Round Seventeen
BILLY
Maggie:
She’s a preschool educator, lives in Barlespy, and is willing to travel to Plainview for the first date, with the assumption that if you guys hit it off and there’s a second date, you’d make the drive to her.
She technically doesn’t have any children, but her best friend is a single mom to a seven-year-old little girl, and all three of them live together to save on the cost of living.
Devina’s received a similar bio about you to prepare for tonight, which means she knows how old you are, your height, your marriage status, and the fact you have a son. Anything else you want to know, you can ask her at dinner.
I’ll be at your house around 6:30. Wear jeans if you wish, since you’ll be taking her to Picnic Point for… you guessed it… a picnic. As part of my services, I will prepare your food, so you don’t have to worry about it.
I think it’s best that we text like this going forward, since it’s clear our ability to communicate suffers when we’re face-to-face.
Text means I can send you the information you need, and you won’t be compelled to piss me off.
Once you arrive home, I’ll excuse myself, and we can debrief via text. It’s best this way, I think.
“Hey. Put your phone away, Romeo.” Ramone passes behind my chair, smacking the back of my head with his palm and jogging away again to avoid my wrath.
I lock my phone with slow, deliberate movements, then I sit up taller and burn him with a glare. “What the fuck?”
“What?” He drops into his chair opposite mine, our desks pushed up against each other, and jiggles his computer mouse to get the screen to fire up. “Why are you so mad, bruh?”
“Why are you so fuckin’ annoying?”
“I’m not.” He sets his elbows on his desk and flashes an obnoxious smile. “It’s called charm. You ought to head out to the shops after work and see if you can buy some of your own. It’s a game changer with the ladies.”
“I don’t need help with the ladies.” I toss my phone down so it lands on my desk with a noisy clatter, even as it continues to vibrate with Maggie’s lecturing texts.. “I have a date tonight.”
“Oh yeah? With Maggie?” Teasing, he bounces his brows. “She was cute as hell way back in second grade, ya know? Especially with those bucky teeth of hers. But now…?” He whistles under his breath. “Yowza. She went and dunked herself in a vat of stunning.”
“No,” I grit out. “Not with Maggie. And shut the fuck up about how pretty she is. Why didn’t you tell me about that moment you two shared back in elementary school, huh?”
“Because it was in elementary school,” he laughs. “Jesus. I didn’t realize I was supposed to keep a detailed report of every single interaction I ever had with a person in my life. Aria and I said hey once or twice back in the day, too. You want me to add those to my report?”
Fuck you. And fuck your momma, too.
“Well?” He looks to my vibrating phone, the incessant buzz-buzz-buzz only adding more fuel to his smug fire. “Things are going well?”
“Things are not going well. Because every time we talk, she picks a fight with me.”
“Right. And I bet that’s completely on her, huh? Absolutely nothing to do with you and your crappy attitude?”
“I don’t have a crappy attitude! I have a reactive attitude, and she knows that, so she picks, picks, picks at me.
She’s still setting me up with these broads, by the way.
Tonight’s will be the third this week! She’s so fucking determined to maintain that perfect success rate of hers, she won’t even listen to me when I tell her I’m not interested in them. ”
“Right. You don’t want them; you want her.”
“Exactly!” I shove away from my desk and snatch up the vibrating phone before it sends me mad. “I still have a fucking crush on an eight-year-old girl, okay? I want her. I even told her so, but every time I try to suggest we go out on a date, she picks a fight and tosses someone else at me.”
Tania, our front desk receptionist, stops by our desks with wide eyes, raised brows, and an odd side eye pointed my way.
“He means he had a crush on an eight-year-old,” Ramone guffaws. “Back when he was eight. He isn’t attracted to eight-year-olds currently.”
“Ohhhkay.” She curls bubble gum around the tip of her finger. “But if this ends up in court or whatever, I’m gonna have to testify and tell the judge what I heard. It would be illegal not to.”
“You gotta be more careful with the things you say.” Ramone swings dancing eyes back my way. “You’re a grown-ass man, Caster! You can’t talk like that about eight-year-old girls without context, bro. You wanna go to prison?”
