "A lot. All boys. Except Esme, but you'll meet her later. And they all drink Diet. You got it?"
"Yes. Diet Coke. Black straw."
She looks up into my face like trying to make sure I comprehend this simple bit of wisdom that belongs inside a fortune cookie. When she seems satisfied that I do, she takes my arm and leads me around the bar where she presses a five-gallon bucket into my hand.
"First, we get ice. Then we'll get the mess." She hoists a bucket just like mine, and I follow her around a super tight hallway, past the locked door of the office, to a mammoth ice maker that sounds like Darth Vader just before Luke takes off his helmet in Return of the Jedi.
She spends a couple minutes showing me how to hold this giant metal shovel-scoop thing and how to dig way down into the ice compartment at the back to bust up the ice that gets stuck and make room for fresh to fall and then she stands back to watch me. I suck at this, too. I'm getting maybe a quarter of the ice she is with each scoop, and a lot of it is ending up on the floor.
About the time I get so frustrated that an exasperated "Fuck!" slips past my lips, I catch a glimpse of something decidedly male through the straggles of matted, stinky hair escaping my long braid. I look up from the ice, and he breezes right along the hallway.
He's wearing a black Cullen's Roadhouse t-shirt, a pair of Levi's, and a fucking apron. Really. He's got a white apron looped low around his hips, just folded and tied around his waist like a dirty towel. His hair, a riot of gold and red and brown, but mostly red, flops into his eyes, which are maybe brown? Green? I'm not sure, but he's flashing me a smile, and he's gone. I watch him take the two steps down into the kitchen, his ass perfectly framed by the apron at his hips. His long fingers are curled around a Styrofoam cup in one hand, and a clipboard in the other.
If my thighs weren't already soaked with beer and ice, I might have a problem right now. He had dimples. At least one anyway, and a smile that just lit me up and blew me out in front of God and country and Lauren.
I become aware that I'm clutching her arm when she says, "Ow. Bella?"
"Who was that?"
She rubs her arm and glances back toward the kitchen, into the din of noise where Adonis just descended. "Who, Edward? He works here, manages back of house."
"Edward. Oh! Edward Cullen?"
"Yeah. Remember what I said –"
My mouth is dry but my pussy is really, really wet. I don't care how gross it sounds. It's true. I think I may be working on a contact orgasm, but without the contact. I rasp at her, testing out if my voice still works. "Diet Coke."
"Yep."
The shovel/ice spade in my hand is so cold, but it feels good because it's so much hotter in here than it was before, and God knows it was hot then.
"Does he have a girlfriend?" I don't care how forward I am. I want to know.
Lauren's nose snurls. It's universal chick body language for this shit is complicated. "Yeah. They just moved in together a few months back, I think. We don't see her much in here. But they're still together."
"Not for long."
I don't realize I've said it out loud till Lauren starts laughing but I am serious as a fucking heart attack. I know, I know I said I was through. I swore off men. I moved here, even though it was James's fucking hometown, and I swore him and Jacob and all of them off, but fuck.
Edward Cullen looks sexy as sin in an apron.
I have to have him.
He's the owner's son, or one of them. I don't know what the rest of them look like, but if Edward is any indication, this job may not suck as much as I was thinking it might.
Emmett's the oldest, and Jasper's the youngest. Lauren tells me this as she counts down her drawer at the end of our shift on day one. Edward is the middle son, the easy-going one. I want him in my middle. Easy going, hard going, just going and yeah, coming. I can't explain it. I haven't felt that kind of instant attraction since, ever, really. No, not even James. James is a cad, a flirter, a schemer. Edward just smiled, and I want to climb him like the last tree in the middle of a stampede.
Fortunately, I have bigger fish to fry. Lauren takes me back to the office and introduces me to Leah Clearwater, a wisp of a woman with bones where her wrists should be and a paleness that makes her naturally dark skin look like rancid chocolate milk. Lauren says she's in a bad marriage, something about a junkie husband. I guess it's the stress but she looks like she's bought out too many CVS allergy sections herself. Day manager, front of house, she is the yin to Edward's yang. I kind of want to hate her, just because she talks about him to the other servers like she's known him forever, which she probably has. She keeps a little radio on her hip, and she unbelts it when it crackles as she counts down the drawer full of cash Lauren just spent fifteen minutes putting in order. "Tell Edward to order more ketchup. Nobody likes that house brand from Sysco."
Somebody on the radio crackles back but it's not him, so whatever.
Leah finishes the drawer and gives me a small smile as she presses a wad of cash into Lauren's hand. "You gonna make it?"
Why does everybody keep asking me that? I'm not totally breakable. And I wasn't that bad. "Sure," I say, trying to look convincing. "No problem."
"A few more days with Lauren and then you'll expo with me through lunch so you learn the menu."
"Expo?" Bars have their own language, like video game geeks and Star Trek nerds. Who knew?
"Expedite. I make sure the orders are plated right during lunch, set up the sauces and sides, and get the trays ready for the servers. It's the best way to learn the menu quickly so you aren't so slow on bar when people want to eat. Back of house."
"The menu," I repeat. "Back of house?"
Lauren hands me a measly ten-dollar bill for a five-hour shift. On top of the two dollars and seven-five cents I'm making an hour, that will just about not-at-all pay for the gas it took me to drive all over town for interviews and finally get this job.
