Most stories don’t really have a clear beginning or end. There’s always some moment, albeit small, in which the rings start spinning, the pistons start pumping. A glance, a touch, if you’re drunk, a kiss.

Ashley and I never had that and there was nothing small about our beginning.

We ran into each other like two freight trains running in different directions on the same track, the vibrations of our crash ringing like a tuning fork rapped against a wooden bureau.

She was a bitch.

“Hi. Welcome to Vinito’s Pizza, home of Vinito’s Pizza, can I take your order?”

It was early June and I had needed a summer job—badly.

Vinito’s Pizza stank of sausage grease and cheap air freshener, the kind that hangs in a cab drivers car from the rear view mirror, the shape of a Christmas tree. I was willing to bear it though. Vinito paid well and beer was getting fucking expensive.

I took the job.

One day of training, and a grease stained work shirt later, I found myself approaching my first table of my first day, praying to god I wouldn’t be serving anyone I knew, though I took refuge in the fact that come august, we’d all be strangers forever.

“Welcome to Vinito’s Pizza, home of Vinito’s Pizza, can I take your order?”

Please, don’t make me say it again.

“Nice hat.”

And there she was.

The signature Vinito’s cap was a bitter topic for every Vinito’s employee. Propped on top of a putrid plastic blue dome baring the slogan “Welcome to Vinito’s Pizza, home of Vinito’s Pizza, can I take your order”, and right before the three inch portrait of Mr. Vinito himself and his signature handle bar mustache giving every customer the thumbs up, was a life size slice of pineapple and anchovies pizza, the model so painfully accurate that, hanging from the tip like a hangnail, was a orange drop of plastic grease.

I tore my eyes away from my notepad before cocking an eyebrow at a highly amused brunette and, who I assumed to be, her gaggle of MTV cronies.

Folding her arms across her chest, she cocked one right back, letting her glare drop from my head, to my neck, oozing down my chest, across my arms and past my torso, before languidly meeting my own gaze with a curl of her lip.