Page 53 of Hunted Mate
Callie
This is a cute little town. There’s a café, a dance studio, and a little general store that would never dare rise to the label of a supermarket. Everything is quaint and picturesque and somehow screams affordable.
It’s magic here too, just like New Orleans, but a little more rural and a lot more rich. I feel as though I can taste it, like velvet chocolate on my tongue. It feels like power.
I’m hungry again.
I go into the diner, where a man wearing a baseball cap backwards pulled down over dark brows and perpetually annoyed blue eyes gives me one look and then sets about ignoring me.
“Please tell me you have coffee!” A teenage girl who looks far too young to drink coffee barges in and starts talking at him even though he was trying to take someone else’s order.
He turns like he’s on some kind of lazy Susan and pours the girl coffee. No money exchanges hands. I assume she’s his daughter. How cute, a family place.
A moment later, a harried woman who looks a lot like the teenage girl throws herself through the door, forcing it to jangle aggressively.
“Coffee!” She declares the word with such incredible desperation that the man once again pivots from his own sense of free will and serves her coffee. The woman joins the teenage girl and the two of them take a slight sip, then proceed to entirely ignore their beverages.
Nobody else seems to think this is strange, but it is pretty bonkers.
I go up to the counter. “Excuse me,” I say. “Do you have any coffee?”
“Coffee!” The ladies behind me echo me like a couple of thirsty poltergeists. The man serves me with a scowl and barely a word. He doesn’t ask me for money either. I’m starting to wonder if this is one of those social experiments, just a place where you put as much money as you want on the counter.
I sit at the counter and listen to the conversations. Apparently the teenager can’t decide which one of the Ivy League colleges she got accepted into she should actually go to. It’s a problem a lot of people can’t relate to even a little, but I’m engrossed.
“You always wanted to go to Stanford,” the mother says. “Ever since you were little. It’s been your dream. You can’t give up on your dream.”
“Oh, boy,” the teenage girl says. “I don’t have enough coffee for this decision. Or pizza.”
“Then we’ll get pizza. And more coffee,” her mother says. “This is a two pizza, double cheese decision.”
The two of them get up and leave the diner, abandoning the coffees they were so desperate to have entirely.
“Do you have any raw meat?” I ask the man behind the counter. He’s not wearing a name tag, but there’s a man’s name on the outside of the diner. Maybe he’s the man with the name. I wasn’t really paying attention when I walked in here. Dave, maybe?
“Sure,” he says in a tone laced with sarcasm. He goes in the back, then comes out and drops a packet of bacon in front of me. “Go nuts.”
“Thanks,” I say, peeling back the plastic. I’ve always liked bacon. I used to have it crispy, but this is good too.
I pick up a rasher and… it’s snatched away from me before I can ingest it. Rude.
The diner owner gives me an annoyed look. “I’m going to cook this,” he says. “You can eat it afterward.”
“Sure. Thanks. Or maybe you’ve got a hamburger?”
“Yes, I can do a hamburger,” he says, still sounding put out, as if he was spawned inside the diner and never wanted to be bothered with any of it.
“Okay, please. But can I make a few changes? I have dietary requirements.”
His jaw clenches, as if he wants to hurl the notepad at me.
“Okay, well, first hold the cheese. Then hold the pickle. And the onion. Then hold the bun.”
“So you want a hamburger patty.”
“Yep. And hold the heat.”
“Hold the heat,” he says, incredulous. “You don’t want me to cook it.”
