by Audrey North
MaisieDaisy13. He enlarged the picture and saw a blonde girl, short little bob in her hair, and green eyes that could nearly leap off the screen. She had fine, tiny features that reminded him almost of a little pixie. She was cute, really cute into that picture. He clicked through the rest before he even read her information or her message and each picture ranged from this cute little pixie to a blonde knockout. There was something familiar to him about her, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
He read her message, same generic type thing that he had sent, but at the end, she had included a little smile face and he felt his own smile on his lips. He wasn’t on there to date, hadn’t even thought about it, yet he didn’t want to ignore whoever this MaisieDaisy13 was. So instead of clicking the x button to ignore her, he typed a message back and sat and waited for her response.
4
The leftover food spilled on her uniform, splashing cold soup and pieces of meatloaf all down her, as a child ran around the table in the restaurant and his mother who was too busy on her phone paid no attention to him. Maisie quickly cleaned up the dishes while the busboy was called to clean up the mess on the floor.
“Well, that’s just great,” she complained, as she slammed the dishes into the dishpan in the kitchen.
“Iew, you’re going to smell the whole rest of your shift.” It was Claire, coming back to help her friend clean up.
Some people wondered if being roommates and working together was too much bonding time as friends, but Maisie felt lucky to have a friend like Claire around as a roommate and a co-worker. Especially at times like the one she was currently in, covered in food and highly frustrated.
“How am I still working here?” She complained. “I went to college, got my degree, and can’t seem to get out of working in this dank restaurant.”
As she wiped, the chunks of food were coming off but the stain and smell would linger until she got off from her shift, in a matter of hours.
Claire being the bartender, snuck her a whiskey and coke to calm her down.
“You’ll get out of here, relax. You’ve only been graduated for a couple of months. Finding a full-time job isn’t that easy.”
“I know,” Maisie conceded. “I just hate my life always being on pause. I just want it to start already!”
Claire nodded, pretending like she understood, but Maisie knew it was just a show. Whereas Claire was easygoing, and able to float with the wind, Maisie had never been able to be that way. She liked plans, she liked moving forward, and hated the thought of just twirling in the breeze.
“Just think of this, you’re newly single, newly graduated, and you’ve got your whole life ahead of you!”
Both girls walked out to the dining are, Claire to take care of her bar people, Maisie to take the next table their food and hopefully not spill. Even with food and smell stuck on her, she still made her best attempt to smile brightly and be warm and welcoming with her table. Of course, that was a bit easier to do as she thought about Luke.
After putting in the new table’s order, she went back to the bar. “So, you know that part about me being single? Well, I think I kind of met someone.”
Claire filled up two wine glasses for two women at the end of the bar, huddled together and gossiping. “You met someone? Really? Where? All you do is work here, go to the gym, and go home. Oh! Is it some gym hottie?”
Maisie laughed. She felt so stupid confessing to her friend that her secret guy was one she hadn’t even met yet, but she’d been talking to Luke for a couple weeks and she knew she shouldn’t be getting too excited, but she really like him so far.
“Actually, I haven’t quite met him yet,” she hedged.
Her friend arched her brow, not yet putting the pieces together, so Maisie continued.
“Remember a couple of weeks ago, we signed me up for the dating site? Well, I sort of…met someone.”
The memory dawned on Claire and she laughed a little. “Girl, that wasn’t what the dating site was for! It was for you to meet a couple of guys, maybe get a couple of hook-ups out of it, and that was it. Not for you to go falling in love.”
Maisie glanced over at her table who looked to be arguing over if they should get an appetizer or not. When a table was fighting over something so silly, Maisie knew that it was most often over something far different and the fight was going to come out later while she was serving them. Sometimes best to give them their space, at least until they could decide if they wanted the mozzarella sticks or not.
“I didn’t say I’ve fallen in love. I just said I met someone,” she answered defensively.
“So, you’ve actually met this guy? What’s he like? Cute? Tall? Please tell me nothing like Ben.”
“Well, he seems really nice and funny. We can text all day long and not seem to run out of things to say.” Maisie had chosen her words carefully yet she knew her friend was smart enough to pick up on it.
“You said seems. He ‘seems’ really nice. Have you not met him yet?”
“Well, not exactly. Just texting so far. But I really want to meet him. I wasn’t sure at first but we’ve been talking non-stop and I think he seems pretty great.”
The door to the restaurant opened and for a moment, it was as if the whole restaurant was on pause. Like the air simultaneously turned too electric and too thin at the same time.
“Well, whatever you do, just make sure you don’t fall for a guy like that.” Claire nodded toward the door and Maisie followed her gaze.
