Paid to Rest: My Lazy Life System

The Slow Breakfast

The bedroom door banged open. Marcus stood there in boxers and one sock, holding a game controller like a weapon.

“Bro, who are you yelling at?” His eyes darted around the empty room and landed on the lamp. “Why are you holding that?”

“Heart rate’s doing a thing,” Hammock observed. “Slow breath in while I count to four, if you want. Your pulse, your call.”

Evan lowered the lamp an inch. His heart was slamming so hard he could feel it in his teeth, and he couldn’t think past it. If this was real, he needed a clear head. If he was losing his mind, he might as well lose it calmly.

He set the lamp on the bed and breathed in while he counted to four in his head. He let it out through his mouth. His fingers stopped shaking on the third breath.

“Nicely done,” Hammock murmured. “Look at you, a man who takes advice.”

A gray box slid across his phone.

[Mission complete. $100,000 has been deposited. Host stress is acceptable, but only barely.]

Marcus took one step back toward the hallway. “You’re scaring me a little.”

“Look at this.” Evan held the phone out with a trembling arm.

Marcus leaned in until his nose almost touched the glass. “That’s a glitch. Banks glitch. They’ll take it back in an hour and charge you a f*e for looking at it.”

“Maybe.” Evan rubbed his thumb along the edge of the cracked screen. “Then I’ll find out the same way everyone finds out.”

“That’s rude again. Your whole household is rude. Here’s your next offer.”

[Mission offer: Eat a real breakfast at a real table. Keep your phone face-down and untouched for 30 minutes. Reward: $150,000. Accept?]

Why would I? Evan thought. I just got fired.

“Because the last mission paid a hundred thousand dollars for lying down, and this one asks you to eat pancakes.”

Evan looked at the number on the bank banner. He looked at the dead plant in the box on the counter.

If it was a scam, he would lose thirty minutes and a plate of eggs. If it wasn’t, he would be an idiot to walk away. He picked up his only clean shirt from the chair.

Accept, he thought.

[Mission accepted.]

“Going to Dot’s,” he called on his way out.

Marcus leaned out of his doorway, his eyebrows shooting up. “With what money? You got fired yesterday, and rent’s due in nine days.”

Evan held up his phone and waggled it, his mouth twitching at one corner. “With a hundred grand, apparently.”

“That’s a glitch, bro!” Marcus shouted after him as the door swung shut. “Don’t spend the glitch!”

Dot’s Diner sat on the corner of their block, and Evan had walked past it every morning for three years without once going in. Breakfast was usually a granola bar on the train, eaten while he answered emails.

The bell over the door jingled as he stepped inside, and the place smelled like bacon and burnt coffee. A waitress with a gray bun and a pencil behind her ear pointed him toward a booth by the window.

He ordered pancakes, two eggs, bacon, hash browns, and orange juice. The waitress wrote it all down with one eyebrow raised. Her name tag read Ruth.

He set his phone face-down on the table and slid it to the far edge.

“Not a rule, just a tip,” Hammock offered. “Chew slowly. Taste things. I know that’s a new idea for you.”

Evan nearly answered out loud before he caught himself and clamped his mouth shut.

“Oh, you can just think at me, Host. I can hear you. You think very loudly.”

Great, Evan thought. That’s not creepy at all.

“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”

The pancakes came out stacked three high with butter melting down the sides. Evan put a forkful in his mouth, and his eyes slid shut. It was warm and sweet, and he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten something hot that he didn’t microwave.

He chewed slowly and looked out the window. A man was walking a fat brown dog, and a kid was dragging a scooter up the curb. He had lived on this street for three years and had never noticed the yellow flowers in the window box across the road.

The phone buzzed against the table.

Evan’s hand twitched toward it after six years of answering every call on the first ring.

“Your call, Host,” Hammock murmured. “Pick it up and the mission ends, and so does the hundred and fifty thousand.”

It buzzed again, and then a third time. The vibration rattled the salt shaker.

Evan knew that pattern, Gordon always called three times in a row when he wanted something fixed. He pulled his hand back and wrapped it around his fork.

He took Chloe, Evan thought, staring at the back of the phone. He took my job in front of everyone, and now he’s calling me for help. I waited six years, he can wait thirty minutes.

“Now that’s the spirit. Eat your eggs.”

Evan was still glaring at the phone when Ruth came back with his card on a little plastic tray. She set it down and stayed where she was.

“Your card was declined, hon.” Ruth tapped the tray with her pencil.

Evan looked up. “That’s not possible. I just—” He stopped.

