Читать книгу Being Shelley - Qarnita Loxton - Страница 12

He came; he saw; he conquered.

Wayde arrived at twelve sharp. Hair tied in a squirt of pony at the back of his head (I’d messaged him about the hair after I found two long ones on the side of the counter next to the coffee machine. Di would fire him for that before he even started), clean grey RVCA T-shirt, dark shorts, black Vans. Still with the Pina Colada Coconut Vanilla smell but with a layer of something masculine from a bottle I didn’t know. A black rubber watch and beaded leathery wrap things on his wrist completed his look. I guessed this was him dressed to impress. I was impressed. Di too. He shook her hand, smiled those smiles, hung on her every word about how she liked the coffee area to be. He produced every coffee she asked for and she didn’t ask him to redo a single one (unlike me – she gave up on me with my twelfth bad cappuccino). He didn’t flinch when she told him that he needed to help with everything when he wasn’t doing coffee – from helping me unpack boxes, to washing cups, dusting shelves, basically anything that Di or Beauty or I needed help with. I didn’t know he had a car, but that was clearly a bonus. No reason ever to be late, and he could collect the Trecastelli cakes if we needed him to since he lived in Blouberg Ridge. I was rather proud. Given our age gap, you could’ve said I was proud as if he were my son, but I wasn’t proud like that. It was more like when you introduce someone you like to your friends, and your friends like him too. I was that kind of proud.

Di sent him and Beauty to Checkers to buy milk for the coffee, and for cream that we serve on the side with the cakes.

‘Okay, it seems like it can work,’ Di admitted as I stood there holding my breath like a contestant on The Voice. ‘He’s presentable, comes across as keen, can clearly make a cup of coffee, seems flexible enough to fit in with the shifts we want. The customers like him. Let’s do a standard contract with a month’s notice?’

‘Yeehaaaaa, Diannnahh!’ I did a little happy dance on the spot. ‘Give me some more credit. I knew Wayde was gonna be good. He is nice, isn’t he?’ I felt like my face would crack from all the smiling.

‘If by “nice”, you mean a nice personality, then it seems like that, yes. But if you mean anything different … Keep it together, Shelley. I see you seeing him.’ She raised her eyebrows at me. ‘That Wayde is a looker and charmer. Fine for when you are a twenty-year-old girl, not when you are a forty-four-year-old mom,’ she paused for effect, ‘and his employer.’

‘I don’t know what you mean. He looks good, sure …’ The smile dropped from my face and my heart thudded under my thirty-millilitre saline implants. I knew exactly what she meant. ‘And he flirts a bit. But it’s just for show – I did it all the time when I was a waitress. It will be good for business, that’s all.’

Business, I repeated in my head. That’s all he would be good for.