Chapter 1 #3
Except for me. “Hi, I know the promoter,” I said, and I tried to step around him.
He mirrored my movement and blocked me. “Are you on the list?”
“No, but I’m Dax Miststuck’s fiancée. I really am,” I promised, nodding hard.
I held up my hand to show off the ring that I had returned to my finger.
It sparkled a lot even in this low light, and that was because there were just so many stones.
The setting was a mound of what I’d thought were diamonds—they really could have been diamonds, if the jeweler today had made a mistake.
This ring was so large and so heavy that I’d been shocked when I’d first flipped open the box and seen it.
“There you go,” Dax had told me. “You got what you wanted and now you’ll shut up, right? Camille, don’t get pissed again! I don’t have time to deal with your shit.” He’d left to meet a friend and I’d carefully given myself a manicure so that I could take pictures to show everyone.
“Nice ring,” the bouncer said now, but he wasn’t really looking. “What’s your name?”
“Camille Carpenter,” I told him.
“Ok, sure.” He flicked open his phone.
“That’s really my name. Camille Ursula Carpenter.” I started to dig for my license before realizing that he didn’t care. He hummed under his breath as he tapped and scrolled.
“No, I don’t see you on here,” he told me.
“Dax didn’t know I was coming…” I stood on my tiptoes and by doing so, I got a glimpse of his screen before he closed it. “Wait a minute! You were looking at a weather app, not a guest list for the VIP,” I accused him.
“Sweetheart, I’m not letting you in there,” he told me.
“Don’t call me sweetheart!” I didn’t feel like anybody’s sweetheart, and especially not the man who wasn’t letting me confront my fiancé about the diamond simulants I might have been wearing on my finger.
“I have to talk to Dax. It’s an emergency.
” It absolutely was. Because, if that jeweler had been right and these were spurious or strass or pieces of phony crap—however you wanted to call it, if my fiancé had lied to me about my engagement ring, then I was going to have to do something drastic.
This wasn’t just about diamonds. I hadn’t wanted something so big and fancy, so over-the-top sparkly and ostentatious.
Even if it wasn’t my style, though, it was a symbol and it represented something, and maybe there was an explanation for what the jeweler had told me.
That was what I needed to know, and I needed to know it right now.
Right now! “It’s an emergency!” I repeated, and I had forgotten to keep my accent out of the words.
It was easy to hear it with the volume I’d used.
“Yeah, ok. Text him, then.”
No, because if I did, Dax would get mad and refuse to come talk. He didn’t like it when I showed up places as a surprise.
“Please,” I said. “Please?”
The man didn’t answer and he didn’t move himself out of my path.
He didn’t care about my problem, which was obvious since he continued humming and then he started quietly singing some words, too.
We stood there with the music pumping for the empty dance floor and it was so stupid that I wanted to scream.
Maybe I hadn’t been angry before, but now I was. Now I really was, at this guy.
“Listen to me,” I started to tell him, but he turned his gaze away from me and frowned.
“Ah, Jesus Christ on a cracker.”
Dax was just walking through a door in the side of the VIP area that had been disguised as part of the black, leather-covered wall. A woman also emerged behind him. She delicately dabbed her mouth with her fingertips and then turned her head and spat on the floor.
My fiancé was zipping up his fly.
“What?” I asked. “What?”
Even with the music, I was loud enough that Dax heard me. He looked up and I couldn’t see his eyes due to the sunglasses he wore, but I did see the snarl that transformed his mouth. There was enough light for me to read his lips as he said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
The bouncer stepped in front of me again. “Camille Carpenter, let’s get going.” He started herding me with his body, moving me away from the VIP. “Go, go,” he urged. He bumped me with his chest and I stumbled.
“What is he doing?” I tried to see around this person who was separating me from my fiancé. That was right, he was my fiancé! “What was Dax doing with another woman?”
“Camille!”
The man stopped herding when we both heard my name. The volume of the music seemed to drop, so the DJ might have spotted that something interesting was happening at the VIP. “What the fuck are you doing here?” Dax repeated as he stomped over to me.
“I saw you closing your zipper,” I answered.
The bouncer stepped away as my fiancé grabbed my arms. “Camille, nothing is happening.”
“Why were you with that woman? What were you doing?”
“Nothing,” he told me. “She’s a bartender here. We were talking about inventory—”
“She wasn’t wearing a uniform.” I had noticed, because her dress was even shorter and tighter than what I had on. “Why were you zipping your pants?”
“I just went to the john,” he told me.
He still wore the huge sunglasses, but I happened to glance at the bouncer who towered behind him. I could see his entire face and I realized that he looked like he was going to laugh.
Something in me seemed to crack. I felt it like a real pain and I put my palms over my chest where it hurt the most.