Mr. Argenti and his son, Easton. Maisie didn’t know them any better than taking their order when they came in or maybe catching a glimpse of them in the grocery store. But you didn’t need to be introduced to them to know who they were. There were rumors, and plenty of them, about the ‘connections’ that the family had. That they had ties and money in almost any business and any politician in the city, and probably farther than that. They were a family at the top of the food chain, one you didn’t mess with, and as unbelievably sexy as every girl in the city knew Easton was, he was not one to ever get involved with.
“Don’t worry,” Maisie said as she walked away to take the Argenti’s order. “I think I’m smarter than to get myself mixed up with someone like that.”
5
“So, I haven’t heard anything from you in a couple of weeks. You haven’t been coming over for Sunday dinner. Your mother is pretty upset.”
Easton looked over the menu, attempting to ignore his father’s comments, yet knowing he’d have to address them. Especially the one about Sunday dinner.
“Yea, I’ve just had some other things going on the last couple of weeks. I’ll make it this week for dinner.”
Easton’s father nodded and looked at his own menu.
“And how about the job I gave you?”
There hadn’t been too much headway on the Cindy front. She was less desperate than he’d anticipated, at least as far as connecting with someone. Cindy was cautious with him online, but slowly, he was getting her to open up. It just wasn’t going nearly as quickly as he’d hoped.
“I’m still working on it all. She’s tricky, you know scorned lover and all. But I think I’ll be able to get to her open up soon.”
His father hadn’t exactly approved of the method with which Easton had been trying to get the information from Cindy, but slowly he had been able to filter a few bits of information here and there to his father, nothing major yet but at least he saw it was working. His father just grunted and kept looking at his menu.
“Hi guys, what can I get you today?”
Easton looked up from his menu and immediately had to stop his jaw from hitting the floor. The picture, MaisieDaisy13, the reason she had felt so familiar to him. She was familiar to him, he had seen her a handful of times when he had come into the restaurant. How had he not noticed before? He had been speaking to her for weeks now, her picture constantly popping up on his screen as they spoke, and eventually, he figured that she seemed familiar because he saw her pictu
re constantly throughout the day. But now he knew that wasn’t it.
“I’ll have a glass of whiskey and the meatball with sauce.”
Maisie, as Easton saw from her name tag that was her real name, wrote down the order and then turned to Easton, her smile beaming as much as it did in her pictures.
“And for you?” It took him a moment to realize that she had been waiting for him to give his order and he felt flustered for a minute.
“Can I have a beer, draft, and a roast beef sandwich? Fries please.”
She wrote that down too and smiled at the men. He watched her walk away, her hips swaying and he couldn’t help but stare.
“Can’t you ever order something a little classier? At least to drink. Draft beer,” his father commented.
Easton shrugged, no longer concerned with his father’s thoughts. He was too busy thinking about MaisieDaisy, or just Maisie as he was going to have to start thinking of her as, and the countless conversations they’d had. Things with Cindy hadn’t been going so well but talking to Maisie had been going great. At first, he thought he would just exchange a few flirty messages and then disappear once he got what he needed from Cindy. But truthfully he was devoting far less time in getting information from Cindy like his father wanted and far more time talking to Maisie.
“So, when do you think you can start getting the big fish from her?”
“Um…probably a couple of weeks.”
Easton’s father shook his head. “This needs to go faster or you need to find a new method. The election is coming up and I need the information on him to take him down.”
“What’s wrong with paying for it again?” Easton’s words were there with his father but his eyes were roaming the restaurant, watching Maisie every time she made another move. She was so friendly, a smile that was lighting up the dark booths, she was almost mesmerizing to watch. Even with the spilled food on her.
“Because why spend money if I don’t have to? If I can get her to leak the information about the money and accounts than I can keep my own money in my own accounts.”
Maisie walked back over to their table, dropped off their drinks and quickly swished away back to the kitchen.
“This is why you have a lot to learn son. You’d have spent the money, rash and major, whereas I will go to every avenue I can to keep my money.”
Easton turned back toward his father. He was right, he did have a lot to learn about the business. But more importantly, he wanted to know more about Maisie. But now that he’d seen her in person, how could he keep talking to her, keep lying about who he was? She had told him that she was a waitress, he could tell she was friendly, and she had used all of her own pictures.
He hadn’t even used his real name.
But it wasn’t as if he could tell her the truth now, the way she was looking at him when she thought he wasn’t looking. It was watchful, slightly nervous, and definitely judgmental. It wasn’t as if he could blame her, he had a reputation. Often times the dangerous, sexy bad boy thing worked but he already knew that with a girl like Maisie it would never work out that way. He didn’t want to stop talking to her but how could he continue with his lie?
“Are you even here with me?” his father asked him sternly, bringing him back to the present.
Easton turned to look at his father again. “I’m here,” he answered.
