Page 16 of With Spite

Like piercing the gas tank with one of my forks, trailing gasoline throughout the store, and accidentally setting it on fire.

But that was the bane of a chronic overthinker’s existence. Worst-case scenarios and me were BFFs.

Harvey and Hux walked to the bike and got it standing again.

Luckily, it didn’t look worse for wear.

“Sorry,” I repeated for the fourteenth time.

Hux snorted and walked back into his shop, slammed the door closed, and locked it.

I looked at JohnBoy. “Okay, let’s finish this.”

“I think maybe you should stack the things over there, away from Hux’s bike,” Harvey admitted.

“I can’t,” I grumbled. “Because there’s a shit ton of stuff over there, which she asked me to go through before I came to ask y’all for help. There’s nowhere else for all this stuff to go.”

“I thought she hired you to work inside the store?” JohnBoy asked.

“She did,” I grumbled.

“Then why are you out here?” he asked.

“Good freakin’ question,” I said. “I told her that I couldn’t do anything physically exerting when I took this job.” I patted my tightening chest.

Harvey frowned. “What?”

“She has asthma,” JohnBoy informed him.

Harvey looked over at me. “You do?”

I nodded, heart pounding and lungs seconds away from fucking up my entire day.

“Ahh,” he said. “Hop off, let me do the rest.”

I was more than happy to hop off.

When Harvey got on, he drove it like he’d been doing it his entire life.

He rearranged everything in minutes.

Only when he was done and the forklift was stowed did JohnBoy say, “My sister is a complete bitch. Don’t let her run all over you. You’re going to have to stick up for yourself. You have laws on your side.”

That surprised me. “Your sister?”

He nodded.

“Lucky you.”

JohnBoy snorted. “She’s been a bitch all her life.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

He handed me the clipboard with his signature and said, “Remember what I said. Don’t let her run all over you.”

Except, by the end of that day, I was run ragged and still on the verge of an asthma attack.

When I laid down in my bed that night, thirty minutes after I got home, windows wide open because I’d forgotten that there were no blinds, I thought…maybe Creed was right.