“Don’t get like this. Not again,” Dax said. He huffed, huh, like he was angry at my reaction. He always said that I blew things out of proportion.
I looked down at my hands and saw the ring there. “This is fake,” I said. “This isn’t real.”
“What?”
The DJ had stopped the music entirely and I knew that Dax had heard me. “My engagement ring is set with diamond simulants,” I said louder. “My earrings are paste. My gold bracelet isn’t gold, it’s yellow metal. It’s all fake.”
“What?” he repeated. Now the features of the bottom half of his face, below the rims of the big glasses, showed outrage. “That’s not true!”
I nodded. It was true, and the truth was that it was phony. All of this.
“Then I got robbed!” he blustered. “Do you know how much that shit cost?” He pointed at my hand, still covering my chest. That rose and fell very quickly because I was panting like I was back on the treadmill, when my ring had flung across the gym and had briefly been lost. It came off so easily then, and it also did now. I slid it free of my finger.
“This is a lie,” I told him. “This a lie that came from a liar. But I believed you. I believed you!” I held the little circle of fake gems in front of his sunglasses.
“Camille, calm do—”
I threw it as hard as I could. Then I slapped Dax and his sunglasses flew sideways. Suddenly, blood dripped down his face.
“Bitch, what did you do?” a woman screeched, and I saw her launch herself at me. But when I opened my eyes, I was safe.
“Ah, Christ.” The big bouncer had grabbed her right out of the air.
“No way, Deb. You’re done.” He carried her away, but I wasn’t paying attention to them.
I looked at the huge scratch on Dax’s cheek where the sunglasses had cut him and made a jagged, red line.
Those glasses now hung from his ear and his mouth hung open, because he’d been momentarily stunned.
I’d never, ever done that to him—I’d never, ever done that to anyone!
I started to reach for his face to help him, which was a habit after our nine years together.
He grabbed my arm and pushed it away. “Get out of here,” he yelled. “We’ll deal with this at home. Get the fuck out of here.”
“What?” I gasped, and I watched him walk away. “Dax, wait!” I started to follow, but an arm caught me around the waist.
“No, you’re done, too. I knew this would happen. God damn it, quit fighting.”
I was suddenly up in the air with my feet dangling. One of the shoes that Dax had picked for me fell off my foot as I kicked. “Stop it! Put me down, immediately!” I ordered, but the big bouncer just carried me toward the exit. The doorman opened it for him.
He finally set me on the sidewalk in front of Chateau Moderne, where I tilted again. This time it was because I wore only one high heel. “Get going before Deb comes out,” he told me. He helpfully pointed up and down the sidewalk to signal the directions that I could choose. “Now.”
“I didn’t mean to hit him!”
“Police don’t care whether you mean it or not. Are you hurt or something?”
I shook my head, but tears still poured down my face. “I think he was having oral sex with that woman,” I gasped.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“He gave me a fake ring,” I said, and I held up my left hand to show the pale circle around my finger. “He was lying all along.”
“Yeah, no…” He stopped. “Do you have somewhere to go?”
I tried to wipe away tears with the backs of my hands. “What?”
He repeated himself and then added, “Do you live together? Is he going to kick you out when he gets home?”
I gulped and tried not to sob. “It’s my home. I mean, it’s my apartment. Only my name is on the lease because his credit isn’t great. He made poor decisions for a few years.”
“Does he have a key to the place? Keep him out, because he’s going to be pissed. You cut him up really good and he’s careful with his face.” He ran his hand, which was the size of my old softball glove, over his own cheeks.
“You know Dax?”
“Yeah, we all know him. You better leave.”
“I want him out,” I said. “I want him gone. I don’t want him and his dumb sunglasses in my apartment again!”
“You broke those, so you don’t have to worry about it.”
“I want him out,” I repeated. “I’m done. It took me this long but I finally see what everyone else did. My parents hate him. My ninety-six-year-old grandma once said that she wished for his death and she meant it, too. My friends in college, my friends in law school—”
“You’re a lawyer?” He sounded doubtful. “Sweetheart, you’ve got to get out of here. Now.”
“Don’t call me that! I’m done with being anyone’s sweetheart,” I told him. I shook my head and tried to think of what I should do about this, and I did come up with an idea…it involved this large bouncer. “How much for your services?” I asked.
He eyed me. “For you, no charge. I’m off at two. You said you have an apartment, but I don’t want to deal with that asshole bothering us. Once I strip, I’m not in the mood to fight.”
“Strip…” I stared at him.
“I can keep my shirt and shoes on, if you don’t mind that. Most women get offended.”
“What…oh, no! I wasn’t asking you to come over for sex. I’m not going to have sex with you!”
“No? Then what the hell do you want?”
I told him, and he did agree. And as for Dax? I wiped more tears from my cheeks. Those were the last ones, because I was going to stop crying over him. He wasn’t worth it.