“We’ll start with some waters.”

I never get pissed and I rarely ever get mad but something about her irked me, irritated me, buzzed around me like a mosquito on crack with a vendetta for blood.

Just think about the weed I thought as I stalked back towards their table, juggling three jugs of ice water in my sweaty minimum wage hands.

I blame what happened next on Lou, the janitor for Vinito’s Pizza. If Lou hadn’t been out back, smoking a fattie, he might have noticed the pool of diet Pepsi on the floor next to table ten, he might of, just perhaps, gotten off his lazy ass and put a “wet floor” sign in the middle of the narrow walk way, and then, just maybe, I wouldn’t have, on my first day serving my first table of teenage hyenas, slipped, hurtling one jug of pitcher over my head only to find two spinning innocently on the floor, their contents seeping through my first customers denim mini-skirt.

Yes, if Lou hadn’t been getting high, if he hadn’t been lighting up in the alley behind the restaurant, I might not have scrambled up from the floor and violently spun around to find something, anything, to clean up the my mess. I, perhaps, wouldn’t have settled for the stack of napkins perched on table five and, just maybe, a certain someone else wouldn’t have reached for the very same pile of tissues at the very same time, forcing us into a head on collision that sent me four feet back.

Bottom line? Lou fucked up.

And in those first few moments, as I cracked one eye open to survey the damage, I felt something: A change in the atmosphere, a static shock, the shifting of the earth, a tingle that creeped through my heart and set my soul on fire. Then it was gone like a memory you wish you’d never forget.

Someone, during the course the debacle, got Lou.

By then, the damage was done, and an invisible line was drawn. On one side was me: Vinito cap eschew and blonde hair stock to my blotchy cheeks. On the other, was Ashley, her curly brunette locks tighter than ever and her tank top soaked, revealing more than I should have been paying attention to at the time.

“Come on, Ashley.”

And then she was gone, shuffling out of Vinito’s Pizza without having ever eaten, a fact Mr. Vinito relayed to me many times as he motioned for me to pick up the plastic water jugs now littering the floor.

That was where we started, that was Ashley and mines beginning, our colossal, epic, collision of a start.

Understandably, we had no idea. We never thought we’d see each other again. And why would we? I had just doused her body in water putting her nipples on display for all of Vinito’s Pizza’s greasy customers. She had been a frigid bitch. If anything, our start was our end—simple as that.

My last thought as I pulled on a dry shirt and set back out to the floor to work? I’m getting fucked up tonight.

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