Chapter 2
Chapter Two
ALIX
Alix Wolf believed two things to be constant: bad tattoos aged better than bad relationships, and beer always tasted colder and better in a dive bar.
The jukebox at The Hollow was broken again, stuck cycling between Blondie and Black Flag. Nobody seemed to notice or mind. The place smelled like stale beer and lemon cleaner, and the booths wobbled like they’d been rescued from a dumpster… which, knowing this bar, they probably had.
Alix leaned back against the cracked black vinyl booth seat, one boot hooked over the other, the toe of her Doc tapping against the sticky floor. Her pint glass left a ring of condensation on the table beside a sticky menu featuring vegan pizza and fried foods. She’d had worse Mondays.
“Tell me again why I let you drag me here?” Oscar asked, voice pitched just loud enough to compete with the punk song rasping through the blown speakers. He was all sharp cheekbones, with a sparse beard he was quite proud of growing in his few years on T.
“Because you love me,” Alix said, flashing him a grin that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “And because Tuesday clients are the worst. We’re doing early damage control.”
Across from them, Lola shoved her ridiculously hip and impractical bangs out of her face and snorted into her whiskey soda. “Says the Tuesday client whisperer? Half your tips come from those lonely rich moms who think you’re their therapist.”
Alix gave a lazy shrug, sleeve of tattoos catching the dim light.
A flaming skull winked beside a bouquet of roses, a scissor blade inked across her finger.
She loved the way strangers’ eyes got stuck on the contradictions — brutal and delicate, beautiful and dumb.
“I just like hearing about other people’s drama that has nothing to do with me. ”
Oscar groaned. “You mean exploiting sad ladies for rent money.”
“Tomato, tomahto.”
Her phone buzzed on the table. One glance at the screen, and her stomach did that stupid tilt thing she hated.
Kirstin
You up?
Of course. She tried to tamp down the simultaneous thrill and dread that accompanied seeing Kirstin’s name on her phone. Her former situationship that she just couldn’t seem to let slip into the past yet.
Lola leaned over before Alix could flip the phone face down. “Oh my God,” she said, eyes going wide. “Tell me that is not who I think it is.”
Alix tried her best deadpan. “Spam text. Probably about my car’s extended warranty.”
Oscar snorted, stealing the phone before she could snatch it back. He read the screen, slow and dramatic, then looked at her over the rim of his glasses. “You. Up. Alix, that’s not even original. I thought we staged an intervention. I thought we killed Kirstin off in season one.”
“She’s like a reboot.” Lola groaned. “Nobody asked for it, but there she is, back again, slightly worse than before.”
“First of all, ‘intervention’ is a strong word,” Alix muttered, reaching for her beer instead of the phone. “Second of all, it’s none of your business.”
“Oh, it’s our business,” Lola said, slamming her whiskey down hard enough to splash. “I’ve had to listen to you complain about Kirstin for six months. Six! You said it was over.”
“It is over,” Alix said, steeling her face into neutrality.
Oscar raised his brow. “Over, except for when it’s not?”
“Over, except for when I’m… bored,” Alix shot back, grinning even as her cheeks warmed.
She hated how transparent she was with them.
They saw through every bluff, every cocky shrug.
She could joke about it, but part of her knew it wasn’t just boredom that had her answering Kirstin’s late-night texts or keeping people at arm’s length.
It was habit. It was safety. It was easier to laugh than to admit how much of her still lived in that quiet space between wanting to be chosen and knowing she probably wouldn’t be.
“Girl,” Lola groaned, throwing herself dramatically against the booth. “You need a hobby that isn’t bad tattoos or worse exes.”
“That’s a low blow,” Alix said, raising her middle finger tattooed with a scissor like it was proof of dignity instead of the exact opposite.
Oscar shoved her phone back across the table. “Delete Kirstin. Or I will. Hand it over.”
Alix laughed, flipping her phone face down. “Relax, Dad. I’m not texting back.”
Before either of them could argue, her phone buzzed again.
Both Oscar and Lola lunged for it. Lola got there first, nearly sloshing her whiskey all over the table as she grabbed it. “If that’s Kirstin, I’m blocking her myself—”
She froze, then tilted her head. “Huh. You have a new Breakup Buddy.”
