I am eating my ninth cinnamon raisin bagel with maple horseradish cream cheese and hazelnut chocolate spread.

Don’t judge me.

It’s my job to eat this.

It’s a Monday morning, 9:13 a.m. on the dot, and the counter person, Mark J., takes exactly seventeen seconds to acknowledge my presence. He then offers to upsell my small mocha latte, which I decline nicely, and within seventy-three seconds my cinnamon raisin bagel with maple horseradish cream cheese and hazelnut chocolate spread is in my hands, toasted and warm.

I pay my $10.22 with a $20 bill and he counts back my change properly, hands me a receipt and points out the survey I can complete for a chance to win a $100 gift card to this chain restaurant.

Survey? Buddy, I’m surveying you right now.

No, I don’t have obsessive-compulsive disorder, though it helps in my line of work. I am not a private detective, and I don’t have an unhealthy stalker thing for Mark J., who loses points for ringing up a customer, touching cash, and not washing his hands before touching the next person’s bagel.

I cringe at mine.

I’m a secret shopper. Mystery shopper. Or as the clerks and managers in the stores where I pretend to be a regular shopper call me: Evil Personified.

That’s Ms. Evil Personified to you, buddy.

It really is my job to sit here on a sunny Monday morning, in my ninth chain store, buying the same exact meal over and over again, sipping each mocha latte and sliding a thermometer in the hot liquid to make certain the temperature is between 170 and 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

You try doing that without making people think you are that one weird customer, the one who talks to aliens through the metal shake cans, or who brings her teacup Chihuahua in to share a grilled cheese and lets the dog lick the plate clean.

I’m just as weird, except I’m getting paid to do it.

My best friend and coworker, Amanda, created a little thermometer that looks just like a coffee stirrer. I slip it in through the lid and in sixty seconds—voila!

One hundred seventy-four degrees. I reach for my phone and pretend to send a text. I’m really opening my shopper’s evaluation app, to type in all the answers to the 128 questions that must be properly answered.

I enter my name (Shannon Jacoby), today’s date, the store location, whether the front trashcan was clean (it was), whether the front mats were clean (they were), the name of the clerk who waited on me (Mark J.), and pretty much every question you could imagine short of my favorite sexual position (none of your business) and the first date of my last period (who cares? It’s not like I could possibly be pregnant. Maybe the cobwebs are in the way…).

Did I mention this is my ninth store of the day? I started at 5:30 a.m. I’m very, very questioned and cinnamoned out. One hundred twenty-eight questions times nine stores equals a big old identity crisis and a mouth that can’t tell the difference between horseradish and mocha.

This is not my fault. I am in management for a secret shopper company. That means my job is to find people to do what I’m doing. A year ago, when I was a fresh-faced marketing major with my newly minted degree from UMass and $50,000 in student loans at the ripe old age of twenty-three, the job seemed like a dream.

You know those ads you see online to “Get Paid to Shop!”?

Yep. They’re real. You really can sign on as a mystery shopper with various marketing companies, and once you pass some basic tests, you apply for jobs. What I’m doing right now pays your $10.22 expense, gives you the free breakfast sandwich and latte, and you earn a whopping $8 in payment about a month after submitting your mystery shopper report to our office.

And people are lining up to do this.

Except…sometimes, supervisors can’t find anyone to fill a last-minute no-show. I’m a full-time, salaried employee (which means I get to keep the sandwich, but not the $8 for each of these nine shops this fine, beautiful, bloated morning).

One of our flakier shoppers, Meghan, texted me at 4:12 a.m. to tell me the purple and green unicorn in her flying sparkly Hummer told her not to eat bagels anymore, and she couldn’t make her nine—NINE!—breakfast shops on religious grounds.

Okay, then. Someone was eating something other than cinnamon raisin bagels last night, and I suspect it involved mushrooms of some sort.

That gave me one hour and eighteen minutes to find a replacement, which meant—yep—here I was. In a rush, I’d jumped out of bed, printed out all of Meghan’s shops, made a driving plan and a map, and steadied myself for the biggest mystery-shopping blitz I’d done since—

Since being dumped by my ex-boyfriend last year. Steven Michael Raleigh decided that finishing his MBA meant he needed a trophy wife who could schmooze with all the hoity-toities in the Back Bay in Boston.

Me? A Mendon girl with only a BA who works as a “glorified fast food snitch” just didn’t cut it, so he cut me loose.

So here I sit in this little coffee shop in West Newton, counting down the minutes until I can break into the men’s room. That’s right – the men’s room. Did I mention I’m a DD cup? So not a covert Men’s Room Ninja.

My ninth men’s room of the morning. Every part of the store has to be evaluated, including the toilets. You’ve seen one urinal, you’ve seen them all…except that’s not how it works when you’re evaluating a store for a mystery shop.

Nineteen questions about cleanliness and customer service are waiting for my answers. Neatly waiting inside my smartphone’s app.