“I tried it twice.” Ruth said it loud enough that the two old men at the counter turned around on their stools. “It says your account’s frozen.”

Heat climbed up the back of Evan’s neck.

The deposit, he thought. Somebody froze it.

The bank had probably texted him, and the text was sitting on a phone he had promised not to touch for another eleven minutes.

The man in the stained apron behind the register looked up. “Is there a problem, Ruth?”

“His card’s no good, Sal,” Ruth called back, without lowering her voice.

Sal wiped his hands on his apron and walked over. He was big, and he stopped right at the end of the booth with his hand out. “The bill is twenty-two fifty. You got cash?”

Evan pulled out his wallet and found a ten, four ones, and a bus pass. He laid the bills on the table one at a time while Sal watched each one land.

“That’s fourteen dollars.” Sal folded his arms over his apron. “You’re short.”

One of the old men at the counter chuckled into his coffee.

“Stress is at thirty-eight percent,” Hammock reported. “Now forty. Just a weather update.”

Evan unbuckled the watch his mother had given him for graduation and set it beside the bills. “Keep this. I’ll be back within the hour with the rest, or I’ll wash dishes until it’s covered.”

Sal picked up the watch and turned it over in his thick fingers. “I got a dishwasher. I need eight fifty.”

“Then let me call my bank.” Evan kept his voice level. “They can sort it out in five minutes.”

“Then call ’em,” Sal grunted, and he didn’t move from the end of the booth.

Evan’s eyes went to the phone. His fingers lifted off the table.

It was eight dollars and fifty cents against a hundred and fifty thousand, and he knew exactly how that math came out. His hand hovered over the case for a long second before it curled back into a fist beside his plate.

Sal followed his look to the face-down phone and back again, his eyebrows climbing. “You scared of your own phone, kid?”

“Little bit,” Evan admitted.

The bell over the door jingled.

“I’ve got it,” a woman’s voice called from the doorway, slightly out of breath.

Tessa Moore walked straight to the booth with her planner under one arm and her coat still buttoned wrong. She pulled a ten from her purse and set it on top of Evan’s bills. “Keep the change.”

Sal looked at the money, grunted, set the watch back beside Evan’s plate, and went back to his register. Ruth picked up the tray and gave Evan a small, crooked smile on her way past.

Evan stared up at Tessa with his throat closed tight. He pushed his fourteen dollars across the table toward her, and his ears went hot all over again.

“You didn’t have to do that.” His voice came out rough. “I’ll pay you back today. I swear.”

“You bought my coffee every Monday for two years.” She slid into the seat across from him. “Your roommate said you’d be here. He also said you were yelling at your ceiling this morning.”

“It’s been a strange day,” Evan muttered, rubbing the back of his neck.

“It’s about to get stranger.” She opened her planner, pulled out a folded sheet of paper, and flattened it on the table between his plate and the syrup. “I pulled the edit log after you left.”

Evan read it. His file had been saved at 4:12 a.m. under his login, then opened again at 6:52 a.m. and saved twice.

The user name on both saves was G.Pratt.

Evan’s fingers went cold around the edge of the page. He folded it in half and left damp prints on the paper.

“He’s been calling everyone all morning.” Tessa leaned in and lowered her voice. “Hartwell’s lawyers want the original file, and he can’t open your backup folder. He needs your password.”

The phone buzzed again, three times in a row.

“He’s not getting my password.” Evan flattened the page under his palm. “Keep that log, Tessa. In ten minutes, I’m sending Hartwell’s lawyer the original file myself.”

Tessa’s pen stopped. “You have it?”

“I mailed it to myself at the office this morning.” His mouth twitched. “The guard was reaching for my keyboard when I hit send.”

Her eyes widened, and then a slow, startled smile pulled at her mouth. “You sneaky man.”

A new gray box flashed across Evan’s vision and hung in the air above the syrup bottle. Tessa’s eyes passed right through it.

[Bonus Mission offer: Ignore Gordon Pratt completely for 7 days, with no calls, texts, or meetings. Reward: $2,000,000. Accept?]

Evan’s breath stopped.

He had already planned to never answer that man again. Now somebody was offering to pay him for it.

He looked at the phone buzzing its way toward the edge of the table, and he looked at the number again. A man who wanted a fight would be starved of one, and the file would do the rest.

Accept, he thought.

The bell over the door jingled.

Tessa turned toward the sound. Her hand went flat on the planner and stayed there.

“Hale!” Gordon Pratt’s voice boomed across the diner. “There you are.”