Free Crush du Jour by Micol Ostow

deserts.
    “Laine.” She was crankier now. Much crankier. It was kind of weird; most human beings, like, max out at a certain level of crankiness, but not Callie. Callie had bitchery in reserves.
    “Yeah?” I willed myself to go to my Zen place. I was in a land where chunky peanut butter and milk chocolate merged in a beautiful symphony of creamy, sugary goodness. …
    Shoot. Now I was drifting off again.
    I stood up straight and blew my bangs up and off my forehead. “Yeah.”
    Callie grimaced at me. “Table nineteen.”
    “Right, the water.” I moved to take careof it. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten distracted again .
    See? Love: not worth the trouble. It always gets in the way. And if, as I suspected, my feelings for Seth ran deeper than a simple crush, you could just triple that trouble. And then double it again.
    “Not the water,” Callie interjected. “Although they’d probably be into that, too.” She rolled her eyes so hard I wondered if she could see the inside of her perfectly shaped skull. “I think they’re ready to order.”
    Whoops. My bad. Even I knew that “think” was code for “know for a fact,” with a hint of “you dingbat” thrown in.
    “Right,” I assured her. “I’ll take care of it.”
    As the night went on, I did my best to tend to table nineteen as well as the four others that were located in my station. It’s just, waiting tables was so overwhelming and difficult, and it was exactly the sort of task that my left-brain-oriented self wasn’t really suited for. Even if Callie hadn’t been launching a one-woman campaign against me, I still would have been in the weeds, big-time.
    Why did I do this to myself? If I was such a lousy waitress, why didn’t I quit?
    The simple truth? I needed the money.
    The more difficult truth? The one I wasn’t sure I was ready to face yet? I really wanted Seth.
    Since the Fourth of July, an electric force field had bubbled up between Seth and me. It had gotten to where I could barely stand to look directly at him without sunglasses or a hazmat suit or … I don’t know. Something .
    But you know who else stuck to Seth like a half-melted Tootsie Roll? Callie. What this meant was that I was not only avoiding Callie, but I was doing my best to duck and cover whenever Seth was around too.
    This obviously involved a lot of leaping through doorways and slinking down hallways when either of them swung by. If nothing else, I was getting a good workout.
    I was so busy both stressing out and bussing table seventeen that at first I didn’t notice Anna walk into the restaurant. Once she caught my eye, though, I let out a squeal of glee, quickly stashed my tray at the sideboard in front of the kitchen, and dashed over to her. It was bliss to see a familiar face in the place I now thought ofas a heretofore undiscovered tenth circle of hell.
    “What are you doing here?” I asked, totally shocked.
    “The kiddie has pinkeye and is deathly contagious. So I get a few days off.” She winked at me with a decidedly non-pink eye.
    “Lucky,” I pouted.
    “Uh, I’m not the one who’s working with Mr. Crest Whitestrips, Laine,” she pointed out.
    There was that, yeah. She’d come by and seen Seth before, and, like anyone with eyes, realized that he was smokin’ hot.
    I grinned. “Thank goodness for that. I would hate to have to kill you.”
    “So …,” she hedged, “how is the competition these days?”
    I bit my lip. Anna had decided over late-night café mochas with me that the source of Callie’s hatred was jealousy. I tried to convince her that Callie had not one single reason to be jealous of me, but Anna wasn’t buying. She thought that my notcrush on Seth was both not-nonexistent and not-nonobvious.
    I held my right hand over my heart. “I plead the fifth, your honor.”
    “You’re no fun,” Anna groaned.
    “I’m so fun,” I corrected her. I glanced at my watch. “And you know what’s even more fun? You camping out at the bar