I fist my hair and stalk toward the single boardroom our small station boasts, shoving the door open and stepping inside before our captain comes out and destroys my day…
and my career. Turning to lock up behind myself, to buy ten minutes alone before I completely step over the edge, I grab the handle, only for Ramone to bound through like the Kool-Aid man and charge toward the smart board mounted to the wall.
“Okay. So things are the Q word in town.” He picks up the stylus pen and taps the board to power it up.
“All the folks of Plainview are currently behaving, but if we say the Q word, we’ll jinx it.
So instead, we won’t say it, but we will work on this while we have time.
” He writes “Billy” in bold letters at the top left of the screen.
“Billy Caster is a prick. Middle-aged, undersexed, over-stressed, and comes with a chronic inability to talk to the ladies.”
I pull out a chair and drop onto the cheap, cracked leather with a pained grunt.
I could carry myself and my chair to the roof of our station and lob both off.
If I’m lucky, I might land on the flagpole outside and do away with this day completely.
But that would mean not making it out of work on time to get my son from school, and I’ve missed the bell a time too many to risk another.
Striding six feet to the right, Ramone writes “Maggie” in bold letters. “Magnolia Sava. Beautiful, witty, hugely successful businesswoman, smokin’ hot body, and if we wanna get romantic and shit, some might even call her the one who got away.”
Kill me. Kill me now.
“Now, we’ve got Maggie all the way over here.” He draws an arrow to her name, then he drags the tail alllllll the way back to mine. “And we’ve got you six hundred miles over here in Timbuktu. Treat it like a murder, Billy Boy. How do we connect these lines?”
“You’re an idiot,” I sigh. “I swear to God.”
“Excellent suggestion!” He doesn’t give a single damn about me or my mental health, because he stops in the middle of the board and draws two poor excuses for houses, side by side.
“Distance connects our subjects, since their houses are literally next door to one another.” He draws a stick figure boy between the two, adds a smile, but omits a few teeth.
“Jeremy also connects our subjects, since he’s the son of,” he draws an arrow back to me.
“And he’s infatuated with,” an arrow to Maggie.
“Like father, like son.” He glances over his shoulder and grins.
“Kid’s got smoother moves than his daddy, that’s for damn sure.
If you’re not careful, he’s gonna grow the hell up and ask her out himself.
He’s already eight, which is basically halfway to adulthood.
” He draws a heart beneath the houses, and inside, the initials MS. “Magnolia Sava, the Love Expert.” He adds an arrow from the heart to me, then another from the heart to Maggie.
“She’s literally tasked with helping you date, you dumb sonofabitch.
She’s giving you the industry secrets, which is basically code for how she wants to be treated in her dating life.
” He turns and pegs the stylus straight toward my head. “Are you fucking stupid?!”
“Dude!” I dodge his weapon. Barely. “What the fuck?!”
“She’s giving you the cheat codes!” He stalks across to the table and snatches up my phone.
Unlocking the screen, he shakes his head with disgust and reads our text messages.
“Consider asking her about her childhood career dreams. What did she want to be when she grew up?” He goes back to the board and uses the tip of his finger now that he’s lost his stylus. “Childhood dreams.”
He writes each word in extreme shorthand.
Chlhd drmz.
Then, “Oh look. She even says here how, psychologically, women rewatch old movies and TV series, because it’s a form of self-regulation.”
He drags his finger across the board.
Regz. Fav Movies.
“So ask her what she likes to watch! Better yet,” he glares over his shoulder at me, “tee up one of those damn shows, ship your kid off to Uncle Ramone’s for the night, and just…” Aggravated, he throws his hands in the air. “Watch it with her! Jaysus, why is this so difficult?”
“Because I already made my move! I said I didn’t wanna go out with those other chicks, and there was a moment where she and I basically had the house to ourselves, so I asked if she wanted—”
“To fuck,” he cuts in. “You offered to fuck. Women who wanna talk about emotional regulation, movies, and childhood dreams, probably aren’t interested in an angry fuck, you dumb bitch.”
I settle back in my chair and scowl. “What’s with all the name-calling?”