Even I rolled my eyes.

It was Miguel who tossed his hands up in the air. “You’re full—”

Mr. Cooper sighed and shifted in the seat beside me. I hadn’t gotten around to telling him how the day before had gone, but he’d given me a hug when I sat down beside him, so I figured he had an idea from my body language that it hadn’t been great.

There was a groan before Miguel continued talking. “You don’t always do all the sanding. Quit exaggerating.”

I kept from making a face and let my eyelids hang low.

“Seems like it. Everybody needs to pull their weight around and do equal work. I wanna do the body filler too. I do bodywork. I don’t just sand.”

“And I don’t just…” my coworker went on while I zoned him out to focus on the man who had held my hands and put his jacket around my shoulders not twenty-four hours before.

My eyes zeroed in on the sliver of tattoos along Rip’s neck. I had brought him his coffee just like normal that morning, and he’d told me thank you just like normal too. There hadn’t been anything that indicated things were different.

That had made me feel a lot better about the day before than I would have expected.

The guys babbled on for a while longer, but I took the time to go through my mental list of what I needed to pick up at the store today for Lily’s graduation before I went home. She didn’t want balloons because she didn’t want us to waste helium on her. I had already called to make a reservation at a restaurant for a late lunch after the ceremony, but I knew that there would be at least a few people who went back to the house with us. So I needed to grab some snacks to feed them. Drinks. Ice. Chips—

“…spend this week in the booth.”

The booth? The words snatched me right out of my head. I glanced over at Mr. Cooper, who had started talking at some point, and focused on my favorite older man.

“You good with that, Luna?” His eyes focused on me like he hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t paying attention.

Shit.

“What was that?”

His expression said he was fine with repeating himself. “Jason will be helping you out in the booth for the next few weeks, starting today.”

Oh, no.

No, no, no, no.

“I’m not that far behind on things.” I smiled, pressing my hand against my stomach subconsciously. “If I need help, I know I can ask.” I made sure to keep my eyes on my boss and keep a smile on my face.

“We talked about Jason learning the booth, remember?”

Everyone in the room turned to look at Jason. Jason, the guy who purposely didn’t finish projects so I would get stuck doing so. Jason, the one who got way too much enjoyment when I got in trouble. Jason, the jerk who had cheated on my little sister.

Jason, the guy who knew I knew he sucked and hadn’t liked me since.

Great.

All I managed to get myself to do was nod and let my smile turn tight.

I didn’t want to even look at him. I didn’t like him, he definitely didn’t like me, and the only way we worked together was by giving each other a ton of room and space.

Double great.

“I know you can catch up, but you don’t need to stay late if you can get some help and knock things out faster,” Mr. Cooper continued, giving me a warm smile like he genuinely thought he was doing me a favor.

I didn’t need to glance at Jason to know why I would rather stay until midnight than have him help.

What was up with me and these jerks in my life? It was like God wanted me to meet the best and worst in extremes. There was no in-between with anyone I met.

“You good with that, Jason?” Mr. Cooper asked him.

From behind me, the guy I honestly couldn’t stand said, “Yup.”

Yup.

Of course this would happen.

I had survived my grandmother’s funeral yesterday. My sister was graduating tomorrow. I guess I could make it through this too.

“Great,” I found myself mumbling.

Today was going to be a good day. Somehow.

* * *

I could count on one hand the number of people in my life that I genuinely hated.

Most of the people I could technically call my family.

Honestly, that was pretty much it.

Hating someone for me meant that if they needed a transplant and I was the only person in the world capable of giving them what they needed, I still wouldn’t.

But I would more than likely give a complete stranger a kidney if they were nice and asked.

To me, there was a difference between disliking a person and hating them. There were plenty of people who I disliked for one reason or another—they were selfish, mean, rude, stuck-up, and any combination of all of those things. But if they absolutely needed something that I had, chances were, I would give it to them. Maybe I wouldn’t smile as I did it, but I would do what needed to be done. If it was the right thing to do.

I’d met a lot of assholes in my life—I was related to most of them—but Jason… Jason was in a league of his own.

That was saying a lot.

I was pinching the tip of my nose so I wouldn’t be tempted to pinch him instead that afternoon.

“Why did you do this?” I asked him slowly, trying my best to sound like Ripley, all nice and calm even though I didn’t feel either emotion… On the inside, I’d kicked him in the balls at least four times in the last five minutes.

Maybe even twenty times.

The smirking-shrugging-useless papercut lifted his shoulders like he didn’t know why he had clearly ignored the instructions I had left him to do while I’d been at lunch. They couldn’t have been any more precise.

Two coats of primer. Two coats of primer. Two. Not one. Two.

And what had he done?

One coat.

And in the time it had taken me to go to the bathroom, talk to Mr. Cooper about what had happened at the funeral, and for him to tell me that he was pretty sure he’d found a replacement for the mechanic leaving, Jason had gone ahead and started adding color without giving the primer enough time to dry. I wasn’t even sure where he had gotten the paint from.

It wasn’t even a rookie mistake. It was an idiot mistake.

I had told him at least five times we had to let the primer dry for at least twenty-four hours after the final coat. Not ten minutes. Especially not when one coat hadn’t been enough in the first place.

I could feel my left eyelid begin to twitch already. I took another deep breath through my nose and then let it out of my mouth. He’d done it on purpose. I knew he’d done it wrong on purpose. I’d bet my life on it.

“It looks all right,” he tried to say, turning his back to me to do who the hell knows what.

My eyes took in the wheels and unease slithered right around the collar of my shirt. “Jason, it needed two.”

“But it doesn’t look bad.”

I blew air into my cheeks and let them stay puffed out for a second while I tried to think about what I could—and should—say. “That’s not the point,” I said as patiently as I could, before dropping to a crouch to look at the wheels sitting on top of a thick blanket. I didn’t need a flashlight to see there was a line of uneven color all along the side of it. I could see hints of gray beneath the red, easily. I wanted to tell him he’d screwed that part up too, but… he had messed up enough by just missing the coat of primer in the first place. I had a feeling he hadn’t even agitated the can of paint in the first place.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” my new—and hopefully very temporary—assistant tried to snicker.

I stood up and sighed. It was done. There was nothing I could do about it now. There was no point in being upset. I wasn’t going to remember this ten years from now, but…. “Everything has to come off, and now we’re going to have to do it all over again from the beginning,” I told him, crushing his dreams.

I didn’t need to look at him to know he had to be giving me a “are you fucking kidding me” face. But what did he expect?

I should have said something to Mr. Cooper the instant he mentioned this happening.

But I hadn’t, and that was my fault.

“And it needs to dry properly,” I explained, walking around the other side of the wheels and leaning back to take in another line of uneven color across the entire thing. He was rushing. That’s why it was so bad. Why he’d decided to rush, why he’d decided to even do this in the first place, was beyond me.