HASALYNX PRESS
Read Romance Ebooks Legally — Anytime, Online, With a Monthly Subscription

Chapter 1. Waking to the Stabbing July Light 

I was going to be fired. Sam would take that rusty pizza peel and wave it in my face while he yelled—assuming I ever showed up. My tombstone might as well read: Here lies Valery. Late because his phone was a piece of garbage.

My eyes snapped open to the cruel, unforgiving light of July stabbing through my cheap plastic blinds, and I knew it. The universe had conspired against me. I grabbed my phone off the nightstand, mashed the home button, and the dead battery icon blinked at me like a mocking little ghost. Eleven-fifteen.

No. No way.

I launched myself out of bed like I was being shot from a cannon. My foot caught in the tangled sheet—of course it did—and I went down hard, my elbow slamming into the floor with a crack I’d feel tomorrow. But tomorrow didn’t matter. Today, Sam was going to fire me, and I’d have to move back in with my mom, and I’d never see Elise again because I wouldn’t have money to buy her soda at the boardwalk.

Okay. Focus. Pants. Shirt. Go.

I yanked on my black work shirt, got my arms stuck in the sleeves, and did a frantic, hopping dance across my bedroom floor trying to pull the fabric over my head without falling over. I fell over. My head hit the nightstand, and my water bottle toppled, spilling lukewarm water all over last week’s laundry. I didn’t care. I was a man on a mission, and that mission was to not get murdered by my boss.

While washing my face, I didn’t look in the mirror. I knew what I looked like. My brown hair stuck up in seventeen directions, and there was probably a pillow crease permanently etched into my cheek. But Elise wasn’t going to see me. She didn’t even know I existed outside of the pizza shop. Why would she? She was a goddess. I was a guy who had just put his shirt on inside-out.

Wait—was I inside-out? I checked. I wasn’t. But the tag stuck out of the collar like a stupid flag, and I didn’t have time to fix it, so I tucked it in and hoped for the best.

The hallway of my apartment building was an oven. The heat hit me like a physical wall, thick and wet, the kind that made your lungs feel heavy. I took the stairs two at a time—well, I tried. I tripped on the third step, grabbed the railing, and swung myself around the corner like an idiot, my heart already hammering.

Out on the street, the tourists were everywhere. Bright bathing suits, coolers, beach chairs, kids with plastic buckets. I weaved through them like a man possessed, my hands shoved in my pockets, my silver thumb ring digging into my skin. I walked so fast my sneakers squeaked on the hot asphalt.

Then my phone buzzed. Sam.

I answered, the words spilling out in a breathless rush. "Sam, I am so sorry, my phone died, my alarm didn't go off, I'm literally running right now, I'm going to pass out, but I'm coming, I swear, please don't kill me, I'll work double, I'll clean the grease trap—"

"Valery." Sam's voice was flat. Tired. The voice of a man who had seen too many teenage employees fail him. "Just get here. The register needs setting."

He hung up.

I stared at my phone. My reflection in the black screen looked like a haunted raccoon. I shoved it back in my pocket and ran.

And as I ran, my traitor brain did the thing it always did. It thought about her. Elise.

Three days ago. The park. The old oaks. The way she had looked at me like I was something interesting, something worth seeing. She had pulled those heart-shaped sunglasses off her head—pink plastic, cheap, the kind you won at a carnival—and slid them onto my face, her fingers brushing my temples, and I had forgotten how to breathe. I had stood there, frozen, while she laughed and took a photo and called me a "cute disaster."

I had looked at that photo last night. In the dark. Under my blanket. For three hours. My heart had pounded so hard I thought I was having a medical event.

I burst through the door of Sam's Pizza Palace at 11:52. Eight minutes early. Ha. I was a miracle worker.

The bell above the door jingled, and the smell hit me: oregano, fried dough, and the faint gasoline tang from the convenience store next door. Sam was behind the counter, counting out ones. He looked up, and his eyebrow twitched.

"You're not late," he said, surprised.

"I ran," I gasped, doubling over with my hands on my knees. "I think I pulled something. Is my face purple? It feels purple."

Sam just shook his head and gestured to the back. "Apron. Dough. Go."

I nodded, still wheezing, and stumbled into the kitchen. The heat from the ovens hit me like a blast furnace. I grabbed the flour-dusted apron off the hook and tied it around my waist, but my fingers were shaking—from the run, from the panic, from the sunglasses moment—and the knot came undone twice. Three times. I finally gave up and just held the strings in my fist while I grabbed the dough.

My hands knew the motions. Knead, stretch, toss. The dough slapped against the counter, and I fell into the rhythm, flour dusting my forearms, the heat fogging my glasses. But my brain wasn't in the kitchen. My brain was in the park. My brain was watching Elise drink a soda through a striped straw, her copper hair escaping her ponytail, her green-hazel eyes sparkling with that manic, chaotic energy that made me feel like I was standing on the edge of a cliff.

She was leaving at the end of August. The thought hit me like cold water. Three weeks. She'd go back to whatever college she went to, and I'd be here, in this kitchen, kneading dough, and she'd forget I ever existed.

My hand slipped. The dough flew out of my grip, smacked against the wall, and slid down with a sad, wet plop.

Sam yelled from the front. "You good back there?"

"FINE!" I yelled back, my voice cracking. "JUST... RE-ENACTING A SCENE FROM A MOVIE. VERY ARTISTIC."

I scooped the dough off the floor, my face burning. And I knew, with absolute certainty, that the sugar rush was already building in my chest again. Just thinking about her was enough. Just remembering her laugh was enough to make me feel drunk.

I was a disaster. A walking, sweating, dough-throwing disaster. And I wouldn't have had it any other way.