Alix snatched the phone back, frowning at the screen. A fresh message lit up from someone with the screen name GoGatorsESQ.
GoGatorsESQ
Heartbreak connoisseur? Does that mean you’re an expert at curing or causing?
Oscar leaned across the table, smirking. “Sounds like trouble.”
Lola rolled her eyes. “Good thing Alix collects trouble like other people collect houseplants. Except hers don’t die, they just text her at two in the morning.”
Alix ignored them, tipping back the last of her beer while her thumbs flew.
She didn’t even have to think about the reply — it spilled out easily, the way her best lines always did with a little liquid confidence.
She called herself Charon, the ferryman who transported souls into the underworld, but made a sly reference about steering poor souls out of hell.
It was a stretch, but it was also an easy way to sus out if the woman she was talking to was smart enough to volley a little intelligent banter.
She grinned to herself as she hit send, almost picturing the look on GoGatorsESQ’s face.
Oscar groaned. “Oh God. You’re flirting with someone who likes gators. Do you think they even have all their teeth?”
“I’m not flirting,” Alix said, sliding her phone away. “I’m… mythologizing.”
“Same thing,” Lola muttered. “At least the ESQ implies them being a lawyer.”
“What? How?” Oscar asked.
“Esquire,” Lola said by way of explanation.
“Isn’t that, like, a magazine?” Oscar looked between Alix and Lola, clearly not understanding.
“It’s a good thing you’re so handsome,” Lola cooed, reaching to ruffle Oscar’s hair.
By last call, she was loose-limbed and grinning, Docs scuffing against the pavement as she tugged her longboard from where it had been leaning just inside the front door of the bar.
The ride home was only a few blocks, the Silver Lake streets mostly quiet at this hour, the air finally cool after a fall day that had baked the city.
She pushed off, wheels humming, phone buzzing again in her pocket. The night wrapped around her — neon bleeding into shadow, wind stinging her cheeks, the kind of small freedom that made everything else fall away.
By the time she coasted up to the cracked walkway of her little bungalow, her buzz had thinned to a warm hum.
The place looked half-asleep under the porch light — peeling paint, sagging gutters, the swing creaking in the breeze.
Inside, her roommate, Phyllis, was probably already tucked in with her crossword puzzles and a cup of chamomile.
Alix dropped her board against the steps and sank onto the swing, the chain groaning as it took her weight. She dug her phone out, thumb hovering over the BB chat.
Scissorsaurus
What about you, Gator? Has one stupid Julie really ruined your belief in love?
She stared at the blinking cursor a second longer before hitting send.
The question hung heavier than she meant it to.
The phone buzzed in her palm.
GoGatorsESQ
Right now? I believe in it about as much as I believe that a quarter will keep me from spending eternity as an aimless ghost.
Alix huffed a laugh, low in her throat. Dark humor. Melodramatic. Exactly her kind of bait.
The front door creaked open behind her. Phyllis poked her head out, silver hair sticking up in tufts, glasses sliding down her nose. “Did you get locked out again?”
Alix smiled faintly. “No. Just… relaxing.”
Phyllis gave her a long, skeptical once-over, then waved her inside with the imperiousness of a queen dismissing a subject. “Well, come on. It’s past midnight, and you’ll wake up with a crick in your neck.”
Alix followed her in, boots clomping against the worn wood floor before she toed them off by the door. The bungalow smelled faintly of lavender and old books. She mumbled a good night and walked to her room, the quiet pressing close once Phyllis’s door clicked shut.
The next morning, she woke tangled in yesterday’s clothes, her phone glowing dully beside her on the sheets. The unsent quip she’d drafted — Then I guess it’s a good thing I’ve got pockets full of change — blinked back at her like a dare.
She sighed, deleted it, and opened the chat fresh.
She’d been a little looser than normal with a few beers in her system the night before, and Breakup Buddies wasn’t a hookup app.
Lola and Oscar had given her plenty of shit for having the app at all, but they’d also given her way more grief hearing about Kirstin, and before her, Nicki.
