Chapter 3 #3
“It is. It’s a shitty song, but it’s catchy. He paid a lot to get it produced so quickly.”
“His business must be going better than I thought,” I said. “He never shared much about his finances.” I had argued that we would need to be totally open and transparent about everything before we got married but of course, we had never reached that point.
“The way I see it, you have two choices,” Mr. Flip Phone told me, and then he leaned back in his chair and stopped speaking.
“Yes? What are they?”
“Hold on, I just thought of two more. Ok, choice A,” he said. “You leave town in shame, but that seems unreasonable because I looked at the company you work for and I read your bio on their website. You have a good thing going there, so A is out.”
I nodded in agreement because I wasn’t going to leave my job! That was nutso.
“B. B is the obvious one,” he went on. “You ignore all this stupid, juvenile bullshit because it’s absolutely stupid, juvenile bullshit, but what else would you expect from a hairless monkey butt like that guy? Makes sense.”
“I don’t want to ignore it. I know Dax,” I reminded him. “When he doesn’t get attention, he just demands it louder. We got asked to leave a few restaurants because of that.”
“Sounds like the polite way to say, ‘We got kicked out on our asses,” he noted, and he was correct. My ex had been physically removed from a few establishments and had ended up on the sidewalk. “B is the best way to go. There’s also choice C, which is you hiring someone to kill him.”
“What?” I gasped.
“Maim him, then,” he suggested. “No?”
I was shaking my head and waving my hands, no, no, no. “Is that it? Are you out of suggestions?”
“There’s also choice D. I’m off at two AM.”
“What does that have to do with my final option?” Oh, no.
Was this really my final option? It sounded like the title of a movie: Final Option, the Camille Carpenter Story.
There wouldn’t be any cute scenes of me cooking with a handsome guy and making a mess, or the two of us kissing with gentle snow falling in the background.
Instead, the camera would show me sitting in the employee breakroom of a second-tier night club and expecting a near-stranger to provide the solutions to my life’s issues.
No, I couldn’t cry again.
“I get off at two and I have an idea that I can explain better then,” he clarified. “I can help you with this if you can help me with something in return. What do they say in that old movie? Quid pro quo, Camille.”
And that was it, all he would tell me. I kept asking but he was unwilling to share any additional information and anyway, one of his coworkers came in and told him to get back out on the floor because there was a fight.
I followed behind and watched him pick up one grown man in each hand and then remove them both from Chateau Moderne, without seeming to put in a lot of effort.
He resumed his position in front of the velvet rope and I stood in the bathroom hallway for another moment.
Then I made my way over to the bar and sat down, because there was plenty of room. Deb, the woman who’d been screwing my boyfriend, wasn’t here tonight but there were several others who looked very cute—and as I had just heard, he screwed everyone.
“On the house,” the male bartender told me, and put a drink on the bar top next to my purse.
“Pretty girl like you shouldn’t be crying alone on a Saturday night.
” Then he picked up his phone, saw something there, held up his hands, and took a step back.
“Damn, sorry. Sorry,” he repeated, and continued to move away.
I turned around, expecting to see Dax glaring because he had always been extremely protective when other guys even said hello to me.
Except he hadn’t minded when his friends got a little handsy.
My ex wasn’t there, though, and I only saw Stone, Mr. Flip Phone watching from across the room.
He nodded at me and I returned to my drink.
Dax had always called me a lightweight—the fact that I was a terrible drinker was in the rap about our relationship, how his job was a fun party but how I had always ruined it with my bad dancing, my inability to hold my liquor, and my general prissiness.
They had said it in a way that kind of rhymed, but that was the meaning.
I took a few tiny sips of the liquid and rested my chin in my hand.
Dax had complained about the crappy sound system at this club but the speakers kept pumping hard.
Thankfully, the DJ didn’t play the song that, according to Stone, was definitely about me…
and I believed him. So I had my own diss track.
Yes, some of the lines had a kernel of truth, but I hadn’t recognized the total picture of the woman that the lyrics had painted.
She was awful—was I that bad? I took more sips and put my head down on my folded arms.
“Hey. Did you pass out from one drink?”
“What?” I picked up my head, yawning. “No, I think I fell aslee—where’s my purse?” I looked around frantically but Mr. Flip Phone reached out his hand to the bartender, and that guy passed over the little bag I’d carried tonight. “Oh, thank you!”
“Check inside to make sure everything’s there,” Stone told me, and the bartender glared but I did and said it was fine.
“Is it really two o’clock already?” I asked, yawning. When was the last time I’d been up this late on purpose?
“It’s after two. You’ve been down for the count on the bar for a couple hours,” he said, and that explained the pain I felt in my neck. “Let’s go.”
I hopped off the stool. The room was empty besides me and some employees.
They were yelling back and forth and the house lights were on, but none of that had woken me.
“I haven’t been sleeping well lately,” I explained as we went to the sidewalk.
The summer morning felt much too cool so early, and I shivered. “What’s your plan?”
“We’ll head to my place. Is it supposed to rain today? I didn’t check any of the forecasts.” He stared into the dark sky. “Let’s go.”
But my paltry supply of street smarts also woke up and they waved a red flag about what he’d just said—not about rain, but the other part, how he’d wanted to head to his place. “Let’s go somewhere public,” I suggested instead.
“Like a city park with no one else around? Maybe a dark alley? An abandoned house? I kept track of you sleeping all that time and I’m not going to do anything bad to you now.”
In movies, this would have been the suspenseful moment where you would see that the woman was going to be an idiot and go with him. Was I that idiot? If something went wrong, who would be to blame? I heard the voice of my Contracts professor asking those questions in my mind.
Mr. Flip Phone stopped walking and looked down at me. “I’m not a bad guy, Camille.”
Maybe my street smarts had fallen back asleep like I wanted to, or maybe I just accepted his statement as fact because I wanted to believe that someone was decent. Maybe Stone really was, so I nodded and we set off again. “Where’s your car?” I asked.
“You can drive me home,” he said.
“Where’s your car?” I repeated.
“Where do they go to die? The scrapyard, right?”
“You don’t have one? Do the busses run this late?” I asked.
“I prefer to trick women into carting my ass around. No, I’m kidding,” he told me. “I can usually get a ride from the bartender, but he’s pissed at me.”
“Because you suggested that he stole something from my purse,” I said, nodding.
“He stole your credit card but I had already made him put it back before I woke you. I only told you to check your wallet as a reminder to both of you to be careful.” We’d arrived at where I’d parked and he bent to look into my passenger seat. “This is a lot cleaner.”
“All the stuff that was in here before didn’t belong to me,” I said.
My life was much emptier now. We got in, and he locked the doors before I remembered to.
“What’s your address?” I asked. I put the destination he gave me into my phone and it let me know that we were eighteen minutes away (but that was always wrong).
“This is a nice car,” he said, and I remembered that he’d liked it before, too.
“Thank you.”
“But it has an engine problem,” he noted. “Something’s happening so that it won’t go over twenty miles per hour.”
“I’m going twenty-three!” I protested. “What if someone suddenly jumped in front of me? I want to be able to stop, don’t I?”
“Yeah, all these people lining the street…” He turned his head and looked up and down the deserted sidewalks. “I can understand your worry.”
“Why don’t you write a rap about what a bad driver I am? Wait, someone already did.”
He laughed, and I hadn’t heard that before. It was a deep, rolling sound and I started to smile, which turned into another yawn. “All right,” he said, and the next time I looked over, he was asleep in the seat next to mine.
It was only twenty-seven more minutes before we arrived at our destination, the home of Stone, Mr. Flip Phone.