Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Clay
Mellow, high Louisa Gallo slips into morose Louisa Gallo before the bar closes. She doesn’t bother with the clean-up and instead drops into a booth and spends twenty minutes spinning a coaster.
All this because her ex-boyfriend came back to town. Anger toward that useless fuck of a man concentrates in my hands as I furiously wipe down the bar. I want to destroy him. Take apart his life piece by piece while he watches, helpless.
He’s just another shitty man who deserves to be buried by the consequences of his actions. He shouldn’t even be a thought in her head.
Fuck it. I toss the cloth aside—clean-up can wait until morning.
Louisa glances up at me when I plunk a bottle of bourbon and a jar of maraschino cherries on the table in front of her, along with two rocks glasses filled with ice.
She doesn’t object when I slide into the booth across from her and pour us each a drink.
Four cherries for her. I skewer them with two cocktail picks and drop them in her drink.
None for me. I’m giving them up. She watches me like she knows. There’s sadness in her deep brown eyes.
“What would you do if you had a million dollars?” I ask. I’ll leave her a million when I go.
“Only a million?” she asks with an abrupt laugh. “Why not ten?”
I hold my breath. That’s rather specific. Suspiciously so. Has Louisa been up in the apartment on her own?
“Why not one hundred?” she continues with a wan smile.
I exhale. Her jump—one to ten to one hundred—is logical, not suspicious. “Why not ten, then?”
She’s quiet for a moment, swirling the loaded cocktail pick in the bourbon. When she finally brings the stick to her luscious lips and slides the first cherry into her mouth, I barely refrain from climbing over the table to see if I can take it from her before she can swallow.
Giving them up, I remind myself.
“I don’t want ten,” she finally says. “It’s too much.”
Why insist on more if she didn’t want it? I’m about to ask, but her gaze slides from the window to mine, and she smiles. It’s not like one of her other smiles. This one is small and a little insecure. I lean forward, needing to know. “What would you do with one million?” I ask again.
“I’d build a new home where Rita’s burned down.”
I lean back again and smile at the idea of Louisa choosing what color to paint her walls and filling her house with vintage junk. “A big log monstrosity like the ones on Haven Lake?”
She shakes her head. “Something just big enough for me. I don’t have family to visit outside of Travis, and I don’t want kids.”
“Just you? No partner or kids?” I examine the ice in my glass, relieved that she doesn’t want something I can’t and won’t give her, even though the point is moot since I’ll be leaving her. “How will you pass on Gallo’s and the curse?” I ask idly.
“Exactly. Both can die with me.”
A shudder runs through me—premonition maybe, of Louisa growing old alone. Gallo’s boarded up after she’s gone.
It won’t happen. She’s a romantic realist, after all.
She’ll meet someone. It won’t be me, but there has to be someone out there who can tolerate her cherry addiction and put up with her sass.
Someone who will appreciate those deep red lips and her sharp edges, who will build a cottage on her lake and respect her desire to remain childfree.
“All those romance novels upstairs suggest otherwise.”
Her head tilts, her brows drawing together. “You’re actually reading them, aren’t you?”
I’ve read two, but that’s two more than I have in my life, so I shrug.
She looks a little impressed, but her focus drops to the skewer she’s still toying with. “So you’re a lone wolf?”
“That’s the plan.” It’s served me well.
Up until now.
“Because everyone bores you.” She rolls her eyes. “The thought of settling down must be suffocating. No partner or kids in your future, either.”
Not everyone bores me or makes me feel like suffocating, it turns out.
“I’ve had the snip,” I casually inform her for absolutely no fucking reason.
God, why am I telling her this? I lean closer because now that I’ve started, I’m nowhere near done.
“It’s not just the risk of children, which I don’t want.
I’ve never gone without protection, despite the vasectomy.
In fact, you’re the first person I’ve gone down on without a condom or dental dam in place. ”
Her taste on my tongue was a need I’ve never experienced before.
Whether I like it or not—and I don’t—she’s the one for me.
I won’t act on my feelings or throw myself on the rusty sword of matrimony, but a part of me wants her to read the meaning behind what I just told her, to understand what she means to me.
Maybe the marijuana is still in her system. She blinks those thick black lashes at me for a solid five seconds, then says, “If I paid you a million dollars for sex, it would include testing so we could do it raw.”
