Chapter 26
26
Kit
The phone rings a few minutes after I get into work. “Parlor, this is Kitty,” I say, mind not entirely on what I’m doing.
Immediately, there’s dial tone, which creeps me out. I’m old enough to have seen those hang-up horror movies and, though it may be full on daytime outside, I’m alone here.
I don’t like it. I lock the door. I’ll have to open it when the staff arrives, but that’s not an issue. I’d rather do that than be freaked out like this.
About twenty minutes later, there’s a knock. I’m about ten feet from the door when I recognize my ex and let my footsteps fizzle to a stop. Fuck.
He cups his hands to the glass and peers inside. I move to the door and unlock it.
“Hey. Kitty.”
“What?”
“Geez. Okay.”
“You don’t get to be the injured party.”
“No? No?”
Carefully, I lodge my foot behind the door.
“You think you’re all victim here, but let me tell you, Kitty, you aren’t that easy to be with, okay? I mean…the number of times I came home after a long day of classes and you were unavailable or too tired to?—”
He stops, mouth open, eyes, too, like he’s just been bopped on the head—and remembered that fighting’s not what he came here for. God, he’s so transparent.
“Look, Kitty, I don’t want to fight.”
I give him a slow blink. Opening my mouth at this point will serve absolutely no purpose.
“I just need you to understand. Life’s…expensive. Kids, pregnancy, I mean, Lily’s going crazy, Kitty. She’s exhausted and hungry and she just yells and then there’s all the shit we’ve got to buy. You’ve got no idea how it feels to?—”
“I’mma stop you there right now. Back up and go away, Clark. Go.”
A car pulls into the lot. A pickup.
“No. No, this restaurant is half mine. The house! The house is half mine. It belongs to my baby. I put in years at the?—”
“Everything okay, Kit?” Jake strolls up, somehow nonchalant and one hundred percent present at the same time. He knows exactly how I feel in this moment. He sees the door cracked, sees the man leaning over me, pointing with that index finger like it’s one of his reproduction medieval swords. God, what a prick. What a stupid fucking prick.
“It’s fine. Clark’s leaving.”
“Leaving? No. No, this is a public place. This is my business, too. This is?—”
“Why don’t you sell the Tesla, Clark? Huh? Sell that.”
“No. No! We need the Tesla. Lily likes to?—”
“Excuse me.” Jake’s voice is so low, the timbre, usually rich and warm, somehow hollow right now, metallic. “This your ex?”
I nod.
Jake looks at him, nodding himself, slowly, like he gets exactly what’s going on.
Not that he can, really. I mean, Clark, the medievalist, whose trips to Europe I financed for years, is just trying to steal another penny from me, but what nobody realizes is that I’d give it to him if it meant I’d never have to see him again. Never have to run into pretty, young Lily at the coffee shop.
I’ve stopped going to the coffee shop now. She’s hugely pregnant, living with the man I thought was my life, my future. I hope never to see her again.
“Let me through,” Jake says.
Clark has to obey. Once he’s in, Jake locks the door. We’re walking to the bar when Clark screams that I’ll be hearing from his lawyer.
“He harassing you?”
I shake my head and then change my mind, because the way I feel, scared out of my wits, is really close to how I’d feel if that were the case.
“He wants half the restaurant.”
“Seriously?” Jake turns to stare out at where Clark’s taking off in his ridiculously expensive car. “What a prick.”
“He is. He is a prick. He wants half the house, too. After everything I financed. He has nothing to do with this place. Nothing.”
Jake stares outside again, looking thoughtful.
I sink onto a bar stool, fold my arms onto the bar, and wonder when this part of my life can be over. “Can we, like, skip forward six months?” I ask. “Or, I don’t know, a year? Can I be officially divorced and, just forget about Clark and his little Lily and his fucking out of wedlock child?”
He doesn’t reply, though I can feel him still standing there.
Slowly, I raise my head.
“Out of wedlock?”
I grimace. “He’s a medievalist.”
“A medievalist?”
“You know. Studies and teaches and writes all about knights and kings and stuff.”
“So, like chivalry and shit?”
I laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, just like that.”
“He might want to practice what he preaches.” He walks around the bar toward the kitchen, slinging an apron around his waist as he goes.
“You’d be surprised.”
“Yeah? How so?”
“Men were real assholes to women back then.”
Jake watches me, jaw tight and hard, before disappearing into the kitchen.
A couple hours later, he comes back out, plate in hand, sliding one arm into his coat.
“What’s this?” I ask, looking up halfway through the week’s liquor order.
“Black Forest.”
“Seriously?
“Seriously.” He looks at me, no smile at all on his face. There’s a pause during which I wonder if he’ll say screw the rules and lean over to kiss me. He might think it, but in the end, all he does is boop me on the nose. “Be back before service. Tell Frida there’s a note to get her ready.”
“All right. Everything okay?”
“All good,” he says with that easy grin. And then he’s gone.
Jake
Pretty fucking easy to find a medievalist when you want one.
This one happens to be the only professor in the university history department named Clark. And his schedule’s listed on the school’s website, which is pretty handy.
The department secretary lets me know that his office hours are over for the day, but he’ll be headed out immediately after his seminar. He’s got birthing classes, apparently.
