by Chelsea Fine
“How did you sleep, dear?” Mable asks, whipping the yolks with a fervor I do not share. The kitchen and I are not friends; we are simply allies in a time of war. The only position Ellen had available this summer was “prep cook,” and as much as I hate cooking, I hate being broke more.
But I don’t suck at cooking. Years of making food for myself and my mother, a woman who thought feeding me was a grueling chore, taught me how to put a meal together without disastrous results. At least now I’m getting paid to slave away in a kitchen.
“Aside from the blasting noise of Levi’s TV?” I say. “Fine.”
She eyes my half-wet ponytail. “Cold shower this morning?”
Everyone who works at the inn knows how Levi and I fight. Not just because sometimes we slam doors and yell but because everyone who works at the inn knows about us.
For the first few days after I moved in, this really bothered me. Because I knew the real reason the employees whispered, and the real reason made my chest hurt. But I don’t give a damn anymore. If Levi and I provide some sort of tragic entertainment for them, so be it.
I look down at the list of menu items for the morning. “Yes. The spawn of Satan strikes again.”
Mable laughs like she always does when I talk about Levi, her round cheeks glowing. Even though she’s like sixty, I’m pretty sure she has a cougar crush on him. And if I didn’t love Mable so much, it would totally gross me out.
“That Levi is something else,” she coos.
“Something selfish, maybe.”
She pours the yolks into a pan. “Something delicious.”
Gross.
But true.
“What’s delicious?” Haley, the curvy thirty-five-year-old who runs the front desk, enters the kitchen through the back door and peers into a bowl of chocolate chips before popping a few in her mouth. Haley gossips almost as much as Mable. She also has a minor addiction to chocolate.
I watch her shovel more of the chips into her mouth.
Okay, major.
“Levi,” Mable answers, wagging her eyebrows.
“Mmm. He is scrumptious.” Haley tucks her shoulder-length black hair behind her ear and gives me a dirty smile. “I’d lick him from head to toe and back to head again.”
Good God. It’s like I work at Hotel Horny Women.
“Levi is not scrumptious,” I say, trying to think about omelet ingredients instead of how Levi’s stomach muscles rippled when he leaned into the hallway this morning. “He’s annoying.”
“He doesn’t annoy me. Does he annoy you, Mable?” Haley says.
“Not one bit.” Mable smiles.
Haley reaches for more chocolate chips and I smack her hand away. “That’s because you two didn’t grow up with him and practically live at his house your entire childhood.”
An uncomfortable silence falls over the room.
“No,” Mable says after a few moments, her voice carefully quiet. “We didn’t.”
Haley clears her throat and forces a smile at Mable. “Got any of last night’s cake left?”
Leave it to Haley to break up the tension with dessert.
I busy myself getting things ready for breakfast as Mable and Haley start gossiping about the guests.
Most guests who visit Willow Inn are retired folks who come to the country for fresh air and a quiet retreat. And some of them stay for weeks or months at a time, and make it an annual occasion.
So several of the guests staying here this summer have visited before and, since Willow Inn is a small establishment with semiregular clientele, they sometimes get to know one another, and things around here can get rather friendly.
Mable’s voice is dripping with drama. “… and then Marsha Greenberg told Betsy Peterson that she was no longer welcome at their bridge table because of the incident with Mr. Clemons.” She looks up from the cutting board, scandal on her face, onions in her hands. “Can you believe that? Especially after what happened with Vivian Whethers last month…” She jabbers on, Haley bobbing her head emphatically as she forks chocolate cake into her mouth.
You’d think senior citizens relaxing at a quaint inn in the middle-of-nowhere Arizona would be low-key and rather boring, but they’re just as bad as college kids. They flirt and drink and sleep with one another, and it’s just nasty. Entertaining. But nasty.
Haley gasps at Mable’s ongoing story, which I’ve failed to follow because I’m busy over here actually working.
“No, she did not.” Her mouth drops open in disbelief.
