Page 11 of A Matter of Fact

“Thank you.” Rhys brushed past him, smelling like cinnamon and cloves, and Beckett pinched his lips between his teeth and forced himself to look back at the three customers in front of him, not the one walking away.

“Did you want to order or wait?” he asked.

“My brother will have champagne,” the unidentified one said, gesturing toward the empty seat. “A bottle of whatever you have that’s expensive, but not Dom.”

Beckett smirked and nodded. “Got it.”

“And I’ll take a third,” Jace said, raising his almost empty first glass.

“Jace.”

“Sebastian,” Jace mocked, finishing the drink and passing the glass back to Beckett. “A third.”

Beckett took the glass and headed back inside to the bar. He put the order in, then collected the drinks ready for his other tables, serving them up and taking their food orders. The patio bustled with the sounds of scraping silverware and clinking glasses, and Beckett’s blood thrummed with happiness. It was so good to be at work like this again. On the weekend, making money.

Beckett drummed his fingers against the bar and closed his eyes. Then he recognized a new smell that was somehow already familiar. He cracked one eye open and found the handsome guy with the great ass, Rhys, standing beside him at the bar staring straight ahead.

“Your brother ordered you a drink,” Beckett offered.

Rhys turned to him, nose slightly upturned and his full, pouty mouth pulled tight like he was ready to shoot barbs at any second. He was taller than Beckett, but not by much. And he was close, so close.

“What did he get me?”

“Champagne. Expensive, but not Dom.”

Rhys snorted and rolled his eyes. “What an asshole.”

“I can change the order if you want,” he offered, but Rhys waved him off.

“My brother knows me better than I thought,” Rhys said, that pouty mouth pulling back down into a frown.

Hunter approached them with the bottle on ice and another Bloody Mary. Beckett garnished it, and Rhys walked away from him without another word. Beckett found himself disappointed at the departure. He wanted to know more about the four men at the table. He wanted to know why Rhys was so proud yet so sullen, and he wanted to know what in the world had happened to make Jace so angry at him.

That was one of the downfalls of restaurant work. You only ever got half stories, oftentimes less. You were allowed glimpses into people’s lives, but only for the brief time they were at one of your tables. Sometimes you never saw them again, and even if you did, when they came back, they were at a different time in their life. Different problems, different worries. It was rare that Beckett ever got to see anyone’s stories through to completion. Sometimes, he made them up in his head. Not everyone got a happy ending, he figured.

Much like real life.

Beckett finished garnishing the Bloody Mary and returned to the patio, leaving all of the drinks and walking away in the middle of a tense and heated conversation. He didn’t have time to make out what the four men were talking about, but he could tell Rhys hated every second of it, and so did Jace. But there wasn’t time to linger. It was a Sunday, and it was brunch. Beckett was quickly swept up in the business of his shift, his attention pulled in every direction.

An hour later, he was ready to go on break, and the four top had cleared, save for Rhys and what was left of his bottle of champagne.

“Anything else?” Beckett asked when he approached the table.

“Just the check.” Rhys’s words were almost slurred, but impressively decipherable.

“Split?”

Rhys flicked his wrist as if to show Beckett the empty table around him. “Nope. I’ve got this one.”

Beckett had already printed the ticket and he set it face down on the table. Rhys nodded and poured the remainder of the champagne into his glass.

“Did you need me to call you a cab?” Beckett asked. It was one thing Heather had hammered home as part of the new hire training. Getting customers drunk and letting them drive away was bad for business. Always offer to call a cab if a table had more than two drinks, and Rhys had downed an entire bottle.

“A cab?” Rhys scoffed. “No.”

“An Uber?” he tried.

“I don’t need a desperate man in a Toyota to come collect me from this restaurant,” Rhys snapped. “I’ll call a car myself.”