No Weddings (No Weddings #1)(12)
I shook my head, clearing it of all things Hannah. Random thoughts had never skewed my focus before, and I refused to let an unexpected reaction to a girl I barely knew send it haywire. My world needed to remain exactly the way it was.
By the time I turned my bike down the back alley and eased between Ben’s Escalade and our bartender Lisa’s Smart Car—yeah, we got the irony, figuring the two cancelled each other out in Energy Karma Points—my head had cleared. The cool night air after a steady drizzle for the better part of the day helped too. Something about that heavy mineral tang in the air made me inhale deeply and feel reset again.
I parked my bike. Two wide-angle security cameras and three floodlights bathed the space. We wanted it bright as daylight to keep the vehicles parked in our six spaces as secure as possible. Barbacks coming and going with empties to recycle and trash to toss, not to mention rotations of our security staff, also kept the perimeter of our building secure.
My gaze fell on the rusty, disintegrating sign that had inspired Loading Zone’s name. At Kiki’s insistence, we’d had the thing sprayed with some kind of matte-finish coating to prevent further decay. But all the red lettering was intact on the white backdrop. I grinned, remembering how too many beers and lack of inspiration had us all sitting on crates out back tossing rocks at the sign in target practice before our name epiphany struck.
My smile faded when I noticed the back door was ajar. Again. I strode over and yanked it open, kicked the rock aside, and let it slam shut behind me.
“Ben, the back door was wide open again!” My shout bounced along the polished concrete floors and steel paneling to reach Ben’s office and his all-hearing ears, even over the loud music pulsing from up front.
Ben glanced up from the scattered paperwork on his desk. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Tracy’s been in and out stocking and told me she’d secure it when she’s done.”
It was well past nine. Stocking should’ve been done hours ago. “Well, either she forgot, or she’s the slowest worker in the world and needs to be fired. I’m a bad guy. I have a gun. I just emptied your safe and shot you ’cause I got sloppy and you saw my face.” I dropped a finger gun his direction and fired it with a snap of my wrist. “Bang. You’re dead.”
He gave me a dramatic eye roll. “Fine. I’ll have another talk with her.”
“Good idea,” I said over my shoulder as I left, heading into the employee area.
It took me exactly ninety seconds to change into the black, tight T-shirt we all wore, stash my stuff in the locker, and be behind the bar, filling my first order.
Lisa was a blur of motion, filling the orders of people already packed into the club. And without skipping a beat, I entered my Zen Zone—my private domain of Loading Zone—thinking about nothing but the next drink. This wasn’t work for me—it was stress relief.
I didn’t let pressure get to me here; I had plenty of that kind of demand at school. No drama made it into my ears, nor rumors past my lips. I tried my damnedest to remain a personable Switzerland, and everyone knew and respected me for it.
I filled my first tickets, which were electronically delivered on tablet screens mounted to the bar, as I rattled off beautiful numbers in my head. Two Silver Bullets: buck a piece. Vodka Tonic: two. Strawberry Daiquiri, Cosmo, and Screaming Orgasm shooters: three each.
No, I wasn’t counting points. Sure as shit wasn’t calculating drink prices. Each pretty calculation was our take per drink in dollars. I owned a piece of this cash cow, and whenever I made drinks, I saw dollar signs flowing into our pockets. For simplicity, we created our prices from how much net we could make off of a sale. And I rounded things up or down in my head.
It was a game I played to pass the time, but it made every night I worked fly by. And we raked in the dough like nobody’s business. Seriously. No one else in our vicinity made as much money as we did. Because we didn’t get greedy with our prices, we ran a clean bar, and made the patrons happy.
And as it turned out, the rusted-metal industrial look happened to be eco-chic. Who knew? Kiki, apparently. Rather than throw out decaying twisted sheets of metal in the small warehouse, she repurposed it all. It covered the bar top, the walls in several places (but let the worn red brick show through in others), and even lined the walls up three feet from the floor in the bathrooms.
And don’t get me started on the bathrooms. Troughs of molded steel sprayed with a protective coating to protect the rust—works of art according to Kiki—formed the sinks, with motion-sensor faucets made to look like spigots pouring from the wall.
Maple-wood accents and concrete floors that had been roughed up to prevent slipping, along with all of the rest of her suggested décor, made the place just the right amount of “shabby” according to Kiki. The customers, and all their flowing money, resoundingly agreed. So did Architectural Digest, Design Magazine, and Coco Eco Magazine, who’d clamored to do feature articles before and around our opening.
That was almost seven months ago. Things flowed seamlessly now. My role remained as mostly a silent partner and part-time bartender. I’d fronted a larger monetary investment to be out of the spotlight and work when I wanted, with the luxury to stop working anytime I decided. Ben put in less money and ran the place as he saw fit, taking the more visible role. Our third partner, my dad, stayed relatively undisclosed and uninvolved. The amount of money we made kept him a very silent and an extremely satisfied investor.