Sugar and Spice

Secret Service: Jay

I stood in the shadows of the dumpsters, watching the blue Subaru pull out of the parking lot until its taillights disappeared into the humid Florida night. My hand still felt the ghost of hers, the way her fingers had hooked into mine, desperate and steady all at once. I had never felt more like a man and more like a fraud at the same time.

“You look like you just watched a ghost depart for the afterlife,” Cole’s voice echoed off the brick.

I turned to see him leaning against the back door. A stack of dirty floor mats were rolled up and thrown over his shoulder. He’d been watching. Of course he had. Cole didn’t miss anything.

“She made the math work, Cole,” I said, my voice sounding a little raw. “She crushed it. One day and she’s already halfway to her weekly goal.”

“I saw the floor today, Jay. I saw the way you moved.” Cole dropped the mats with a heavy thud. “It’s like you were playing secret service.”

“I’m the ground crew, I was clearing the path.”

“There’s clearing a path, and then there’s building a shrine. You gotta be careful, you can’t let it look like you’re playing favorites. The other servers will complain, and then you’ll get stuck in the dish pit to keep the peace.”

I looked down at my hands, “She’s going home to show her dad that notepad, Cole. He’s probably sitting in a dark room right now with s calculator and a heart made of stone. If she doesn’t get every single advantage, he’s going to take her life away.”

“I get it,” Cole’s tone softened just a fraction. “I really do, but you can’t control everything in her life. You can’t pre-fill the water carafes at her house. You might be helping her build the bridge, but she still has to walk across it alone.”

The thought of her alone facing her father made my chest ache. “I’m serving tomorrow anyways,” I pointed out. “Not a lot I can do when I have my own tables to contend with.”

“Just watch your back, Jay,” Cole sighed.

He went back inside, and I headed toward my old, rusted-out Honda. I stayed there for a long time with the windows down, listening to the sound of the surf. Eventually I started toward my stilt house, but I found myself slowing down as I passed the more affluent neighborhoods full of perfect manicured lawns and perfect manufactured daughters. Somewhere in one of them, the Missile Scientist was defending her trajectory. “Don’t let him win, Mal,” I whispered to the dashboard. I headed home, the smell of the marsh filling the car.

The humid air of the stilt house felt too small that night. I tossed and turned until five in the morning. My mind kept looping through images of Mallory’s white-knuckled grip on her server book and the way her fingers felt against my palm. By 5:15, I gave up on sleep.

I grabbed my board from the porch, the was tacky under my fingers, and drove towards Emerald Bay State Park before the sun had even thought about breaking the horizon.

The beach was gray and ghostly. The only sound was the rhythmic, heavy thud of the gulf waters crashing against the shore. I paddled out, my muscles groaning from yesterday’s double shift, until the pier was just a dark skeleton in the distance. I sat on my board, bobbing in the swells, and watched the sky turn from a bruised purple to a pale, bleeding orange.

In the water, there were no budgets or red pens. There’s just the swell, the timing, and the courage to drop in. I wondered if Mallory had ever just… floated. If she’d ever let a current just take her without a map in her pocket.

I caught a waist-high left, carving through the glass as the first sliver of sunlight hit the water. For thirty seconds, I wasn’t a server, a “shadow,” or a drifter. I was just part of the physics.

Physics, I thought, kicking out of the wave, she’d love the math of a break.

By the time I loaded my board into the back of my Honda, the salt was drying on my skin and my head felt clearer. I had to be at Stella’s by 10:30. Today wasn’t about being ground crew. I was on the floor with my own section. It was 10:15 when I pulled into the parking lot.