“Oh, honey, you know she did,” Mable says, and makes a disapproving mm-huh noise. “I told you that woman was trouble.”
Haley shakes her head and takes another bite. “Trouble, indeed.”
Wow. Remind me never to vacation at an inn when I’m older, for fear my daily activities might become the talk of the kitchen staff.
The old-fashioned phone by the door rings with a merry ding-a-ling-a-ling, and I can’t help but glance at the thing. It’s red and giant and hideous and it ding-a-lings loud enough to wake the dead. Ellen thinks the spinning dial and long coiled cord add charm to the inn. I think Ellen’s full of shit and just hasn’t gotten around to replacing the prehistoric device yet.
On the second ring, Mable wipes her hands on her apron—which is an appropriate shade of light blue and features no fruit or fringe—and answers the antique phone with a chipper “Good morning!”
She listens for a moment before promptly disappearing through the swinging door that leads to the dining room, speaking in hushed tones. Ever the gossip, Haley strains to hear what Mable’s saying through the door but gives up and turns to me.
“So.” She finishes the last bite of chocolate cake. “I hear you and Levi get to have weekends off this summer. Lucky ducks.”
Hardly.
I’m pretty sure the synchronized time off is part of Ellen’s diabolical plan to get Levi and me to spend some quality time together. Joke’s on her though, since I plan on ditching this place every weekend. No need to hang around Levi and our pet elephant more than necessary.
“Lucky, indeed,” I say dryly.
She rounds up all the chocolate crumbs on her plate and starts smashing them with her fork until they stick. “Got any big plans this weekend?”
“Not really. Just hanging out with Jenna and Matt.”
She licks the fork. “Who’s Matt?”
I pull some bell peppers from the fridge. “My, uh, boyfriend.”
I have this weird habit of saying “uh” before the word “boyfriend.” I can’t help it. It’s like saying “Jiminy” before “Cricket” or “more” before “cowbell.” It just falls out of my mouth.
“Oh right, the boyfriend. I almost forgot about him,” Haley says. “Are you sure he’s real? You don’t ever talk about him and I’ve never seen you guys together.”
“He’s real.” I rinse off a knife and start cutting vegetables. “It’s just hard with him living down by ASU and me all the way out here.”
Arizona State University is a hundred miles south of my hometown, and somewhere right in between the two, on a desolate stretch of freeway, stands Willow Inn. So yeah. Middle. Of. Nowhere.
She licks the fork again even though it’s squeaky clean. “Does Levi know about this real boyfriend of yours?”
I slant my eyes at her. “I can’t imagine how he wouldn’t, what with the gossip grapevine around here in full bloom. And I don’t know why he’d care, anyway. He’s like a brother to me.” My heart cringes at the word and I try not to overthink why.
“A brother.” She slowly nods. “Right… right—shoot!” She looks at the clock and drops her shiny fork. “I’ve got to get to the front desk. See ya.” She hurries from the kitchen just as Mable swings back in from the dining room.
I watch Mable hang up the phone without making eye contact with me, and my gut tightens. She moves to the counter and begins putting together a breakfast quiche. I continue chopping vegetables. Minutes pass.
With
a slow inhale, Mable calmly says, “That was your mama on the phone.”
I slice a bell pepper in half. “My mama can go to hell.”
My statement makes the room feel thick, so I look up and try to lighten the mood. “Hey, and maybe while she’s there she can ask the devil if he wants Levi back.” I smile brightly, but the thickness lingers.
There’s a reason I chose not to go back home after school ended, and that reason gave birth to me nineteen years ago and has regretted it every day since.
Mable finishes layering the quiche and slides the dish over to me to finish. “She says she’s coming to see you in a few weeks. She wants to have dinner with you.”
I grab some cheese from the fridge and mutter, “Well, that should be fun.”
She gives me a tight smile because she knows how not-fun Sandra Marshall can be. One of the side effects of being from the same tiny town.
The door to the dining room swings open again and this time Levi walks through, a box of tools in his hand.
