Chapter Four

JESSIE

 

“You mind doing the retail inventory before you go, Jess?”

Jessie had slung her backpack over her shoulder, eager to race home, change into something sexy, and grab a quick bite to eat before giving Sophie her surfing lesson. The thoughts of her sexy new neighbor all wet and curvy in a too-small bikini, giggling and breathless beside her, had made it hard to concentrate during that morning’s manager meeting.

She stood outside the liquor room, clinging to the single strap of her backpack she’d managed to put on just before her general manager, Brett Collins, interrupted her sexy daydream. “Right now?”

He gave her a stiff upper lip and a side-eye to match. “That’s…the implication, yes. End of the month is coming up and I need them for the preliminaries before I shoot them back to corporate this afternoon.”

She stammered, needing this job as badly as she needed another sight of Sophie’s glowing, copper skin. “I know, sure, absolutely, but… I was only expecting the morning meeting today. I’m off on Thursdays, remember?”

Brett rolled his eyes, dull and dark behind his predictably rectangular glasses, resting on his predictably flared nostrils. “I should, Jessie, since I make the schedule every week.” He crossed his hands and rested them perfectly on his taut little beer belly. “Why, you have somewhere better to be than your place of employment?”

She didn’t cower, exactly, but she relented, nonetheless. “No, of course not, Brett, I just…have plans later.”

He brightened, squaring the knot in his tie as he grinned triumphantly. Mission accomplished. “Good, it should only take a few hours and then you’ll be free for whatever, uh…plans…you have for later.”

The pause, the glare, the implied disgust, made it clear Brett knew her plans somehow, intrinsically, involved another woman. Not that she’d had a relationship in years, mind you, but he could never forget the time he caught Jessie and the new hostess making out at the Christmas party, even after three long years of simmering, macho, hetero tension between them.

“Of course. Absolutely.” She slid the backpack back on the nail from which it usually hung in the liquor storage room and turned, straightening the hem of the casual periwinkle-blue sundress she’d worn for the weekly manager’s meeting. “Happy to, Brett.”

He followed her to the small gift shop at the front of the restaurant, rustic wooden shelves dotted with colorful Beach Break souvenirs: T-shirts, ball caps, keychains, snow globes, all slathered with the smiling, sentient beach ball with a face that represented “Bouncy,” their ridiculous corporate mascot. “What, did a shipment just come in or something?” She’d never seen the shelves so well-stocked before.

Brett gloated with another shit-eating grin, his version of sticking the knife ever further in her eager-to-please back. “As a matter of fact,” he murmured, kicking a stack of cardboard boxes behind her with the toe of his cheap dress shoe. It was scuffed and had a piece of dried Hawaiian slaw stuck to it. This fact, somehow, made her almost happy she’d stuck around to see it.

Almost, that is…

Rather than help her open the boxes or, heaven forbid, unpack them, Brett leaned against the surfboard-shaped sales counter, watching her do the dirty work herself. “So, performance reviews are up next month…”

She glanced at him over the stack of tank tops in her hand. “Already?”

“Every quarter,” he murmured sarcastically, as if this was uppermost on her mind. “Corporate keeps asking when you’re going the make the plunge to full manager, Jessie.”

“I’m ready when you are, Brett, sheesh…”

He gave her a steadily judging look. “Well, you know, I can only put one assistant manager up each quarter and well, Brody’s been really impressive lately.”

Jessie nearly dropped the stack of keychains she was carrying to the display case at her right. “He was late three times last week, Brett.”

“Still, when he’s here, kid’s on fire.”

“Kid is right, he’s barely legal.”

Brett finally offered a reluctant chuckle. He wasn’t a bad guy, per se, just a guy’s guy: straight, white, macho, and eager to share his workspace with mostly the same type of dude, bro, pal, Chad, or some variation thereof. He’d been perfectly cool with Jess being a girl until he’d found out she wasn’t someone he could actually sleep with, and after that?

Donezo.

Still, three years was long enough to endure his obvious distaste for Jessie and her kind. “Either way, Brett,” she said stiffly, her back to him as she counted the powder blue Beach Break T-shirts for his bogus inventory request, “I feel like I’ve done my time and earned my stripes and I’d formally like to be put in for a manager approval during this round of performance reviews.”

