Chapter 4
“I heard Theo Witherborne got arrested,” Bet said, sipping from her coffee cup.
She sat across the café table from me during our weekly check-in, to make sure I hadn’t gone off the deep end and needed to be fitted with an ankle monitor.
Bet had blonde hair shaved on one side, jaw length on the other, and tattoos peeked out from under her shirt at the collar and wrists. I’d never asked about her past, but I figured to do what she did, she must have lived experience of making huge mistakes and coming back from them.
I was still coming back from mine.
“I don’t know anything about that,” I said. “He just hitched a ride back from the pool gig, and wanted to crash on my couch. I let him, and then he was gone again. Nothing to it, really.”
She peered at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “You must be the only person alive who can turn a meeting with Theo Witherborne into something as boring as unpacking groceries.”
I chuckled at that. It had been three days since I’d kicked him out of my apartment. He’d been arrested that night, and was out by the following morning, lawyered up and using the experience for clickbait. #TooGlamToGiveADamn was still trending. His fan army had threatened to break him out of jail.
Between then and now, I’d spent too much time scrolling social media, glued to his drama, and had to force myself to block the apps a day ago.
My phone, face down on the table, buzzed. I ignored it.
“So, how are you doing, Owen?” Bet asked in her professional-sounding voice. The voice that meant she’d write down my answer.
“Well, the job’s going great, if I can keep it. Like you said, the Witherbornes are a lot. I’m hoping they just go back to ignoring me. I have a few more clients. It’s shaping up.”
A woman entered the café and looked my way. She caught my eye, as though she’d been searching for me specifically. I turned my face away, avoiding eye contact with the stranger, but she stared and started to come over, her smile growing.
Her smile grew with every step closer.
Did I know her?
“Be careful around them,” Bet said. “If it gets too hot, or if anything happens you’re not comfortable with, you should leave. There’ll be other pool clients.”
“Yeah.” I picked up my coffee cup to hide half my face from the woman who was almost at my table.
“Are you hashtag MurderMysteryMeetCute?” she asked, as though whatever she’d just said was a perfectly normal way to speak.
I blinked. “Am I murder-what?”
“MurderMysteryMeetCute? MaintenaceButMakeItHot? GoldenRetrieverEnergy?”
I gaped. I could hear words in her sentences, but it was like listening to a password generator talk. “Ma’am, I have no idea what you’re saying.”
Bet blinked at her too, then caught my eye. I shrugged.
“You’re Owen, right?” the woman asked.
“Uh, yeah, but—”
“Can I get a selfie?”
She scooped her arm around my shoulders, thrust a phone in front of my face, and took the picture. I barely had time to put my cup down.
What was happening? I turned my face away too late. The phone flashed.
“Wow, hashtag freckles, hashtag splashsnack.” She squealed. “You’re cute.” And then off she went, face in her phone, typing fast.
“What was that?” Bet asked.
“I have no idea.”
But inside, a seed of realization had been planted and began to sprout. I turned my phone over, flicked it open, brought my socials back online, and stared at the Instagram notification number. Three hundred and fifteen. “Oh . . . he didn’t.”
I opened IG and immediately got virtually mobbed. Reaction videos to a ship called #Thowen. A lot of girls screaming. Some guys too. Mailbox blow-up. Mentions off the charts. #FangsDeep. #Freckles #Splashsnack #MinimumWageMaximumTrauma. That last one. Wow.
“Uh, Bet . . . I have to go.”
“What is it?”
“Oh, you know, a thing . . . Just a thing I have to deal with.”
I found the original post on Theo’s account.
A quick video of him climbing into the back of a car at night.
“Shout out to my pool guy.” Theo’s sly smile showed a bit of fang, the money shot.
“Owen helped me through it.” And then all the hashtags, implying I wasn’t just a pool guy he’d met that morning.
Implying a whole lot more. That’s where #Thowen had come from.
We’d been shipped. And now the internet had lost its collective mind.
Oh. Well. That was rude. Didn’t I get a say in these things?
He couldn’t just splash me all over the internet like that. I was going to have to have words with him.
But I didn’t have his number. I’d have to go over there.
This wasn’t right. And it wasn’t some innocent mistake.
He’d tagged me deliberately, dragging me into his orbit.
I’d told him to leave me out of everything, and he’d done the exact opposite.
Clearly, rich boy vampires did not know how to take no for an answer. And that was a problem.
“Owen?” Bet asked, her tone concerned.
“It’s fine. I just need to teach someone some manners.”
“Owen, what does that mean? Don’t do anything risky!”
