Excerpt
Skate City
Alex Winters © 2025
All Rights Reserved
Chapter One
ZOE
“Is this…for you?”
Zoe Chamberlain registered the dramatic look on the young cashier’s face and blanched. Miserably. She’d been hesitant about walking into the too-cool-for-school skate shop in the first place, and this comely cashier had just confirmed Zoe’s suspicions that she was, in fact, thoroughly and irretrievably uncool.
“Obviously not, but so what if it was?”
The counter girl, fresh-faced and freckled with charming auburn pigtails and a creamy soft lip gloss Zoe ached to taste, gave her another cool once-over, like maybe she’d wandered into the wrong nightclub and needed to be escorted out.
Pronto.
Zoe half-expected a bouncer to show up at any moment. “Nothing, it’s just…do you need to check with the nursing home first? They might not approve of such a rash purchase.”
Zoe rolled her eyes and glanced around the empty skate shop, a bare bones affair that was so cavalier about its warehouse-inspired aesthetic it just had to be good. In the background, lowkey punk music completed the grunge vibe. “Is this how you treat all your customers?” she teased, knowing the sassy clerk was just giving her the business—and wishing she didn’t enjoy it so very much.
The wispy redhead, tall and gangly in her baby-doll-blue Skate City T-shirt with the pink cuffs and collar, met her gaze with cool green eyes, as languid as they were searching. “Not really, but it’s not every day a MILF walks in to buy a cherry-red skateboard, so I’m at a slight disadvantage at the moment.”
“I’m not a mother!” Zoe huffed, hoping the blush she felt dampening her panties didn’t extend all the way to her cheeks. “And? Gross?”
The counter girl blushed as well but met Zoe’s eyes with the indignance of a young woman clearly confident in who she was. And, apparently, what she wanted. “Maybe not, but…”
Zoe waved her hands, as nervously as she did demonstratively. She wasn’t used to such flagrant come-ons. At least, not since she’d graduated high school a good dozen years earlier. She ran a bakery for Pete’s sake. A nice, wholesome, independently owned bakery specializing in muffins and cupcakes, at that. This—this flagrant sexiness wasn’t a part of her daily routine, though Zoe couldn’t actually say she wasn’t into it. Not that she’d let the sexy skater girl behind the counter know, of course.
“Listen, let’s start over,” Zoe cautioned, feeling as if she’d just stepped into some kind of red-light district, as yet unknown to her despite living in tiny Sunset, South Carolina her entire life. She extended a cautious hand, somehow sensing that if the saucy cashier took it, Zoe might never let it go.
The redhead brightened, standing a little taller and extending a pale hand with long fingers, many of them covered in cheap silver rings that shimmered in the warehouse’s extensive track lighting. “Good idea,” she chirped, squeezing Zoe’s hand so familiarly, so warmly, it was as if they’d known each other for years. “Welcome to Skate City! I’m Astrid. And you are?”
“Astrid?” Zoe gave her a little nose wrinkle for good measure, slithering her hand out of the cashier’s grip before she could detect Zoe’s sweaty palms and the sudden tremors that seemed to rack her entire body. “Is that a real name?”
Astrid jutted out her youthful chin as predictably as she did defiantly. “I mean, is Zoe?”
“How did I say my name?” This time, Zoe did in fact look around the industrial-size skate shop, as if someone with a cue card bearing her name might be standing just behind her.
Astrid leaned over the counter, small breasts pressing against the pale blue of her clingy T-shirt. Tapped Zoe’s nametag as familiarly as she did everything else. “What? You forgot you came straight from work?”
Zoe glanced down at herself, her faded black Sunset Sweets work shirt dusted with flour and, naturally, bearing her crooked nametag just above her left breast. She blushed anew, feeling flustered and seen in ways she hadn’t in, quite literally, years. She still wasn’t sure how she felt about that yet, but part of her wished she’d just gone to the generic skate shop on the Strip like she’d intended to. Those stores were usually so busy Zoe certainly wouldn’t have been able to receive the, uh, personal attention she was currently getting at this grungy skate shop just off the Strip.
“I guess I did,” she said quietly, her hip sagging against the countertop, littered with vibrant pastel and neon Skate City stickers. “I didn’t think this would be quite so hard.”
Astrid apparently took pity on her, inching around from the counter on predictably long legs, topped by a pair of frayed denim shorts so small they could have qualified as bikini bottoms. “Listen, sorry, you’re my first customer all day and I didn’t mean to come on quite so strong.”
Zoe wasn’t letting her off the hook so easily, endless legs and small, perky breasts notwithstanding. “I mean, MILF? I should ask to speak to your manager, young lady…”
Astrid beamed, tugging on her own nametag, hiding just beneath one of her auburn pigtails. “That’d be me too, so…”
“Aren’t you a little young to be a manager?”
Astrid smirked. “I’m not as young as I look.”
“And I’m not as old as I apparently look, so…”
Astrid leaned back against the counter, a hand on either side of her impossibly narrow waist, as if posing for, well, a skater girl catalog. “You act like I insulted you or something.”
“Did I say that? I just wanted to buy a skateboard, that’s all.”
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