How to Not Fall for a Stalker (Certified Poor Decisions #2)

Chapter 1 Leo

Leo

I hate Friday nights. I truly hate them.

They are the worst. Especially when you own a fucking sports bar.

Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to own one?

Oh yeah, the guy who has yet to show up for his shift.

I swear when Kai gets here... I am going to murder him.

I am going to cut him into pieces and feed him to the customers as a side dish for their beer.

He will be a fucking delicacy. That will teach him a lesson to not skip his damn shift next time.

I take a deep breath and remember that my therapist usually doesn’t approve of those types of thoughts.

I try to count.

I inhale... “One.”

Stupid Kai and his tendency to disappear...

I exhale and inhale again.

“Two.”

I breathe out the second number.

This is not working, my therapist was wrong those tools are useless...

I push myself through the last round. I inhale, hold for a few seconds, and then exhale again.

“Three.”

How the hell am I more mad than when I started using this method to control my anger? Like Jesus fucking Christ, am I that bad at therapy? Can you fail therapy? What happens if you do? Does your therapist fire you? Can they fire you?

I try to direct my thinking into a more positive direction.

I can bury him in a freshly opened grave at the local graveyard; they probably won’t figure out he is there until he is too rotten to identify.

With some luck, I will be able to get away with it.

What am I even thinking about? I am not killing my best friend. I need him. He pays half the bills.

I should find someone to own half the bar first and then kill him.

See? That’s a good plan! A great plan even.

Therapy is working after all. I just need to find a fool to own a bar that is barely open at this point, and then kill the fool who caused the business to be barely open in the first place.

Solid plan. My therapist will be proud. I am doing the work, controlling my anger, fixing shit.

I am fucking winning in therapy. This is good. I am doing good.

“Hey Melanie, do you want to own half a bar?”

I yell to our waitress, who’s standing next to me, pretending she is cleaning.

She is not, in fact, cleaning, but I pretend not to notice.

I am a good boss. She gives me the middle finger and continues wiping the same spot.

Your loss, Melanie; this bar is doing great.

If you don’t count the debt hole we keep digging ourselves into, or the fact that we are one impulse decision away from losing it.

A fact that I keep to myself, because Kai doesn’t deal well with problems. It’s the reason I am in charge of our finances. He is too reckless to be trusted.

I will admit, though, murder plotting is kind of a dark way to think; my therapist has a point, especially if you’re like me. The person who is usually the voice of reason. Kind of, when I am not spiraling, at least. I will admit I have my issues. A lot of them.

Some of them even go back to my childhood, but I am working through it.

Even if I have darker thoughts, I would never actually go through with them.

I am already being eaten alive by the guilt of my past actions.

I am the definition of that saying about the dog that is all bark and no bite.

I am a fucking chihuahua in a doberman’s suit, pretending I can be anything but what I am currently am.

Which is not much to begin with. At least I am not a criminal, not anymore.

Not in the actual sense of the word. More criminal in mind.

I turned my life around. I own a bar. I pay my taxes. I don’t kill people. Anymore.

Kai, my best friend and business partner, for now, at least, is the guy that you’d expect to commit a crime.

Not me. I am the good one. He is the guy who is unfit to be an emergency contact because eleven out of ten times he is the emergency.

While I am the guy who will run to his rescue.

Seriously, I mean it. This guy is a fucking menace.

He should be supervised all hours of the day and night, because explain to me why this man makes his worst decisions during nighttime?

As if we don’t have enough problems already.

Who goes through a ten-hour shift and, when it ends, decides, ‘now it’s time to get in trouble’?

What happened to grabbing a beer and rotting on the couch with a good book or a movie?

Not that Kai reads. He doesn’t. Closest to reading, my friend has come in all the years I know him is reading a label at the back of a cleaning product because he already used it the wrong way.

If he even bothers with that. Most times, this man uses products as he pleases, with hopes and dreams of a good result, and then complains if they don’t do the job right, even if it isn’t the product’s issue but entirely a Kai issue.

