Till We Pretend

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Someone was staring a hole in the side of my face as I clean the table that's just been vacated. Any other day I would give in, look towards the person, offer them a polite smile and ask them if there's something I could possibly help them with. But that was before. Now when I feel someone's eyes on me, they're usually attached to pint sized pre-teens who look at me like they wish the bubonic plague upon me and that's not the kind of energy I'm looking to invite into my day.

Energy? Look at me, I hang out with those Hollywood types for a few days and I'm already thinking like them. I reminisce about the green juice I had for breakfast in the morning and make a note to self to never ever have it again in my life.

"You do realise you've been scrubbing the same spot for the past ten minutes?"

My boss Dee's voice makes me jump and the bystander, a girl a few years younger than me wearing way too much makeup glares at me and walks past us. She joins her group of friends at their booth and they resume their vigil over their phones as I assume they have heard the news.

"You seem a bit more distracted than usual, everything okay?"

DeeDee's has been in business for a long, long time. My boss had this diner since long before I was born and she hasn't kept it that by hiring absentminded waitresses. She's being kind by calling me distracted. Ever since hurricane Kyler rolled into my life, my work ethic has been shot. I've been taking down wrong orders, not getting the food to the customers in time and apparently it takes me half an hour to wipe down a table. I'm lucky she hasn't fired my ass and hired any one from the hundreds of applications that sit on her desk.

"I'm sorry, no I'm completely fine. I just couldn't sleep last night."

That is partly true. Kyler told me that his version of the story would be going out last night and to be prepared for the backlash the next day. Even though I couldn't care less what a bunch of strangers thought about me, it's still unnerving to be judged and watched like this. But maybe it's all in my head because I'm sure Maureen from the convenience store doesn't care about my love triangle with Kyler Blackwell and Alyssa Hargrove. But she'd been looking a bit too intently at me as I bought some milk this morning and it threw me off my game.

"You want me to switch your shifts with Mandy this week? You know she's dying to take the breakfast crowd."

"No! Please don't fire me Dee, I really need to work the mornings." I blinked back tears of frustration, hating that I had disappointed my boss. "I...I promise I'll do better."

"Honey," Dee's maternal instinct took over and she pulled me into a hug. "I don't know what's going on child but whatever it is, something tells me it's all going to be all right."

***

Sometimes in life certain choices are made for you, not by you. Who makes those choices, why the decision is taken away from you and the impact those choices can have on your life are afterthoughts. When something like this happens, just go with the flow and let life take its course. No matter how hard you try to control every single aspect of your existence, that's just not possible. Because one of these days, a wild card possibly an annoyingly gorgeous one with a face created to weaken one's knees will come in and destroy all your best laid plans.

At least that's what I was telling myself.

Inside my house the chaos has died down and within these four walls I'm reminded of why I'm helping Kyler in the first place. Yes, I was the one helping him not vice versa or at least that's how he puts it. According to him his reputation was shot and the studio producing the film that will propel him to teenage heartthrob status was threatening to fire him for breach of contract. But his team was better and somehow what Kyler had done had worked out in favour of the franchise. There was more social media buzz surrounding the movie than ever before and his and Alyssa's relationship had gone from being considered cookie cutter boring to a thing of mystery. I was the one who had thrown a spanner in the works and created a tension between them, were they a thing or weren't they? The fanbase was eating up the guessing game and so with the clarification of my being Kyler's childhood sweetheart today, there was bound to be some friction.