Cougar Mable immediately lights up. “Morning, Levi!”
“Morning, Mable.” He smiles at her. He scowls at me.
I notice his face is now clean-shaven and a part of me misses his scruff—what? No. NO. I do not miss his scruff. Missing scruff is for weirdos.
I scowl back at him and start grating Swiss cheese.
“Where’s the fire alarm in here?” he asks in his work voice. It’s a very different voice than his get-out-of-my-way voice or his if-you-want-hot-water-wake-up-earlier voice.
Mable points to the wall, looking far too happy to be of service, and I keep my eyes down as he moves past me. As I sprinkle cheese over the quiche, I can’t help but notice how grated Swiss kind of looks like white scruff.
I’m not a weirdo.
Quiche finished, I turn to start sautéing vegetables and my gaze automatically darts to Levi. He’s so distracting. His arms are all raised, and his shoulders are all broad, and he’s fixing crap, and it’s just… it’s just… annoying.
You know what else is annoying? The fact that the freaking fire alarm is right by the stove.
With a huff and a puff and some choice words in my head, I grab my sliced bell peppers and force my feet to the stove. I throw the vegetables into a frying pan, grab a wooden spoon, and ignore Levi’s close proximity.
My body hums.
I ignore that too.
I steal a glance in his direction and watch as the corded muscles in his forearm flex as he unscrews something on the alarm box. Why does he have so many muscles in his forearm? That can’t be healthy.
I drop my eyes to the frying pan and focus on bell peppers, because bell peppers are interesting and they don’t have backs the size of Alaska or copious amounts of forearm muscles.
The forearm muscles that I’m not thinking about lightly brush my shoulder, and the humming inside my body knots together and zips around like a bumblebee on crack.
I casually turn down the heat on the stove, like that’s the reason I’m suddenly a human vibrator, and go back to stirring. Levi goes back to screwing.
Bell peppers.
I’m thinking about bell peppers.
Levi brushes against me again, except this time his forearm grazes my breast and my body immediately goes wild, like I’m some love-starved teenager, and the humming dives low in my belly and the stove gets hotter and my breaths get shallow and suddenly bell peppers are the sexiest vegetable on earth.
Welcome to Hotel Horny Women, home of scruffy cheese and sensual produce.
From the corner of my eye, I catch his Adam’s apple bobbing with a nervous swallow, which can mean only one thing. The boob brush was an accident.
Well, crap.
If he had been trying to cop a feel with his Hulk-ish forearm, I could have responded with some kind of snarky “you’re a pervert” comment. But it wasn’t on purpose and somehow that makes it sexier, and now the cracked-out bumblebee is buzzing in my nether regions and my hands are starting to tingle and why the HELL is this stove so hot?
I turn the burner down another notch and take a slow, deep breath. I have a boyfriend. A great boyfriend. So this sexual frustration I feel around Levi is nothing to get my bee-loving panties in a bunch about. I just need to calm down.
Levi lowers his arm for a moment, his eyes still on the alarm, and stretches his neck.
Ah, the neck stretch. The universal sign of stress. Well, at least I’m not alone in my frustration. My hot, distracting, pants-are-so-inconvenient frustration.
Wait, what?
Who said anything about pants? I am NOT thinking about pants—or lack thereof. Damn you, bell peppers!
I toss the wooden spoon to the side and move back to the counter, where the threat of being turned on by a handyman or, you know, a sautéed vegetable is much less severe.
I stare at the scruffy quiche and bite back a groan. What was I thinking, living under the same roof as Levi? There’s no way I’ll survive the summer.
Hell, I can barely survive breakfast.
4
Levi
Sexual tension is like a ruthless pigeon. Feed it once and it will follow you around forever. It never tires or goes on vacation. It just lingers. And it’s lingering all over me every time I’m around Pixie.
Like right now, in the kitchen.
I carefully keep my eyes fixed anywhere but on Pixie’s blonde hair or the yellow bow of her apron at the base of her back as I finish my task. But I can still hear her. The shuffling of her stained sneakers as she scoots around the counter, the soft inhale-exhale of her concentrated breathing as it flows between her lips…
Yeah. I have to get out of here.
