Chapter 12
LILA
The place is loud.
Going from the sophisticated settings of Damon West’s estate to a crammed place downtown requires an adjustment.
Smoking is banned inside, yet the rule is rarely enforced, so we spend most of our time drinking and chatting on the terrace.
Frankie is no longer sick––his flu has magically disappeared––and I quickly realize why he’s built such a reputation.
Female patrons flock to the bar outside. They’re flirting more than they’re drinking.
His attention is generously distributed to all of them, which makes me wonder...: Hw in the world did Keira think that he’d have time for me?
He’s cute, well built. Not massive and muscular like Damon West, but fit enough to have some muscular definition.
His crooked smile keeps the orders and tips coming.
“Do you like him?” Keira asks from behind her drink.
The bar is in our line of sight. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads clamor over him.
“He surely has a lot of fans,” I say, pointing to him with my drink.
Smiling, I go on.
“What in the world were you thinking? Poor guy can’t even look in my direction. He’s that busy. And I’m not talking about fulfilling orders here. I’m sure he’s booked solid for the rest of the year with other stuff.”
“It gets crazy like that in the summer. Believe it or not, he had a girlfriend last year during summer break.”
I look at her.
“What happened to her?”
She flicks her head toward the bar.
“This. She couldn’t stand it after a while.”
“You won’t say. And you thought he’d be an option for me.”
“For having sex? Yes. He’s only had happy customers.”
My eyes linger on her face as she studies him juggling a dozen tasks behind the counter.
“What about you? Have you ever been interested in him?”
She shakes her head, sunk in thought.
“Frankie and I go way back. I recommended him for this job, actually. We were good friends before he became quite a hit with the local bar female clientele. Nah. I wouldn’t be able to live like this.”
She gestures to the crowd and looks away.
“I don’t think he’s good for me, either,” I say.
She shifts her focus to me.
“It’s different with you. You don’t know him.”
“I’m not for him,” I argue. “Look at him talking to five women at once. Can you imagine him getting in a car with me and trying to strike up a quiet conversation?”
“Give him a chance. You might be surprised.”
I’m not so sure.
Things wind down eventually, and we end up at the bar, where Keira introduces him to me.
He squeezes my hand briefly, his eyes pinned on mine for a few seconds.
He must’ve met a lot of new women tonight. I’d be shocked if my name registered with him.
After midnight, the place empties, and after one, he walks us out, and someone else takes his place at the bar.
The place closes after two.
He’s genuinely easygoing, not intimidated.
I guess all that experience he acquired has paid off.
Keira calls a cab for herself, while Frankie offers to give me a ride home.
It’s too late for another drink, and besides, we need to talk before we know for sure whether we’re doing this or not.
Keira told me she’d talked to him, and he knows exactly what I’m looking for.
Well, I’m not so sure my goals have stayed the same.
Despite what I said to Damon, and what would be the right thing to do––pursue whatever opportunity I have to get some fun over the summer and not waste my time with married men––I’m a little uncertain about this.
Damon’s signaling to me behind his wife was more than telling.
Keira noticed it and asked me what it was all about. I played stupid and said I had no idea.
I had a very clear idea about what he was conveying, and the fact that he was so tense when he left, he didn’t say goodbye to us, and gave off vibes that things were about to worsen between us only supported that idea.
Frankie and I stay with Keira while she’s waiting for her ride. As I move my eyes up and down the road, and not far from us, I notice a black sports car.
My heart skips a beat, and my chest tightens.
The lights are turned off, so I look around, trying to locate the owner.
There’s no way this is not his car. I never bothered to memorize the license plate, but it must be his car.
Please don’t tell me he’s inside that car, watching us right now.
A shiver sweeps my spine.
Anything is possible, but I can’t say for sure. The car is parked in a dark spot, and the windows are tinted.
Why would he be here?
What business does he have here at this hour?
I thought that he and Henrietta were going straight to the club.
His nightclub is in the other part of town.
I shift my eyes away and look in the opposite direction.
There’s no sign of Keira’s cab, so I gesture to her.
“I’ll be right back,” I say before setting myself in motion.
I cross the street and go straight to the black car.
He’s not inside––I don’t think so. That doesn’t stop me from knocking on the window, just in case. I can’t tell whether he is inside just by looking.
I can’t see a damn thing through the tinted window.
Eventually, I feel ridiculous stalking his ride and move away from it.
Keira is about to climb into the cab when I return.
“Everything all right?” she asks.
“Yeah. Everything’s fine. We’ll talk later,” I say with a wry smile.
Frankie witnesses the exchange before inviting me to his car. It’s a nice vintage ride.
This must’ve cost a pretty penny, and I glance at him twice. He’s casual about sliding in.
No boasting about it.
No trying to impress me, although the car may contribute to his success with the ladies.
I suddenly feel like an impostor.
It was easier when I didn’t know stuff about him. I get less and less enthusiastic about the idea as I learn more about him.
I’m sure he wouldn’t be heartbroken if I took a rain check. Frankly, I’m sure he owed Keira a favor, and that’s why he said yes to the idea of me.
He sets his car in motion, and we slide past Damon’s ride like it’s nothing to us.
It might be nothing to him, but a kernel of discomfort grows in my chest.
I owe nothing to Damon. And there’s nothing he can do to me. He left the house with the woman who happens to be his wife.
Until we get rid of the generic answers and he helps me understand what’s going on between him and that woman, I have no reason to manage his sensibilities when it comes to other men.
