Dark Secrets(11)

Hell, the last guy Vin hired didn't even know that no one save for freaking fictional James Bond wanted their gin martinis shaken. It bruised the juniper and made your drink taste like a fucking Christmas tree.

So she should have been happy that Danny knew what he was doing.

She wasn't.

Maybe a part of it was that she felt threatened.

She had been the big man on campus for a long time. She was who kept the place from going to complete hell. And fact of the matter was, Danny was every bit as good as she was. If you were factoring in personality, he had her beat.

Granted, that wasn't much of a feat. She knew her work personality left a bit to be desired. She couldn't help it, she was on-edge at work. It was not only because of Vin and Anthony and all the other colorful and dangerous characters she ran into at Lam on a daily basis. It was just how she was. She was watchful and distrusting and had little, if any, tolerance for bullshit and shallow relationships.

So she didn't do the small talk thing, not even for tips.

If you wanted to talk, she thought the only way to do it was to talk deep. Why bother wasting your time on bullshit like favorite TV shows and the weather and which sports team were really gonna do it this season.

What was the point in that?

It didn't tell you anything about a person except they had shitty taste and naive optimism for a team that sucked year in and year out.

She didn't want to waste her breath on silly things like that. If she was going to talk to someone, she wanted to know their scars, their traumas, their highs and lows, what made them who and how they were. 

Anything short of that, she'd pass.

So bar talk wasn't her forte, even after ten years on the job.

There were some regulars she had been talking to for years, who she knew because they talked when the nights were slow or everyone else at the bar was an asshole. She knew Eddie's wife had stage three cancer and wasn't long for this world and that their son was drowning that grief in heroin needles. She knew that Mandy was taking care of an elderly mother who used to beat the ever loving shit out of her and struggled daily over tasks to nurture the woman who left her unable to trust anyone who was supposed to love her.

But the guy at the end of the bar who wanted to talk to her about what a 'pretty girl like her was doing in a place like this'... yeah, she'd pass. And when she passed, she likely did it with a snippy, sarcastic jab in the process.

That was her M.O.

And she had no plans on changing it.

Even if freaking Danny was Mr. Congeniality all night- flirting with the women, bullshitting with the men, offering his opinions on everything from the menu items he had not even tried yet to what the hopes were for the upcoming football season.

"Alright, why do you hate me so much?" he asked when things started to quiet down, most people going home to find their beds so they could power through one last day in the workweek.

"I don't hate you," she said honestly. It wasn't that deep. She wasn't one of those people who said lame ass shit like 'I don't hate anyone'. Everyone hated someone, no matter how much they wanted to deny it. Everyone was as capable of hate as they were of love. And it was Faith's personal opinion that the more capable you were to hate, the more capable you were to love. So she shamelessly wore her hatred of a vast array of people because she knew she loved every bit as passionately the people who deserved it.

It would be easier if she hated Danny.

But the fact of the matter was, she had a begrudging respect for the bastard.

"You sure seem like you do," he said, dumping out the remaining alcohol from the glasses on the bar and loading the glasses into the flats that the guys from the dishwashing station just brought out.

"Well, I don't."

"Not much of a talker, huh?"

"In a month, you're going to be working Mondays and Tuesdays and maybe a busy Friday or Saturday here and there. We won't even see each other. Why do we need to become buddy-buddy?"

"Why can't we?" he shot back, making her stop from pulling the spill mat off the bar to empty it to look at him.

"I don't think you want to be buddy-buddy. And I don't think you are any more of a social butterfly than I am. What I think you are, Danny, is a bullshit artist."

"A bullshit artist?" he asked, straightening, one dark brow raising. "How so?"

"Tonight you called the lobster ravioli the best in the City."

"And?"

"And you've never had it. You also told that hipster jackass that the crappy IPA from Jersey went perfectly with the calamari."

"Pretty much any beer can go with fried food like calamari. Last I checked, upselling was a part of the job. You know... why give someone a well drink when you can talk them into mid or top shelf?"