Her announcement was met with a stony silence that continued moments after she turned back to the hostess stand to mark another tally on her growing inventory sheet. When at last her eyes rose to meet his, she found him silently fuming.

“Is that so?” he finally asked, tight-lipped and guarded.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“You know, Jess, Brody’s not the only one who’s been late this quarter.”

Jess put down her pencil and calmly crossed her arms over her chest. That way she wouldn’t be able to stab Brett in the eye with her handy inventory writing implement.

“Brett, I wasn’t late last week, I had an appointment that I told you about two weeks in advance. What’s more, I wrote it down on two separate sticky notes so you wouldn’t forget. And yet? You did. I’m not trying to be difficult here, but this continual oversight of my loyalty to this company and this branch is becoming…problematic.”

“Is that so?”

She fixed him with a quiet glare and played her trump card. “Did you know that Beach Break corporate has a separate division in HR for gender bias?”

Brett’s face blushed a beet red. “Come again?”

“And that this branch handles complaints of gender discrimination?” she pressed.

“How…why would you know that, Jess?”

“Because it’s become painfully clear to me that the management team here, all-male, by the way, is a real sausage fest and after numerous years of repeated requests to join said staff, with no reason to do so otherwise, I, the lone female on the team, have been denied not just quarter after quarter, but year after year. I haven’t had to talk to corporate about anything other than health insurance since I’ve started here, but if we keep doing this little dance each performance review? I just might, Brett. I just might…”

“Where is all this coming from, Jess?” Brett wasn’t necessarily compassionate, though his fake manager’s voice sounded that way. “This outburst is very unlike you.”

“I’d hardly call pointing out the gender disparity at our particular branch an outburst, Brett. And if you do? I think that says more about you than it does me at this point.” Jessie struggled to hold her tongue. She’d already said a mouthful, she didn’t want to get fired the same day she offered to get Sophie a job.

Brett stood his ground, weathering her diatribe in his usual stoic fashion. When she was done, red-faced and flushed, he simply nodded. “I never realized you took management so seriously, Jess. Maybe if your actual performance matched your passion for, uh…gender bias, was it? You might have been promoted sooner.”

She gave him a stiff, threatening smile. “I’ll match my performance against any of my male peers, Brett. And I’m sure corporate would agree.”

“You’ve already contacted them?” His voice cracked.

She sensed the simmering panic underneath Brett’s cool, calm, calculated surface. He was a company man, after all, and there was nothing a company man hated more than trouble from above. “Of course not, Brett.” She offered him a slithering, sly smile. “My performance is outmatched only by my loyalty to this branch. However, if this pattern continues, they’re only a 1-800 number away, right?”

She met his eyes one last time, fixing him with a defiant gaze until he finally blinked and murmured something bland but unintelligible. As if the moment had been scripted that way, he sulked away, glancing at something on his cell phone as he pressed solemnly through the swinging kitchen door facing the host stand.

She nodded, self-satisfied, and turned back to her work, grateful Brett couldn’t see her hands trembling as she sorted through the next pile of shirts.

She certainly hadn’t meant to clap back at her manager, nor so passionately, but something about her run-in with Sophie after the beach, so sultry and warm and soothing and kind and generous and loving, made Jessie realize that she was, finally, passionate about something other than her work.

If that passion happened to be directed at someone other than a man, that was her business and her business alone. And it certainly shouldn’t hold her back at her workplace, where her performance, objectively speaking, was never less than stellar.

Still, Brett was right about one thing: her defiant act of subtle insubordination wasn’t like her. At all. Perhaps it was the half-can of iced espresso making her react off the cuff like that. Or, more likely, her impatience to rush back to Sophie’s beach house where she could bask in her presence yet again.

Or, maybe, it was just simply time to wake up and smell the coffee beans. If she wasn’t appreciated at Beach Break, where she’d worked since her senior year in high school nearly five years earlier, there were plenty of other tourist traps up and down Siesta Beach that would snatch her up in a heartbeat.