Bad Company (Seven Deadly Sins #1) ✅ Completed

Chapter Nine: Stars Up Close

I glanced up at the wall clock for the hundredth time. It was exactly 5:30 in the afternoon. It was officially the time of day when crazed New Yorkers ran to catch buses, stole each others’ cabs, or were crushed inside densely packed train cars with other grumpy commuters. This was certainly a far cry from the ghost town I was currently stuck in. Blackwater, Missouri was not a bustling metropolis by any stretch of the imagination.

As a matter of fact, it wasn’t a bustling anything. I’d barely seen anyone on Main Street, and only three people had stepped inside the shop all day. If I didn’t count Aunt Celeste or Dante, then technically I was down to one. One customer, that's it. How did she even stay in business with that kind of turnout?  

Little wonder she closed the store at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon during the week. Even that was still a heck of a lot more than her weekend hours; she was only open by appointment on Saturday and not at all on Sunday, which was just fine by me. I didn’t think my weekends would be filled with a lot of football games and cook-outs, but I did enjoy sleeping in and generally doing nothing as much as humanly possible.

I was a teenager after all.

When I'd asked Aunt Celeste about her store hours, she’d explained she kept them short because she was old and needed her rest. Well, that was paraphrasing a little. Her actual response had a lot more curse words in it, but I got the general idea: she couldn’t be bothered any more than I could. She didn’t seem lazy per se, just ironically disinterested. I mean, why have a store if you’re not going to actively sell stuff? Still, I wasn't about to complain or anything. Short hours meant less work for me, right?

Wrong.

Here I was, two and a half hours after closing time, still polishing away a crateful of crap antiques for Aunt Celeste because my shift didn't end until six every night. It was one of the many “rules” she’d laid down my first night in Blackwater. I also wasn’t allowed to leave the store without her permission, go to the third floor for any reason, and handle anything breakable with my “clumsy cow fingers.”  There hadn’t been a really good way to point out that cows didn’t have fingers during that fun conversation, so I'd just left it alone.  

The box of aforementioned crap she’d unloaded on me today was completely ridiculous. It took a good half hour to polish each piece, and that was just to get the top layer of grime off. It would’ve taken me the rest of my natural life to actually find the original silver under all of it.

Maybe I wouldn’t have been so pissy about the whole thing if I’d had a little help, but I’d have better luck getting blood out of a turnip.

That little gem of a colloquialism was courtesy of Aunt Celeste herself. It seemed the old bat had an endless supply of colorful country-isms. I had no doubt that before my time here in Blackwater was done I’d have an entirely new vernacular at my disposal; a totally useless and highly embarrassing one that would serve little purpose anywhere people actually said “Hello” instead of “Hey there.”

I glanced at the clock.

 5:32 pm.

Arrgghh! I was going to die waiting for 6:00 o’clock. Why did I agree to meet Chase? What was I thinking? I was no good at this sort of thing. I was too sarcastic. Too prickly for a nice guy like him. He was cute and funny, and just too normal. It wasn’t even like we’d have the same things in common. What were we going to talk about?

I hated sports and sports movies, including the Blind Side, because I despised that self-serving, self-congratulatory drivel.  It wasn’t like some rich, suburban housewife (or househusband) was going to swoop in and save me from my crappy lifestyle (damn you Hollywood for getting my hopes up!).