Page 8 of Taste Test
My part-time gig at Brew he had the aim of a drunk pensioner and the courtesy of a tomcat.
I’d lost count of how many times I’d walked into that toilet to find puddles of piss around the base of the bowl, splattered across the seat, sometimes even on the fucking walls.
Like he was marking territory or just didn’t give enough of a shit to lift the seat properly.
“Just sort it out,” he snapped. “It’s fucking rank.”
“Yeah, I know. Trust me, I’m aware of how rank it is.”
“Don’t look so sour. I thought gay guys loved piss.”
I stopped cleaning and stared at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know.” A cunning smile played on his mouth. “All that kinky stuff you lot are into. Golden showers and that.”
“Right, because being gay automatically makes me into every fetish you’ve seen in porn.” I turned back to the grinder, scrubbing harder than necessary. “That’s like saying all straight guys are into having women shit on their chests because it exists somewhere on the internet.”
“Touched a nerve, did I?”
I bit my tongue, hard. While my parents weren’t exactly poor, they weren’t as loaded as Jared’s family.
Or Dash’s for that matter. I needed this job to fund my social life, my textbooks, my share of the groceries.
Even if it meant mopping up fuckwit piss and pretending Dash’s casual homophobia was just workplace banter.
I grumbled under my breath, grabbing the mop and industrial cleaning spray.
“That’s more like it,” Dash said. “It’ll only take you five minutes.”
He wandered off towards the front counter, probably to find something else to criticise, leaving me standing there with cleaning supplies and a growing fantasy about shoving his blue-spiked head in the toilet he’d deliberately pissed all over.
When I returned from cleaning up his mess, Dash was lounging behind the counter, his t-shirt riding up as he stretched, giving me a glimpse of his abs.
They were skinny-boy abs that would probably disappear the moment he hit his twenties, considering his diet consisted mainly of energy drinks and spite.
But right now they were sexy as fuck, especially with that thin trail of crisp black hair leading down into his jeans.
My brain was already filing the image away in the wank bank for later, complete with a footnote: tonight you’re getting fucked rough, you smug little shithead.
“All sorted?” he asked, oblivious to the filth running riot in my head.
“Your piss is mopped up, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He grinned, all dimples and attitude. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
I slammed the mop into the cleaning cupboard. “You know, most people over the age of five manage not to piss on the floor.”
“Most people your age don’t whinge about a little work.”
“I don’t have a problem with working. I have a problem with you turning the bathroom into a splash zone.”
“Stop being so bloody dramatic. It’s just a bit of piss.”
“Yeah, piss I wouldn’t have to mop up if you had half-decent aim. Or, wild idea, weren’t a complete fucking knob.”
Dash’s thin eyebrows climbed, and the ring through one of them glinted in a ray of sunshine. “Don’t make me write you up again for insubordination, Casey.”
Prick.
“Sorry your highness,” I muttered, biting back about eight worse replies.
“That’s better. Now I’m gonna go back to the stockroom and finish this inventory.”
He stalked off, and at that exact moment the bell above the door chimed. I was about to call out that we were closing until I saw it was Suzie, my favourite customer. Her auburn hair was pulled up in a bun and she was clutching a stack of books that looked like they weighed more than she did.
Suzie had the kind of relationship with caffeine that most people reserved for life-sustaining medication.
She’d discovered Brew & Bean during her first week at uni and had been treating it like her personal study hall ever since.
What had started as polite barista-customer interactions had slowly developed into actual friendship.
The kind where she’d stay after closing to help me clean up, or I’d slip her free coffee when Dash wasn’t around.
She was almost forty and a mother of two teenage boys, but despite our age difference and very different lives we’d clicked like we’d known each other for years.
Maybe it was our shared obsession with Bridgerton, or the running debate we had about which professor on campus was the most shaggable, but our friendship had developed naturally.
She’d come back to uni after her divorce, determined to finish the degree she’d abandoned when she got married at twenty.
“Please tell me you have something stronger than coffee,” she said, slumping her petite frame against the counter and placing down the pile of books.
“Fresh out of methamphetamines,” I replied, already pulling a shot for her oat milk cortado. “But I can make you something that’ll either fix your problems or make you too jittery to care about them.”
“Sounds perfect.”
“How are the boys?” I asked, steaming the oat milk. “Still driving you insane?”
“Tyler almost got suspended yesterday so yes... driving me very insane.”
“Oh. What did he do?”