Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Kira
My head hurt the next morning when I woke up.
“What time is it?” I asked groggily, fumbling for my phone. I accidentally yanked it from the charging cord, forgetting that I’d plugged it in the night before.
Come to think of it, I didn’t remember much about the night before.
There was pizza and… wine. Lots and lots of wine.
That was why I couldn’t remember much and why my head was killing me!
Groaning, I slowly sat up and finished bringing the phone toward me from the nightstand. There a few unread messages from some guy named Rex.
Rex!
Oh shit! And this wasn’t my phone, it was Lila’s.
Okay, it was coming back to me now. Carrie had come over, we were lamenting my job loss—that’s right, I’d lost my freaking job!—over wine and pizza. I was supposed to break up with all of Lila’s dick dates or whatever the hell she called them, but I started chatting with this Rex guy on Snap.
Did I break it off with him? That part escaped me.
Opening the app, I navigated to our chat. Thankfully, it hadn’t been twenty-four hours, so the thread was still there.
“Okay, okay, come on…”
And there it was. My sins laid bare.
“Shit! I’ve got to tell Carrie!”
I hopped up from my bed but instantly tripped on something and went straight down to the floor, the phone falling from my hands and skidding away until it hit the baseboard on the opposite wall.
“Ouch! And tell me what?”
I felt Carrie moving beneath me and I hurriedly scrambled up. “Sorry. I forgot you crashed over here last night.”
“Yeah. We hit the wine pretty heavy and I don’t even think I could walk across the hall,” she said, sitting up from the pile of blankets she’d laid out on the floor. “What time is it?”
I crawled to the phone and checked it. “10:30. I hope you didn’t have to be anywhere early.”
“Nope. You?”
“I don’t have a job,” I reminded her, the realization hurting me all over again as I thought about my bleak employment status.
We both sat there on the floor a minute, collecting our wits.
“What was it you were going to tell me?” she finally asked.
I thrust the phone toward her. “Look! I freaking agreed to go to Los Angeles last night and meet up with that guy!”
“Oh shit!”
“Right?”
I watched as she took the phone and went through the thread, her lips moving as she silently read the messages.
“Shit!” she said again.
It was hard, but I managed to stagger to my feet. The room was spinning a little as I stumbled to the medicine cabinet—which was also my cup cabinet because I didn’t have much storage space in that tiny efficiency—and pulled out some pain reliever.
The pills shook loudly as I struggled to open the safety cap. A moment later, I had two pills which I quickly downed without the help of water. Holding out the bottle of medicine, I waited for Carrie to see the offer.
“No thanks,” she said and then returned her eyes to the phone, apparently once again reading through last night’s exchange.
“I didn’t, like, send him a picture of my boobs or anything, did I?”
“No. You didn’t send him any pics. But you sure got flirty.” Looking at me with a grin, she asked, “He kind of talks to you… I don’t know what the right way to describe it is… like he wants to take care of you or something.”
“Yeah. I do get those protective vibes from him. Maybe that’s his thing.”
“Well, he asked you if… you are looking for a Daddy.”
I grinned too. “Like in the romance novels?”
Carrie shrugged. “He didn’t elaborate. But you said yes.”
We both giggled.
“I don’t know a lot about all that, but some ladies get off on calling their guy Daddy. Or maybe he means like a sugar daddy or something,” I suggested.
“Hey, you might get that big mansion with a pool after all!”
I shook my head and chuckled as I began to make coffee. “I couldn’t date a guy just for money. Not my style.”
“Oh… well…”
“What?”
“Is it your style to impersonate Lila and go to Los Angeles?”
“Ha!” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I can’t really do that!”
“That’s too bad because he just sent you your ticket. You leave this afternoon.”
I nearly fainted but stayed upright and yelled something that was probably heard in the apartments on either side of me and below and possibly above.
“What the fuck?”