Girl In Pieces Read Online Free PDF

only way.”

 
     
     
     
FIVE
     
    There was no rum.
    No Captains or Sailors or the cheap chemical tasting shit I kept on hand in case patrons behaved badly. I crouched behind the bar opening cabinet after cabinet where there ought to have been enough rum to float in, but there was nothing. The whiskey looked low. Vodka too.
    No rum. Not a drop.
    It had been a long few weeks. Long and very, very lonely and it was entirely possible I’d let some of my duties slip. But in my entire career bartending for my father and then owning South River, I’d never run out of an entire line of alcohol before.
    When one last check proved I wasn’t imagining things, I headed back to the storage room behind the manager’s office in search of the lost rum. It was always possible the shipment had been delayed. Or never unboxed. Certainly there was some obvious explanation other than we had just simply run out without anyone noticing.
    I flicked the switch inside the door and the overhead light buzzed to life, illuminating the long, narrow room. The storage area wasn’t so large you could lose a shipment in it. It was big enough for shelves on both sides, crates stacked in the back and as high as the fire marshal allowed. Bits of crushed packing peanuts and brittle wood pieces littered the floor where the delivery guys dropped the new pallets, but there were no new pallets waiting to be unpacked. The room hadn’t been swept or straightened in a while. The shelves were a mess, labels hidden or missing entirely, nothing in a straight row. Someone had abandoned a half empty bottle of water and pile of peanut shells next to an overturned crate.
    I’d clearly let a lot of things slide lately.
    Each section was labeled with an old fashioned, whiskey bottle inspired chalkboard plaque. They were marked with their distributor, brand, and last inventory count. The chalkboard made it easy to adjust numbers and make notes when a vendor had changed orders unexpectedly. The signs should tell me what happened to my inventory.
    The signs were one of Kat’s ideas, of course.
    I’d discovered a lot of little Kat things hidden around the bar in the last few weeks. Post-it notes asking for a pony and better jukebox music hidden in my desk drawer. Old email messages. Graffiti in the girl’s bathroom I was sure was her doing no matter how many times I’d scolded her for it. When I’d discovered obscure Joy Division lyrics doodled across a table top in slanted, girlish cursive I’d felt irritated, then paralyzed with an intense longing like I’d never experienced in my life. I’d imagined dragging her over to the table in the middle of the night, bending her across it so her cheek pressed prettily to the dark lyrics, and punishing her for misbehaving. My hand on her bare skin, making her scream and beg and moan …the image had overwhelmed my better senses, wrecked my control, left me shaking and badly missing her. No girl had ever screwed with me like this. I didn’t know if I hated her for it or…or something else just as impossible.
    On Halloween, trying just to get through the night without losing my mind, I’d tried to take a picture of costumed regulars celebrating over shots at the bar and discovered a string of selfies of Kat making faces into my camera phone. The last picture was of her blowing me a kiss, red lips and dimples and holding a napkin with a warning in black Sharpie.
    “ What’s yours is mine.  p.s. Use a better password. XOXO. ”
    The last straw was when I found one of her t-shirts in my laundry. It was a band t-shirt, their signatures in faded ink on the back where they’d signed her. One night, after a big football game, a tipsy fan spilled buffalo wings on her. She’d tossed the shirt in my laundry and stolen one out of my closet to finish the shift.
    In true Kat form, she’d never given it back, but I’d long since stopped asking for anything she made off with since it was largely a futile effort. Kat must have had