Page 7 of Mischief

"You're making the face again," Sophie says.

She comes around the end of the bar with a bus tub balanced on her hip, apron dusted with cinnamon, a smudge of chocolate on her jaw that she has no idea is there.

Sophie Crockett wandered into Beans and Babes a few months back as a wrecked, cautious thing, and somewhere between then and now she turned into the one person in this town who talks to me like I'm a person instead of club royalty.

"What face?" I keep my eyes on the milk I'm steaming and don't give her the satisfaction of looking up.

"The one where you're thinking about your grandfather and it's making you sad and mad at the same time." She sets the tub down and steals the shot I pulled for Kayla, downing it in one go like a woman who hasn't slept either. "Summer's supposed to be my break, and instead I'm here at seven in the morning watching you brood over a man who loves you so much he can't stand it."

"He loves me so much he tried to assign me a security detail to run a coffee shop." I bang the steam wand clear harder than it needs.

"That's what I said. Can't stand it." She grins, and the chocolate on her jaw moves with it. "You've got—" I reach over and thumb it off her face before she finishes, and she rolls her eyes. "Thank you. God. I look like a toddler ate me."

"You look like someone who could've stayed home in bed and instead chose to pour oat milk for strangers on her one day off." I toss her a clean rag for the chocolate she doesn't know is still there.

"I get restless," she says, and the joke thins out and lets the truth show through. "You know that. Three months off and I start climbing the walls. At least here I'm useful."

I do know that.

I know it because I know her. Busy hands, so the past can't catch up.

Sophie doesn't talk much about when her hometown turned on her, the fabricated screenshots, the doctored photo, the way strangers looked at a second-grade teacher like she was something scraped off a shoe.

She talks about it the way you talk about weather in another country.

But she picks up shifts she doesn't need the money for, and she shows up on her days off, and she moves through my shop like motion is the only thing that keeps her ahead of it.

As an only child, she's the closest thing I have to a sister.

"Refill the pastry case before the nine o'clock rush," I tell her, because everyone I love in this club shows up with their sleeves already rolled, and I learned it from them. "The lemon things go on the left where people can see them. They're moving twice as fast as the muffins."

"Bossy." She ties her apron string tighter and doesn't move toward the case.

"General manager." I point the steam wand at her like a teacher's ruler.

"Same thing." She hauls the tub toward the back, and over her shoulder, light, the way she says everything that matters, "Your boy's outside, by the way. Been sitting on his bike in the lot for ten minutes not coming in."

My whole body goes still behind the bar.

I don't let it show on my face, because I've spent ages not letting it show on my face, but everything under my skin turns toward the window like a compass finding north.

Bodul.

He's straddling his bike at the edge of the lot, helmet off, forearms on the tank, watching the front door like it's a decision he hasn't made yet.

Even from here I can see he's holding himself wrong.

Not the body, the body's the same, all that lean muscle he pretends he doesn't have.

It's the set of him. Shoulders up around his ears, jaw locked.

A man braced for something instead of a man swinging by to see his girl.

Sophie's still watching me, and she's too smart.

The corner of her mouth does a thing that tells me she's clocked exactly how fast I turned.

"I don't know what you're implying," I say.