And if I don’t break in to the men’s room?

The eval will be a “failed job.” I shudder. A failed job is worse than eating nine cinnamon raisin maple horseradish bagels, because when you work in my field, a failed job is like a failed date with a billionaire.

Whatever went wrong, it’s always, always your fault.

Speaking of billionaires, hellllooo Christian Grey. In walks a man wearing a suit that must cost more than my rickety old Saturn sedan. Fine grayish-blue with fibers that look like he snaps his fingers and they conform to his body because he’s that dominant. Trim body with a flat, tapered torso, and oh! His jacket is unbuttoned. The bright white shirt underneath is so bespoke that it fits like a glove.

If I had echolocation I could map out the terrain of ab muscles through sheer force of will. His cut body is meant to be relief mapped the way Braille is meant to be read.

With my fingertips.

Parts of my body that have been in suspended animation since I dated Steve spring to life. Some of these parts, as I watch him reach out and shake hands with Mark J. and see the taut lines of sinew at his wrist, the sprinkle of sandy hair around a gold watch, haven’t risen from the dead since my party days at UMass.

And then he opens his mouth and asks Mark J., “How’s your morning going?”

Liquid smoke, whiskey, sunshine and musk pour out of that jaunty, sultry mouth and all over my body like I am standing under a waterfall of oh, yeahhhhh. Everything goes into slow motion around me. My world narrows to what I see, and I can’t stop staring at Mr. Sex in a Suit.

Mark J. says something to the man in what sounds like Klingon, and they share a laugh. Beautiful, straight white teeth and cheeks that dimple—dimple!—make me fall even more in lust with Mr. I Will Make You Omelets in the Morning Wearing Your Suit Jacket and Nothing Else.

I look down and nearly vomit, because my torn t-shirt may actually have remnants of omelets on it. From yesterday. I sniff in that secret way people try to surreptitiously look like they are not so hygiene-deprived that they don’t know whether they’re offending half the Eastern Seaboard.

Damn. I am.

My phone rings. People around me look as I stare at it, slack-jawed. I can see my open mouth in the glass and realize my hair is still in a loose topknot on my head. Is that my nephew’s My Little Pony scrunchie?

I really sprinted out the door this morning, didn’t I? Being made an honorary Brony by a seven-year-old with two missing front teeth meant I’d been named “Thparkly Thunthine Auntie Thannon.” I smile at the memory.

“Hello?” No one calls me. They always text. And the phone number is new. I don’t know this person.

“Shannon, it’s me.” Amanda. My co-worker. My best friend. My thorn in my side. A ringing phone is an anomaly these days. Most people just zombie text. Me? I have a twenty-four-year-old friend who uses her phone like it’s 2003.

“Why do you have a new number?”

“Greg made me get a cheaper plan.” Greg is our boss. He makes those crazy coupon queens who buy $400 worth of groceries for $4.21 with 543 coupons look like people from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.

“Huh. Well, you could have answered the phone when I called this morning and taken some of these bagel hell assignments, you know,” I whisper. “I am going to name my reflux Maple Horseradish Amanda after you.”

“Oh, thank God! You picked up the jobs.”

A very attractive college guy walks in, wearing a lacrosse team shirt and a pair of legs that make me wish I were wearing my good underwear instead of my safe underwear. You could go fly fishing in these granny pants.

My eyes can’t stop flipping between college dude and Christian Grey. Eight bagel shops, and on the ninth, God gave Shannon a smorgasbord of hot men.

“You took them all?” Amanda’s voice is somewhere between a dog whistle and a fire alarm. She shakes me out of my head just as Mr. Sex in a Suit walks by, making me sniff the air like an animal in heat. Which I kind of am, suddenly.

He smells like a weekend in Stowe at a private cabin with skis propped against the back wall, a roaring fire in a stone fireplace that crawls from floor to ceiling, and a bearskin rug that feels amazing against all your naked parts.

Even the dormant ones.

Especially the dormant ones.

“On the ninth one right now, but you’re blowing my cover,” I hiss. “And you so owe me. I’m making you pick up those podiatrist evals next month.” Podiatrist shops don’t exactly feed a sense of sexual desire, so my mind makes me go there. Feet. Hammer toes. Eww. Mr. Sex in a Suit leaves through the main doors, coffee in hand.

But wait, I want to cry out. You forgot to let me lick your cuff links.

“You can’t make me do the bunion walk!” Amanda protests. Yes, mystery shoppers evaluate podiatrists. Doctors, dentists, banks, and even—

“Then you can do all the sex-toy shop surveys,” I say, biting my lips after. I can feel the heat from her blush through the phone. Or maybe that’s my own body as I lean to the left to search for a glimpse of Mr. Sophistication.

“Bunions it is,” she replies curtly. “Come to the office after. We need to talk. Clinching this huge account hinges on how well these bagel shops go.” She pauses. “And I am so not doing those marital aids shops!” Click.