“It’s July, Josie. The sugar shacks are closed.”
“Okay. I’ll settle for Denny’s.”
“Gross.” Laura recoiled. She’d waited tables there for three years in college. The only superbird she wanted to see was her own middle finger flipping off her old manager whenever she was in town and drove past.
“Well, excuse me for not knowing the proper gourmet etiquette for what to eat while talking about your best friend’s threesome.”
“Brie and Nutella, actually,” Laura intoned, faking sincerity. “Haven’t you read Dan Savage’s column on it?”
Ding! Laura’s laptop made an all-too-familiar sound. Her Home Page was the online dating site— who could this be?
“Laura! Batman’s calling. Or maybe the Green Lantern. Iron Man’s taken—Gwyneth got him already.” Josie grabbed her arm and dragged her to the door. “No—you can’t answer it. We need to talk about the two you already got before you get any more hot guys. Leave some for the rest of us!”
Laura whiplashed her head between the front door and her laptop. “But...”
“Nope—and now you’re definitely buying. Hope you have lots of cash, because I am starving. Flash Gordon can wait.” Laura ran back to the table, slammed the laptop shut, and trotted back to Josie, the streetlights outside her door blinding her as she realized she was starving.
The night air whipped against her cheeks, refreshing and cleansing, like a baptism of reality. Walking a few blocks, she and Josie searched out a good breakfast joint.
“What time is it?” Josie asked.
Laura checked her phone. “3:12.”
“Jesus,” Josie muttered. “You’re getting me a giant stack of pancakes, eggs, bacon, a milkshake—the works. Three in the fucking morning.”
“Yer getting’ old, Josie. We used to just get started at three a.m.”
“Getting started at three a.m. with a guy in my bed is one thing. Prowling the town for pancakes with you? I need three shots of espresso for that.”
Insatiable. The rush of hunger hit Laura like something sexual, a teeming need for a brownie sundae. Breaded, fried shrimp. Mozz sticks. Apple pie.
They turned a corner and—hooray! Jeddy’s was open. Josie pointed. “Jeddy’s?”
“Good old Jeddy’s. Geez, haven’t been here in...what?”
“Seven months,” Josie said, a sour expression on her face.
“Seven mo—” Oh. Yeah. Josie had come here to drown her sorrows after her last fuckbuddy left her. For a guy.
“Let’s talk over caramel toffee chocolate chip pancakes. With crushed bacon cooked in.” Josie wiped an imaginary line of drool from the corner of her mouth. Or was that real?
“Only if you add in real whipped cream and homemade chocolate sauce.”
“Deal.” As they approached the door, Laura’s hunger pangs sounded like gongs at a Buddhist monastery, the reverberations filling every void.
Except for two.
Her Two Billionaires and a Baby
The waitress’s giant set of balls always threw her off.
Jeddy’s was one of those neighborhood holes in the wall that had probably been a breakfast joint since Laura’s grandma was a kid. During the height of factory shift work it had been open twenty-four hours and, as a relic to the Industrial Age, had never stopped. Even as the fluorescent lights buzzed and blinked and the streets were empty in that surreal hour between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. when everyone in the world is asleep and you’re not, Jeddy’s still had the cheap red vinyl bench seats, gummed-shut sugar containers and a few ancient men scratching their balls and chewing on a piece of something from 1983.
And then there were the waitress’s balls. Someone, years ago (since Laura and Josie were in college) had taken a cut-out cardboard life-size person, put a Jeddy’s uniform on her, and attached a pair of those truck hitch plastic balls to it.
It had, uh...stuck. So the waitress with balls greeted every customer with a smile, except that the cardboard cutout was actually Julian Sands from the old ’80s movie, “The Warlock.”
The stuff of nightmares and cheap Netflix thrills. Everything about Jeddy’s screamed old, forgotten, ratty and dated.
Except the food.
One of the owners had passed the restaurant on to a family member who had earned a degree at Le Cordon Bleu in Boston, and this had created as schizophrenic a restaurant as ever there was, for as Josie and Laura greeted the ball-bearing waitress, which involved giving her nuts a squeeze and saying “How you doin’?” in the best Joey Tribiani imitation, the aroma of the restaurant was strictly gourmet. Better than gourmet. Cheesy roadhouse Top Chef Gordon Ramsey Fucking Awesome gourmet.