I quickly finish with the fire alarm and spend the next hour checking the remaining ones around the inn before heading for Ellen’s office.
Along with the lobby, kitchen, and dining room, the downstairs has two small converted bedrooms. One is the library, where guests play chess beside tall windows and pretend to enjoy books by Ernest Hemingway, and the other is Ellen’s bright yet incredibly cluttered office.
The wooden planks just outside her open office creak as I step into her doorway, and she looks up from a pile of papers, sticky notes, and pens.
“What’s up?” She smiles.
“The fire alarms look to be in working order, but they’re pretty ancient,” I say, not stepping fully into the room for fear of being swept into one of her famous conversation traps. “You might want to think about installing a whole new system.”
She nods and chews on the end of a red pen. “Yeah, I figured as much. I’ll add it to my ever-growing list of New Crap the Inn Desperately Needs. Thanks for checking everything.”
“No problem.” I turn to leave.
“Your mail’s still at the front desk,” she says to my back, halting my exit. “It’s been collecting dust for almost three weeks now.”
I slowly turn back around. “Is that right?”
Her eyes narrow. “Don’t make me open it up and read it out loud to the waitstaff. ’Cause I will, and then you’ll have to face the music.”
I scratch my cheek, which feels oddly bare since shaving. “I’ve never understood that phrase. There’s nothing scary about music.”
“Says the guy who’s afraid of his mail.”
I cock my head. “Must you bust my balls at every given opportunity?”
“Someone needs to.” She smiles, but it’s half-sad. “Just pick it up so I don’t have to listen to Angelo complain about how untidy the desk is, okay?”
Angelo’s incessant need for things to be clean and organized spills over to all areas of the inn, not just his bar. And it is his bar, as he likes to remind everyone.
“I’ll be sure to pick it up today,” I say, wiggling a hinge on the door I’ve just realized is loose. “Anything else?”
“Just the lobby chandelier.” She grins.
I sigh. Chandeliers are a pain in the ass. They’re heavy and cumbersome and contain more wires than any
lighting fixture should. I honestly have no idea why people still use them. And by people, I mean Ellen.
Her grin widens.
“You don’t have to look so amused,” I say.
“Oh, but I do,” she says. “I find the look on your face right now very amusing.”
Ellen knows of my severe distaste for her choice in lighting fixtures. She doesn’t care. It’s pretty and it adds charm, she says. There’s nothing charming about a five-hundred-pound hanging lantern.
“Whatever,” I say, moving down the hall. “I’ll fix your precious chandelier.”
“I love you!” she calls after me.
I shake my head but can’t help smiling.
After turning off the main electricity, I retrieve the inn’s only ladder from the maintenance closet and set it up in the lobby beneath the chandelier. It wobbles as I climb to the top, and I make a mental note to add “ladder” to Ellen’s New Crap list. This one is probably older than the alarm system.
I carefully begin unhooking a few chandelier wires under the close and obnoxious scrutiny of one of the inn regulars, Earl Whethers.
I’m not sure what it is that draws retired men to my side while I’m fixing things—maybe they find handiwork fascinating, or maybe they’re horribly bored—but I sometimes feel like the Willow Inn sideshow.
Take Earl for instance. He’s pulled up a chair in the lobby and is now watching my every movement with expectant eyes.
And for my next act, I shall fall from this prehistoric climbing contraption and break both legs—with no hands, because they’ll be dangling from this hanging candelabrum after being torn from my body during my amazing fall!
I should set out a tip jar.
Earl scratches his white-whiskered chin. “You sure you know what you’re doing, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
The skin around his faded blue eyes crinkles as he squints up at me. “You look too young to be running the maintenance around here. How old are ya?” He crosses his arms over his short and stocky frame, once probably stacked with muscle, and leans back. His balding head shines a bit in the light streaming in from the lobby windows.
