Lizzie Blake's Best Mistake (A Brush with Love, #2)(22)
And she wouldn’t fuck this up.
Chapter 11
THE day was barely halfway over, and Lizzie was fucking this up.
She’d had a good brain morning. She’d powered through a to-do list, which she’d written out with details and color coordination, thank you very much, and was pretty confident that operation New Brain Leaf would be a smashing success.
And then she’d gone to lunch.
She’d wandered a few blocks from the shop toward her favorite food truck in Rittenhouse Square and, gyro in hand, headed for a bench in the park. She’d gone into hyper-focus while eating, her brain completely absorbed by a Beverly Jenkins audiobook. It wasn’t until a giant flock of pigeons took off in flight right in front of her, scaring the shit out of her and snapping her out of her brain trap that she realized she only had five minutes before her break was over.
Shitgoddamnitfuck
Lizzie jumped to her feet, a wave of queasiness almost knocking her back down to the bench, but she pushed it away. She fisted her trash and took off in a dead sprint, for the second time that day, toward work.
She could not be late.
She could not be this dumb.
Lizzie weaved and ducked around masses of people, only giving the quickest of glances before darting across intersections.
She was three blocks from Baking Me Crazy, with only two minutes to get through the doors, when she hit a massive traffic block.
A garbage truck was broken down in the middle of an intersection, bags of trash spilling out and open onto the street, blocking both cars and pedestrians from getting across. Lizzie came to a screeching halt right before crashing into a mass of sweaty people.
And then everything seemed to happen at once.
A wall of sharp, rotting scent slammed into her nostrils, singeing her nose hairs with its intensity, while nausea caused her stomach to plummet down to her kneecaps. The heat of the day and the crush of bodies around her heightened these terrible sensations, pushing and pressing on her skin. Her belly. Her throat.
And then she puked.
It wasn’t a cute, oops-mini-throw-up-haha-shake-it-off type of puke. It was a massive, chunky, body-wracking hurl of waste. Just in time, she opened her plastic lunch bag, emptying the entirety of her internal organs into it. It seemed to go on forever.
People gasped.
She was pretty sure children started crying.
Hell, Lizzie was crying, as her body seemed to try to turn itself inside out. After multiple prayers for the devil to take her if he could just make it stop, she eventually regained control of her body. She lifted her head, sweat dripping down her temples and her back, a cold chill racing through her bones despite the heat of the day.
The smash of people had given her a wide berth, and she tied up the bag as tightly as she could, dry-heaving a bit at the slosh of its contents when she took it to the corner trash can and dropped it in.
She looked down at her phone and felt more tears slam against the back of her eyeballs.
She was officially late.
Dragging her body in a defeated trot the final distance to Baking Me Crazy, she prepared for George’s worst.
And when she pushed through the swinging doors to the kitchen, he looked ready to give it to her.
They stared at each other for a moment, and Lizzie watched as the vein on George’s forehead swelled with each passing second until it looked like it would burst through his skin.
She swallowed. “George, I’m so sorry. I can explain. I—”
George held up both hands, silently begging her to spare him. He then pressed his fingers to his temples like he wanted to push through to his brain and swirl it around, his nostrils flaring, and fake wire-rimmed glass fogging as his face turned six shades of purple.
After what felt like a lifetime, he spoke. “We literally had this talk five hours ago. Five. You can’t even keep your act together for a single day?”
“I—”
“I don’t want any more excuses!” he yelled, cutting her off. “How are you this irresponsible? How are you this—this—”
Lizzie knew what word was coming next, and her shoulders coiled around her neck as she braced for the slap of it.
“—lazy?”
Whoop, there it was.
If Lizzie had a dollar for every time she’d been accused of being lazy, she wouldn’t need a job she’d show up late for.
She wasn’t lazy. She wasn’t.
Lizzie wanted to do well. She wanted to impress the people in her life so damn badly, her bones ached with it. But she couldn’t get her brain to cooperate. Her brain felt like this separate entity tossed haphazardly into her skull, like a toddler she would never have much discipline over.
It twirled and raced and jumped rope up there, never ceasing in its activity, but also never doing what she needed it to do. And then she was constantly running around trying to pick up the pieces of the messes it made, collecting phrases like you’re just lazy and try harder and grow up that created a poem of failure branded across her skin.
“You’re fired,” George said, emphasizing the world’s most obvious point. “Empty out your locker and go home.”
He turned on his artfully distressed ankle boot heel and left Lizzie standing there like a hollowed shell of a person.
Chapter 12
LIZZIE went home, stopping in her kitchen to make a batch of pity-party hot fudge sauce before carrying it to her room, throwing on her pj’s, and curling herself into a cocoon of blankets on her bed.