Fuck.
Not only did she miss what I was saying entirely, but what do I say to that?
My cock is going hard at ‘we could do it raw’ and I can almost feel the tight grasp of her soaked pussy.
I take a large swallow of bourbon, and it goes down the wrong way.
I stifle the cough and choke instead, which at least distracts me from my cock.
Louisa shakes her head, a wry little smile on her lips. “I got tested after Hayden, by the way. The results were all negative, and I’ve had the HPV vaccine.”
“Good to know,” I manage to sputter.
“How does it work?” she asks abruptly. “Being an escort. Do you have a website or something? Is there an app?”
I clear the last of the drink from my lungs and push my glass away. That this is a safer line of conversation should be concerning. “I only accepted referrals from previous clients if they met my criteria and terms.”
“Apart from Kristen.”
“We’ve already discussed her and my reasons,” I say, waving the teacher off.
Louisa mimics my dismissal with a hand gesture of her own, communicating that I should get on with it.
“Most of my clients have been professionals in Vegas on business or to let loose. Sometimes they’d want me to attend a function as a boyfriend or a friend.
I’d take them out to dinner, to a show, the club, or a casino—whatever they’re interested in during the time they contract with me.
Officially, they paid for my company and conversation. ”
“Oh god,” she says with a look of mock-horror, “why?”
“I’m charming,” I insist.
She snorts.
“Any-way,” I say, giving her a warning look, “prostitution in Nevada is only legal in a few licensed premises in certain counties, so I wasn’t paid for sex.”
“Except you were?”
I nod. “Yes. I was paid a lot.”
“Did you like the job?”
“Obviously, I enjoy fucking.” I roll my eyes, but she merely tilts her head. I capitulate with a sigh. “I don’t see myself continuing in that line of work anymore.”
She nods. “Because you’re bored?”
I shrug. I was bored, but now the only person I want to fuck is sitting across from me, an unreadable look on her face as she sizes me up.
“Well?” I say when I can’t take the silence any longer. “What do you think about”—me—“my work history?”
She pokes at the ice in her glass with the empty cocktail pick. “I was with Hayden for six months. He cost me sixty grand, and I only got two dozen orgasms. I’m thinking I was ripped off.”
It’s not the answer I was looking for, but maybe it’s one I needed. It doesn’t matter what she thinks of me. “I’m surprised he gave you even that,” I admit.
“He had help,” she says with a sudden laugh and a wiggle of her fingers.
I envy that worthless prick. He had months to worship her before he threw it away. Even if he was clumsy and bad at sex, that’s more than enough time to learn how to play her body to perfection. Instead, he half-assed it. I hate him.
I top off my drink and barely resist the urge to drop a cherry in it. “So that fucker is back in town.”
She sighs and goes back to looking out the window. I doubt she can see beyond our reflections. There’s nothing out there but darkness. “Well, he’s not on his knees in front of me, so he’s not here to apologize or beg me to take him back.”
Surely she doesn’t want him back.
She had better not want him back.
“I can’t see him walking out of that conversation alive,” I say. My tone is a little cool, but I expect her to take the compliment and maybe preen a bit.
She glares out the window instead.
Fuck. I take a swig of my drink for courage. “Did you love him?”
Her glare swings my way, but after a moment, she drops her gaze. “No, but…before he fucked me over, I thought…” her voice trails off as she picks up her glass and examines it. “I thought I was happy enough.”
“You were going to settle.” I don’t mean to sound accusatory, but that’s how it comes out. This is the downside of a romantic realist approach to love. Bargaining with oneself. Looking for good enough because everything is as realistic as a fairy tale.
God, if I could give her everything, I would. But she deserves better than me, too.
She holds her glass out instead of confirming or denying, and I lift the bourbon to refill it. “You deserve better than settling for happy enough,” I grit out.
She flinches a little at the anger in my voice and takes a drink before setting the glass back down. “Maybe that’s as good as it can get. And anyway, it’s better than being alone.”
“Is it?”
“Definitely.” A smile slowly spreads across her face. “If I embraced my inner lone wolf like some people I know, I’d be so poorly socialized that I’d assume the best way to comfort a crying person was to blow in their face.”