I get to work and still haven’t seen my wolfy stalker. He’s starting to piss me off.
And he’s starting to piss my puma off.
Following me to my school was one thing. But following me to my work?
This is my territory: this building, the people in it, the tough, sometimes crude cooks, the waitresses and bartenders and Sean.
I know it’s his restaurant, but I still feel territorial.
If he as much as shows his face in here I’ll rip it off for him.
My puma growls her approval.
Chelsea, the closest thing to a best friend I have here, greets me the moment I walk through the front door.
“Angela reported off again,” she sighed. “That means it’s just me and you tonight.”
I breathe in the garlic laced air of the restaurant and let my head fall back with my own impotent sigh.
Angela really needed to find a new job, somewhere in a galaxy far, far away.
I looked Chelsea in the eye and winked. “We’ve got this.”
“It’s a Friday night. We usually have four waitresses on Fridays.” Chelsea’s starting to get wound up.
Okay, I know I’m going to regret this… but I have a bunch of energy to burn through anyways, with the wolf stalker and acing my final.
“I’ll do three sections and you just have to do yours and carry-out orders, okay?”
Chelsea blinked at me. “I can’t ask you to…”
I give her a little nudge with my shoulder as I walk past her into the restaurant. “You didn’t ask. I’m just money hungry and want to make monster tips tonight.”
“Roxy, that’s… you’ll…”
I turned and gave her my I’m the boss look. “I’ve spoken. My word is law.”
She giggled nervously. She’s a history major and is obsessed with the royal family: from Kate and William all the way back to some guy she called Alfred the Great. Sounds a little too much like Bruce Wayne’s butler to me, but she knows them all by heart, and can go from nerdy boring to captivating and charismatic in an instant.
She makes it all sound like Game of Thrones.
“And if I do get in the weeds, I’ll use Sean as a slave.”
This made Chelsea laugh like a hyena. She’s afraid of Sean, so she always gets a thrill out of me treating our boss like he’s just like one of us.
I’ve been waiting tables for a few years now. And with my shifter stamina and speed and reflexes… well, I could probably cover the entire restaurant and make my own drinks. But luckily we had a bartender tonight.
***
Chelsea surprised herself by ending up taking three tables more than her section. She was bursting with pride. I hadn’t needed Sean and hadn’t needed to move much faster than my usual speed. If I did move much faster people might start wondering about me.
Shifters are out and proud, a new minority in the world. But that didn’t mean I wanted to be out.
I wanted to be a nurse, to help people. But bureaucracy and prejudice had already forced so many shifters out of their jobs just in the short few years since their revelation to the world. We’d been around for thousands of years, and yet only now that we were a known commodity were we suddenly becoming an endangered species.
Chelsea and I cashed out our banks, turned in our ones and fives to Sean for larger bills (which helped him since he didn’t have to make a mad dash to the bank for change in the morning) and started cleaning up. I had Chelsea do the side-work (filling condiments, folding pizza boxes, wiping the menus and rolling silver wear) while I cleaned the tables, swept and mopped.
We ended up leaving together, while the kitchen crew and Sean were still finishing up.
I was relieved when I didn’t detect even a whiff of my werewolf stalker.
He must’ve gotten bored.
I hoped.
I walked Chelsea to her beat up old VW Rabbit. How she kept it running was beyond me. It had more rust on it than paint. She offered me a ride home, but I still wasn’t sure I’d lost my stalker, so I said, “Thanks but no thanks. I ate way too much garlic bread tonight. I need to walk some of the calories off.”
Which was bullshit. I’d have to have eaten half of the food in the restaurant to even feel bloated.
It’s good to be a shifter. You had a huge food bill, but the shifter metabolism couldn’t be beat.
Chelsea smiled her crooked smile and waved goodbye as her little clunker shimmied out of the parking lot and made its way down the street.