Chapter 3 #3
“I’m going to load up the back of the car with the donations,” he mentioned. I had already tried to sponge away the blood stains and it had worked, at least a little. “Let’s drop off all that stuff and then go out.”
I thought of his earlier remarks about needing a stylist: he’d said that he never went anywhere except work and the gym.
“I don’t want to eat from that pot again,” he continued. It reminded me to tell him about the plate I’d found, but that didn’t change his mind. “We could go out to dinner. Let’s do it.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “One thing first.” I adjusted his hat so it was backwards on his head. “The sun is in a good position for pictures if you can get the door open.” He fought it up and soft light flooded the dirty garage.
“Now what?” he asked me.
“We’ll go in front of the donation pile,” I decided. “No, just you alone, standing next to the ladder.” I had a good idea for the caption: “This ladder is actually only three feet high. Callum is that big!”
“How am I supposed to stand?”
“Did you ever pose before?” I questioned. I had a series of smiles and specific looks that I could call on, like “hot and ready” and “never had so much fun.”
“I had to take a picture for the JUCO website.” He crossed his arms and glared into the distance. “I did this.”
I got the feeling that their website was meant to scare the other teams, and his expression would have done that.
“Maybe less frowny,” I suggested. “Not so mad. Just look at me like you normally do.” I held up the phone and nodded.
“Yep, like that. That’s perfect.” I took a few pictures and then Callum said it was time to eat.
“I don’t know about all this,” he told me as we got into the car. “I don’t know how I feel about making everything I do public.”
“It’s not,” I reminded him. “I haven’t posted anything yet and you don’t ever have to, if you don’t want to. Are you thinking that the guys you ran with in your gang will see and come after you?”
“No.” He laughed a little. “They’re either in prison or they did the same thing that I did, leaving all that shit behind. They won’t bother me now. I just feel like, who the hell wants to see me standing next to a ladder?”
“I think people will.” Women would. When he had crossed his arms, his muscles had looked both cut and huge, and the sunlight had made his eyes so warm. Plus, he’d had a little half-smile, like a smirk, and I thought it was adorable. “But we don’t have to post anything if you don’t want to.”
He was quiet for the rest of the way to the restaurant, which was a Mexican place on the other side of the neighborhood where the 20 Grand club was located.
I had a lot of memories of these deserted, hangar-like buildings with the weeds and broken pavement.
I also remembered waking up in the lounge with no idea what was happening but now, things were so much better.
When we’d gotten a table and he’d had a few chips, he wanted to talk about the subject that had been coming up a lot: my future plans.
“I was thinking about what’s next,” he mentioned, and I waited for the question he’d already posed so many times about where I was going. He asked something different, though.
“If you could figure out where those people are, that Damian and his cokehead assistant, would you want to join them and be a part of it again?”
“I…” I had to think about the idea. There had been advantages, like a safe place to live, free gym memberships, and plenty of champagne. “I’m not sure.”
“Did you like it?” he wondered. “Did you enjoy that life?”
I also took a chip and spun it in my fingers by its sharp corners. “It wasn’t so bad.”
“You got to travel, you got to go out, you probably got clothes. Right?”
“I didn’t really enjoy that kind of traveling, like how I didn’t get to see stuff.
” I shrugged. “And going out is fun sometimes, but it was a lot of late nights and having to be energetic and sexy all the time.” I’d had to self-medicate to keep that up and I got tired of feeling so out of it.
“At first, it did seem glamorous but the clothes weren’t even mine.
Damian could take everything back because he had bought it all. ”
“He did exactly that,” Callum said.
“It was funny how they left,” I mused. They must have gotten into a car at 20 Grand and obviously, I wasn’t there with them.
But they just drove away. They obviously knew that I wasn’t with them when they took off from the hotel, too, because Millie left me the envelope at the front desk.
Sage didn’t leave anything, not even a note, and I had thought that she was a friend.
Kind of. We used to talk about stuff,” I went on.
“She has a kid back in Sacramento, living with his dad.” She’d had a few pictures from when he was little and I’d thought he was adorable.
I had imagined holding him, his warm body cuddled with mine.
The dreams I still had about the baby were so vivid.
“She missed him a lot but she didn’t call very much.
She said it was because we had such a different schedule from his, but I think the reason was that it made her too sad. ”