I’m leaning against the building’s brick wall when a slew of students come out, followed, eventually, by the man himself.
“Clark.”
He pauses, turns. It takes a second, when he sees me, for his eyes to pop wide with recognition and by then, the place is deserted.
“What are you doing here?”
“Came to talk to you.”
“Got nothing to say, man.”
“No? Fine. I didn’t come to listen.”
His mouth opens and shuts again and, while he’s trying to puzzle out exactly how this is gonna go, I take a step—one step—into his space and he’s cornered. A rookie move. But this guy hasn’t done a day of time in his life.
“Give me your phone,” I tell him.
“Are you kidding me? No. You’ve got to be.”
One more step and he knows just how big I am, just how little I care.
“Your fucking phone.”
He hands it over. I shove it in front of his face and the phone opens, like magic. Quickly, I find Kit’s number and delete it. With his unwilling help, I install an app that lets me track him, then hand it back.
“What’d you do?”
“Made sure you don’t go near her again.”
“Go near her? She’s still my wife you know, you fucking?—”
My mind goes narrow, my focus as sharp as it’s ever been. I move, put my hand at his throat, the other hovers just over his balls.
“I will fucking kill you.”
“What? You’ve got to be?—”
“I will kill you.” I look down into his eyes and let him see the violence in mine. Then, in case he doesn’t quite get it, I translate into words he’ll understand. “That is not hyperbole.”
“Hyperb…” He swallows. It’s loud out here, despite the traffic at the edge of campus, but I hear that dry sound. I see his pupils go wide. I know the signs of fear and this man is in the thick of it. “Where the hell did Kitty find you? Thugs R Us?”
“I don’t get that reference.”
“Geez, how old are you, dude? Like twenty?”
The fucking gall. I back slightly away, more annoyed by him now than angry. “How old’s Lily?”
Touché.
His blinking speeds up. “I can’t believe she sent you here.”
“She’s got no idea I came after you.” And by the time he works up the courage to reach out to Kit and complain, I’ll be long gone.
That knowledge drills a hole in my gut.
“She wouldn’t like you doing this. Threatening me like this.”
I let a smile pull at my lips. I can be creepy as fuck when the occasion requires it. “You think you know what she likes?”
He opens his mouth to reply and then drops it, belatedly struck by understanding. Mottled color seeps up his face. He knows now, as surely as I know, that I satisfy the woman in ways he can’t begin to imagine.
I hand him back his phone. “Leave Kit alone and you won’t hear from me again.”
I’ve turned to go by the time he works up the courage to say, “I know who you are, you know.”
My only response is a raised-eyebrow look.
“You’re internet famous.”
“What?”
“Your video. My girlfriend—” He clears his throat, looks away, runs one trembling hand through floppy hair. “The students. They’re all talking about it.”
“About what?”
“You beating the shit out of that guy.”
My pulse picks up. “Guy?”
“In a parking lot? Against a car? That’s you. Crap, I thought that looked like Kitty pulling you off him. You’re the hashtag ‘Parking Lot Hero.’ Like, you literally pick some guy up by the neck, like he weighs nothing. The… Fuck. You know what? I believe you, okay? I believe that you’re capable of hurting me. I can’t…” He looks away, sort of theatrically flummoxed, and then back. “I can’t believe she’d consort with someone like you, but then again, she does have that shitty, felonious brother, doesn’t she? Fuck.” The phone in his hand starts ringing. He looks at it, drops his hand to his side, and mutters another “ Fuck! Just… I’ve got to go.”
He takes off, not quite running, phone pressed to his ear.
I pull out my phone and do a search, wondering if I’ve gone and fucked everything up, now that there’s video evidence.
It takes a while, but I finally find it on one of the big social media sites.
It’s me all right. #ParkingLotHero. Whoever posted it was dining at Parlor that night and she, clearly, along with more than 2 million other people, thought the other guy deserved what he got. I watch the whole thing, closely, and the distance, the lack of any real identifying characteristics, like a license plate, a restaurant name, or my face, allow me to finally breathe enough to get in my truck and head to the restaurant.
But I’m buzzing, hard, with adrenaline when I get there.
Kit
“My place tonight.”
“What?” I blink up to see a very stern-faced Jake, just back from who knows where.
“Let’s do my place.”
“Oh. I think we’re not on the schedule until?—”
“Fuck the schedule. Fuck the contract. I want new rules, Katarina.”
“What’s going on?”
“I’m over the rules. They’re obsolete.”
“They’re important.”
“Bullshit. They’re hypocritical nonsense. I’m tired of being the bad guy, bending rules. Tired of breaking them, too.”
“We don’t need to?—”
“ You sucked my cock , Katarina.” He leans close enough so no one can hear, looks me straight in the eye and in a low, gruff growl, says, “You licked it like a fucking lollipop.” Mortification turns my skin to pure fire. I cast a quick look over my shoulder at where Cora and Toni are rolling silver. “We’re well past your rules and you know it.”
I can’t catch my breath.
“You pregnant yet?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“All right. Well, let’s get you that baby.”
I can’t think of a single reply. Or anything else I’d rather be doing.