Breakup Buddies had been a lifeline in a dark time when she’d had no one else to help her out of the deep, dark hole of heartbreak.
And after Kirstin’s unanswered text from last night — and the resounding jolt just seeing Kirstin’s name had sent through her — it seemed she wasn’t as far enough away from heartbreak as she’d once thought.
Alix used to think she just didn’t have the wiring for love.
Not in some tragic way, just the practical truth of it.
She always found herself with people who saw her steadiness as a service.
They leaned, she held. They drifted, she steadied.
Kirstin was the clearest example of that: sharp as glass, magnetic, and allergic to being known.
The kind of woman who drew a crowd without trying, who made ordinary things feel curated just by standing near them.
Alix had been proud to be one of hers until she realized she’d stopped being a person and become a prop.
Kirstin’s apartment always smelled like Diptyque candles and takeout.
The walls were white, the furniture minimal.
Everything about Kirstin had been curated.
Alix would come by after a long day at the salon, hands still faintly sticky with hairspray, thoroughly wrecked and tired, to find Kirstin cross-legged on the couch with her laptop open.
“You’re so good with people,” Kirstin would say, eyes still on the screen.
It always sounded like a compliment until the next part came: “It’s almost like you’re desperate for everyone’s approval.
” The remark landed like a bruise. By the time they argued, it was never about what was wrong, it was about how Alix had said it.
Kirstin had a way of making her feel dramatic for wanting things that were, by any measure, human.
Alix kept trying to be the version of herself that Kirstin might actually stay for, less earnest, less soft.
Every time Kirstin called her sentimental, Alix learned to laugh.
Every time she swallowed what she wanted to say, she told herself it was maturity.
Kirstin gave affection like tips at a restaurant: small, inconsistent, always enough to keep Alix hoping.
That kind of slow hunger did strange things to a person.
It made you mistake survival for devotion.
Scissorsaurus
Morning, Gator. Has the new day brought more clarity? Or are we still like Sisyphus, rolling the same damn rock uphill?
The reply came fast.
GoGatorsESQ
Depends. Is it clarity if you say the boulder’s just part of the décor?
Alix smirked, thumbs moving before her brain could catch up.
Scissorsaurus
Only if you’re into tragic interior design.
She hit send, rolled out of bed, and stumbled toward the blessed smell of coffee.
The day unraveled in flashes, Alix moving on autopilot through the salon’s chaos while her phone kept tugging at her like a second heartbeat.
Mid-morning, as she angled her razor through a client’s shaggy layers, her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She smiled to herself, all anticipation and intrigue, but waited to check her phone until the woman left with a fresh cut, giving her a generous tip.
GoGatorsESQ
What’s worse: heartbreak hangover or martini hangover?
Scissorsaurus
Trick question. They’re the same thing. Except one doesn’t come with pizza at 2 a.m.
By lunch, she was perched on the back steps, biting into a burrito and thumbing out replies between messy bites.
Scissorsaurus
Okay, tell me about Julie.
GoGatorsESQ
Julie. A work colleague.
Scissorsaurus
Ah. The worst. You can’t escape them.
GoGatorsESQ
It’s like being haunted by a sexy ghost.
She snorted so hard she almost choked on rice. Oscar popped his head out the back door, gave her a look. “Who’s got you giggling like a teenager?”
“None of your business,” she said, shoving her phone into her pocket like it burned.
By late afternoon, bleach fumes clung to her skin, her fingertips cramped from holding scissors too long. Still, she checked her phone in the break room, three times. Nothing from Gator.
By closing time, the salon’s buzz had died down to a low hum. Alix slumped into a chair, scrolling back through the day’s thread of banter. Her body ached, but her chest hummed.
Then the final message lit her screen:
GoGatorsESQ
God, I hate texting on this stupid app. Here —
A phone number.
Alix’s lips curved slow and sharp, the kind of grin she usually reserved for a perfect haircut or a fresh tattoo needle. She copied the number, switched apps, and tapped out her first message.
Alix
Look at us, Gator. We’re like officially friends now.
She hit send, slid the phone into her pocket, and stood. She wasn’t naive enough to call it fate, but damn if it didn’t feel like the beginning of something exciting.