He is chaos wrapped in muscles and blue hair.

From fucking strangers to having their spouses come knocking at our door because the asshole forgot to ask if the woman was married, or he simply didn’t care.

To even restraining orders because Kai, the fucking chaos demon he is, had to stalk his ex-girlfriend to the point where the poor girl moved out of the country, changed her name, and got a restraining order.

You can easily screw up a relationship, but screwing it up to the point where your partner moves to a different country in order to get away from you is another level of skill that I personally would never like to possess.

Trust me when I say that out of the two of us, Kai is the guy we keep a bail money fund for.

Which also makes it the reason I am half pissed and half worried that we are going to need it the more time it passes with no Kai showing up.

I check my phone again; no missed calls, that’s at least a good sign.

If he were dead, I would have gotten a call to pick up his dead ass from the morgue by now.

The police haven’t come by the bar yet either, which is also a good sign.

And I didn’t get a call from him from a holding cell, so we probably can rule out a crime spree from the list of things Kai is probably up to right now.

Unless he hasn’t gotten caught yet. Fuck.

No. Don’t go there. He is probably fine.

He has already gotten into trouble twice this month.

He is sure having a break from dumb decisions.

It’s fine. He is fine. Everything will be fine.

That’s at least the lie I will keep telling myself.

Because at this point, I am one inconvenience away before I give up and move to a cave.

I can live off the land, raise animals, meet a nice cave lady.

Do those exist still? Probably not. Most women wouldn’t live in a cave in this century.

Maybe a cave man. I can’t be the only one wanting to leave everything behind and become one with nature.

Fuck. Now I sound like an insane hippie.

This spiral of doom needs to end. Where the fuck are you, Kai? I am going insane here.

I try counting again.

I inhale. “One.”

I exhale and inhale again.

“Two.”

What the fuck do you want?

The man in front of me keeps waving his hand as if I don’t see him.

I exhale, and now my anger has doubled.

This is not working.

Does he really think I can’t see him? I do see him.

He is kind of hard to miss. Dude is built like a brick decorated with doodles that I am pretty sure it is prison ink.

At least that’s what the rumors about him say.

I can see him very clearly, tattoos, muscles, and all.

I simply choose to ignore him until I am done filling the shots for the group in the back.

The same group who has been hitting on Melanie, my lifeline at the moment, since they came in.

It’s only nine in the evening, for fuck’s sake, yet somehow those assholes are already drunk.

I hate owning a fucking bar. Living off the land does sound great at the moment.

I could even get a pet ferret. I have always wanted one of those wild animals, borderline illegal, as a pet.

Any animal would be great, but an illegal one would be perfect.

Kai, though, only likes dogs, and both of us don’t have enough time to run after a puppy.

I should probably sell the stupid bar and do something else with my life.

Anything else. I can start a spicy account online.

Kai already has the equipment for it. Of course he thinks I don’t know about it, as if it’s that hard to guess why the damn basement at his family house that he owns is always locked.

We stayed in that house for almost two years, and yet I was never allowed down there.

Never. I am still not allowed in the fucking basement.

It’s ridiculous. What is more ridiculous is that Kai has yet to show up for his shift, and now we are closer to the time we need to close down than to our opening hours.

Yet... still no Kai. I hope he is dead because that’s the only excuse I will accept at this point.

Honestly I am pretty sure if I don’t kill him, Melanie will.

She has been asking where he is every twenty minutes, and every time she has a snarky comment to add to my answer.

I don’t blame her. She is not a fan of Kai, and with a good reason.

It happens when your business partner has a habit of fucking the waitresses and never calls them back.

We are lucky enough this one stuck around.

Before she came to work with us, we used to have a new girl every shift that we needed help.

Which usually is our busy game nights. We had made the decision to get help only on game nights because no one wanted to stay long term, but we still needed help, and this was the closest to a compromise we could get.