"The kitchen," Lauren says, smirking. Did I mention I hate smirkers?
But the kitchen?
Bingo.
Leah sidles up to the bar the next morning as Lauren is showing me how to clean out and ice down the wells. She takes the gun away from me, holds down the button for Coke and Sprite at the same time, and flashes me a grin that pulls the already prominent bones in her face even tighter.
"QT starts at 10:45. Booth 1."
Fucking shorthand, bar-speak.
And what the fuck with Coke and Sprite together? Gross.
"That's homemade ginger ale for her stomach. Nerves." I gape at her. Lauren leans over to whisper conspiratorially while Leah moves up to the front of the bar and starts rolling up the giant blinds over the windows and turning on neon signs. "Her husband. She's very nervous. Vapes too."
Lauren is like the little chubby Scheherazade of Cullen's. She sees all, knows all, does it all better than anybody else, and yet, can't wait to get away from it all.
"Okay," I say, pulling a beer pitcher of sliced limes out of the fruit cooler under the taps and arranging it at the wells with yet more little rubber mats. "QT?"
"Quality Time. It's what Esme calls our morning planning meetings."
Morning staff meetings as quality time? Esme Cullen sounds like a cunt.
My well is decently set up and servers are drifting toward booth 1 for this mysterious meeting when the ticker tape from hell goes off.
Diet Coke.
That's all. Hmm.
I make the cup, and have just stuck the little black straw in when he materializes behind me. No apron. Darker jeans. His hair looks like he just crawled out of bed from fucking someone six ways to Sunday. He was probably fucking his girlfriend.
Damn it.
He grins at me, a little lopsided, and takes the straw out of the cup. It goes into his mouth. He talks around it as he pours the clear plastic cup into a replica of that giant Styrofoam one from yesterday.
"Sorry," he says, and ooh, his voice is as good as his height, and the height is really, really good, because I'm easily 5'8," so he's got to be 6'2" or 6'3." "I have to have a lid for back of house."
Don't say something stupid, Bella.
"Oh, right. Because of contamination and stuff?" Oh, God. He's not tainted. Shut up! "I would've poured it for you but we don't have any of those cups around here."
He's working that straw with his lips and arching one eyebrow up at me. I never could do that. It's so James Bond, effortlessly cool. I think my eyebrows are maybe paralyzed, along with other parts of my anatomy at the moment.
"Here." Warm fingers touch my wrist. "I'll show you the secret."
Oh, please. Please, do.
Those hot fingers go around my forearm, and he tows me away from the bar and down the hall toward the office. We stop at the ice machine and he drops my arm. I can't register anything besides the lack of contact and that straw in his mouth. I bet he's one of those guys who can tie cherry stems into knots with their mouths, too. Oh, God. Isn't there some kind of law against being this turned on before lunchtime?
He taps the top of the ice machine, and I drag my eyes away from his mouth long enough to notice a plastic-covered sleeve of the giant Big Gulp-style cups and matching lids.
"There you go. Now you know where the treasure is, you can't go taking off."
"I would never." I try for coy, smiling up at him, but I really just want to grab him and push him out the door behind us that leads to the dumpsters and the oil recycling. Alleyway sex. All the hottest man-stealing, home-wrecking whores are doing it these days.
"Well, that's settled. We better get you back to Leah and Lauren."
I start to follow him, but the hand with the Diet Coke sweeps out for me to go first, and so I do, walking slowly, trying not to twist my ass so much I look ridiculous, while remembering to keep my shoulders back and sway a little more than usual.
My back feels hot. I can feel the prickles all along my neck. I wore the shortest jean shorts I could find today. The uniform is jeans and Cullen's shirts. Or jean shorts. Daisy Duke, you blessed redneck, thank you for showing me the light. Let's hope he sees it, too.
He hangs back behind Booth 1 while Leah yammers on. I have no idea what she says. He's looking at his clipboard again. I don't think he's listening either, but I don't know.
"We've got to make a liquor order tomorrow," Leah says. She shoots me a look. "That's you and Lauren. Day bartender checks out all the old bottles so I can order."
That explains the dozens of empties lined up at the other end of the bar. Sort of. I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to do with any of them, but I nod like I do, and then immediately look back to Edward to see what he's doing.
He's watching me. As soon as my eyes land on him, he's back at his clipboard, and oh, he's caught. It could just be everybody stares at the new girl when the day manager calls her out, but I prefer to think it's the shorts. He's bewitched by the denim and skin. Come here, and let me charm your snake for you, Edward.
He's smiling at whatever is on that clipboard, and it's such a nice smile. One dimple and very straight, white teeth, except for a top incisor that's a little out of line. I can't tell about the lowers. He doesn't smile that big. He looks trustworthy, which is ridiculous because he is a man, after all. The only trustworthy ones are dead. Or gay.
My phone beeps as QT breaks up and I miss him walking away as I read the text from Alice.
I'm in town. Your landlord stopped by.
He wanted to remind you that there are NO pets.
Put Bails cat carrier under a quilt in the bathroom.
He was not amused.
I have got to make some fucking money. I need to pay a pet deposit.
And buy new underwear.