I waved her off. “I’ll call you.”
Theo thought he had teeth, thought he could sink them in deep. #FangsDeep. But just because he happened to have money and influence, didn’t mean he could push me around.
I seethed the whole drive over, and by the time I pulled up at the Witherborne Mansion’s closed gates, it was late afternoon. The sun was still up. I had an hour before dusk. I’d go in, say what I had to say, and then get out of there.
But sitting at the gates, engine running, I didn’t move. Didn’t press the intercom. Kept my hands on the wheel
I needed this job. Needed it for a lot of reasons.
If I stormed in there and told Theo to back off, I risked him pulling the plug on my employment. And what would it achieve? I’d feel better. Lose my job. Be alone in my apartment, sadder, lonelier, poorer.
“Dammit.” I put the car in reverse, turned around in the drive, and headed home.
Tomorrow, I was due back to check the filters anyway. I’d go, ignore it all, like anything Theo could do wouldn’t touch me. When his antics didn’t get a rise out of me, he’d get bored and move on.
Yeah, that’s what I’d do. Show up for work tomorrow like nothing had happened. “Hashtag not bothered, asshole.”
Show up, do the work, go home.
Theo wasn’t on the lounger this time, so that was a win.
But the raging argument going on inside the house distracted me from the delicate work of balancing the filter flow rate.
From the snippets I caught, Geraldine wanted to host a party, Theo argued for waiting until the fallout from his arrest had died down, and Bentley wanted a pony.
I wasn’t sure on that last one. The closed, thick windows made it tricky to hear. But there was shouting, shattered glass, and slamming doors. Then quiet.
The quiet was worse.
Not my business.
Do not get involved.
Nothing to see here.
#NotBothered
While I’d been working other pools for the last few days, the cops had been in and messed with the filter.
They’d probably had it apart to sift for evidence.
Now, the elegant equipment needed more than my quick visit to recalibrate it all.
Apparently, the pool had been drained too.
So all my work to balance the water had literally gone down the drain.
The Witherbornes had clearly refilled it, but the water hardness was way off.
I needed hours to fix the mess, not the twenty minutes I’d scheduled for.
Who was I kidding? I didn’t have anywhere else to be. And I didn’t mind the pool. The pool was easy.
Twenty minutes into my visit, Geraldine opened the sliding doors and stepped onto the patio, under a newly installed sail-type shade.
She vaped aggressively, puffing out vapor like one of those wet steam-room hydrators.
Her gaze pinned me as I worked. Theo wasn’t scary—though Bentley clearly could be—but Geraldine set all my nerves on edge.
“You there, pool boy.”
“Yes, ma’am?” I straightened and shielded my eyes to squint across the pool at her.
“Why don’t you come over here a moment.”
It wasn’t a question, but I treated it like one. “I’m in the middle of a complicated strip-down of the filter here, ma’am, and I really need to concentrate, or I’ll never be able to reassemble the relevant pieces in the correct order.”
Her eyes narrowed. She took a drag of her vape. “What do you think I’m going to do? Hm? Do you think, because I’m a vampire, I can’t have a normal conversation with a pool boy without wanting to stick my fangs in your neck? That is highly racist, young man.”
I swallowed hard. “You’re right. Sorry, that was outta line.” Dayam. When she said it like that, I didn’t have much of a choice. I grabbed a towel, and while drying my hands, came around the end of the pool toward the shaded area she stood under.
Closer now, I could see how her skin had a marble-like gloss to it. I had no idea how old she was. At a distance, she didn’t look much over mid-forties, maybe. But the way her eyes drilled into my soul suggested she’d been around long before Florida was a state.
“What’s wrong with the pool that you’re taking so long?” she asked.
“The water is hard, acidity’s too high. It ideally needs correcting before anyone swims in it.”
“Oh,” she laughed a sharp, edgy sound. “We don’t swim in it, dear.”
Then why did they have a pool? I opened my mouth to ask, figured I really didn’t want to know, and closed it again. “I assume the water’s been changed since the whole . . . body incident?”
“Yes. I suppose we should have gotten you in for that. Leander did suggest it, but I’d already organized someone by then.”
“It’s fine.” The last thing I wanted to be doing was milling about somewhere the cops might come back to at any moment. Not that I had anything to hide. I didn’t. I’d done my time, and I was on the right path. The good-boy path. “It needs a few hours calibration, though.”
“Then you’ll be here a while.”
“A little while, yes.”
“Oh good, I’ll tell Theo. He’s been in an ungodly mood since you kicked him out of your apartment after he asked you for help.”