6
After her shift, Maisie felt exhausted and sticky from food and wanted nothing more than a hot shower to rinse off the night. As she toweled off and got comfortable in her robe, she heard her phone vibrate on the porcelain bathroom counter and she became giddy when she saw that it was Luke messaging her. She opened it and her heart fluttered in her chest with just the simple question of ‘How was your day beautiful?’
It was amazing how much he could make her smile, which she found completely wild because she had never even met the man who could put a smile on her face like that. It felt good to feel good again though, it felt good to feel happy. It had been a long time since she had felt this way, like a kid who is seeing an ice cream truck for the first time, or getting the college acceptance letter to your first choice college, or when your crush finally asks you out for the first time. You feel like you’re floating like a balloon in the sky, like you can finally breathe, like you feel pure happiness coming from inside of you.
But after finally spilling her secret to Claire, Maisie could feel a little fear wiggling inside of her. There was always the thought that Luke wasn’t who he said he was because as close as she felt to him, he was still a virtual stranger.
My day wasn’t that great. Got spilled on at work, and well just being at work in general. Haha
She could see the bubbles that he was typing so quickly she dried her hair and left the bathroom. Better to have conversations with him with a glass of wine, it felt kind of like a date that way. Warm in her robe, she poured a glass of wine, knowing that Claire had a few more hours on the bartender shift, and curled up on the worn couch.
Why do you work there if you hate it so much? You have a degree, get yourself out of there.
There was nothing grey in Luke’s world. Everything was black and white to him, at least when it came to giving her advice and how he described his own life to her. She couldn’t help but wonder what his real life was like. He had told her pieces about it, but only surface things. She knew he had a job that worked with people on a more private basis, and that he was very close with his family. But most of the time he found a way to turn any conversation back to her. She liked being the center of attention to a guy that seemed like such a great catch.
But there was still that wiggle of fear, the one that Claire had implanted. Maisie hadn’t really thought much about the idea that whoever was on the other end of the messages was not real. He had pictures, he had a profile, and she figured that Luke was just like her, just trying to meet someone who you have a connection with. And she still felt like that was most likely the truth, but what if the other things weren’t? He often times was very vague about his life, what if there was a reason for that?
Back and forth they messaged for hours while she sipped her white wine, smiling and feeling content. But a sudden flash, the one of Easton in the restaurant, struck her suddenly. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was Claire’s warning that she could be talking to a guy like that, but she couldn’t shake that feeling. Easton was incredibly sexy, with his searing dark eyes and long lashes that made his gaze smoldering. Even his body, underneath his fine tailored suit, was tall and she could tell very muscular. If he wasn’t such a dangerous guy, he’d be one every girl drooled over, even though some girls still did she was sure. Some girls wanted the bad boy, but she wasn’t one of them.
And now that Claire had planted the seed that she didn’t really know who was on the other end of those messages, she knew that she had to find out. Biting her lower lip, she typed up a text. Erased it. Typed up another one. And then rolled her eyes at her own annoying self. Finally, she typed up one final one and took her liquid courage and hit the send button without even reading it.
I’ve really liked talking to you these last couple of weeks. You make me laugh and I would like to know if that’s something you could do in person too. I think it’s time we meet for real. What do you think?
Nervously she waited for the little bubbles to tell her he was typing a response. It was a couple of minutes before she saw them, then they disappeared. A watched pot never boiled, she knew, but it was nearly impossible to tear her eyes away from the screen. But the little bubbles didn’t pop back up again. Anxiously she downed the rest of the crisp wine and went to the kitchen to pour another glass.
The lock jiggled on the front door and Maisie knew that Claire was home. She finished off the bottle by pouring her friend a glass.
“Ah, you’re the best,” Claire told her. She didn’t even change before taking her first gulp.
“I asked Luke to meet me, finally.”
Claire’s eyes nearly bugged ou
t while Maisie wrung her hands and stared at her phone on the coffee table.
“Um…yea? And?”
As if on cue her phone buzzed and Maisie nearly knocked Claire over to get the phone.
I think that’s a great idea. How about tomorrow night? 8 at the bar on the corner of Main and Tennyson.
“Tomorrow night!” She squealed as she jumped around a little bit.
Claire lifted her glass in a slight toast at her friend’s happiness. After all these weeks she was finally going to meet the man behind her phone, and she could only hope that it was going to be everything she was imagining.
7
It was stupid to tell Maisie that he would meet her, he knew that with every part of him. But he just couldn’t say no to her, and he really didn’t want to. Especially now that he’d seen her in person, well, realized who she was actually. Now that he knew that the cute little waitress that waited on him often at the restaurant that he went to with his father was the same girl that he couldn’t keep his mind off of every day, his addiction to her felt even stronger.