Hooking up with Frankie would make Henrietta stop harassing me. It would probably stir her husband up, but that’s his problem, not mine.
Frankie and I are making small talk.
I learn that he owned a bar at some point, yet he closed it since it was too much work and responsibility.
Before that, he dropped out of college. He thought it was a waste of time.
I also learned he’s older than I thought. I was under the impression that he’s close to my age. Early twenties.
He’s twenty-eight.
All right. That explains a lot. The car. His work experience. His experience with pleasing women.
As the conversation steers away from dating, and in no way becomes flirtatious, it dawns on me we both know that nothing will happen between us tonight.
Perhaps never.
There isn’t the slightest hint that he might be attracted to me. And while I find him attractive, I can’t say I’m interested in sleeping with him.
We’re two people set up by a friend, and things will probably never evolve beyond this point.
“You live at Damon West’s house,” he says as he follows my directions and the gate to Damon’s estate looms in the distance.
“Uh… Yes. I thought you knew that.”
He rolls the car to a stop a few yards away from the gate and turns the engine off, not willing to move any closer.
“No, I did not.”
“Do you know him?” I ask, shifting in my seat to face him.
Smiling, he looks away.
I don’t know what that knowing smile means.
“No, not really. I know of him. Everybody knows of him in this town. He’s sort of a legend.”
His voice is tinged with bitterness.
I study him in silence while he ponders something.
“He’s the reason I have closed my bar,” he eventually says, leaning back in his seat and folding an arm behind his head.”
“What? Why?”
Flashing a smile, he looks at me.
“He doesn’t like competition.”
“How were you his competition?”
He shrugs.
“We never shared our clientele. His customers were never my customers, but the word got out that the crowds got bigger and bigger every weekend at my place. At some point he had enough of me.”
“What did he do?”
He laughs to himself.
“What any man like him would do. He had people come over, stir up trouble. There wasn’t a Saturday night without a scuffle. The customers began to steer away from my place. Once I started to lose patrons, I saw the writing on the wall, and I had to close it.”
I can’t believe my ears.
“What about where you’re working now? Isn’t that his competition?”
“Nope. Not really. It’s smaller. The owner is a woman. It’s just a different venue.”
“Why would he do something like that to you?” I ask, still grappling with disbelief.
He shrugs again.
“I don’t know. Maybe he had a personal thing for me. Do you know him well?”
His direct question makes me gasp.
“Um, no. Not really. He’s more of a distant relative. It’s a long story.”
“I hope you’re not going to share this with him,” he says quietly, and I catch him push his eyes down, checking my legs for the first time.
Our eyes meet again.
“I’m not discussing these things with him.”
“Is he with the same woman?” he finally asks, studying my face with a flicker of interest.
“The same woman? What are you talking about?” I ask, experiencing a pang of discomfort again.
“A stunning brunette. Big eyes, full lips.”
He talks like someone who’d very much like to have Henrietta in his car instead of me.
Perhaps she’s his type.
“He’s been on and off with her for a few years,” he says.
I freeze, my eyebrows slowly lifting.
He notices the shift in my expression, and I swiftly try to look casual, although alarming bells go off in my head.
“She had a cute name…” he goes on.
“Henrietta?”
“Yeah, yeah. Henrietta.”
His playful smile tells me he must’ve been infatuated with her at some point. Maybe he still is.
“I haven’t seen her for some time. Anyway, we’re not running in the same circles.”
I bite my lip for fear of slipping to him that Damon West had married his on-and-off long-time girlfriend.
How can he not know all that?
Damon and his wife must be the juiciest gossip topic in this town.
That aside, what the fuck?
Did Damon truly know her before she met my father?
It appears so.
My hands shake, so I slide them under my butt so he doesn’t notice how affected I am.
For how long has Damon West known this woman?
Please don’t tell me that these two are scammers, as I initially thought.
Does gold digging qualify as a crime? Probably not. There must be a different name for what they’re doing.
Oh, my God.
I can’t even swallow. My jaw is that tense.
What story did she tell my father?
Frantically, I’m trying to remember.
Um… Oh, yeah. She had her heart broken by her billionaire boyfriend. Honestly, no one believed her besides my father. But even he had a hard time believing the billionaire part.
I don’t know whether Damon West is a billionaire, but he surely is wealthy as sin.
Probably has more money than my father had.
“Your description fits the woman in the house,” I say. “So, yes. They’re still together. Or they are now. What’s their story anyway? I’ve only recently been introduced to them,” I add without offering more information. “Were they together when he forced you to close your bar?”
He looks in the rearview mirror, slowly nodding while pondering.
“Yup. The whole town was talking about her. It was hard not to.”
I lift an eyebrow.
His not-so-unique brand of wide-eyed infatuation with this woman gets on my nerves.
He hardly notices it.
“So that would be… what? Three, four years ago?”
He looks at me.
“Yeah. About four years ago. She was a transplant from LA. That’s how the story went, but no one really knew where she had come from.”
“Uh-huh. And what exactly happened?”
“He smashed someone’s face in because of her,” he says, recollecting things. “The guy was following her around. There must’ve been more to the story. And then, she got into a catfight with a woman who––rumor was––had been his mistress.”
“How do you know all this?”
“The catfighting happened at my bar. Maybe that was another reason he wanted my bar closed. I don’t know.
Other stories were circulating at the time.
She liked to tease him a lot. And he had no problem fucking other women when she did that.
That’s why I said they’d been on and off for years.
She met other men. He fucked other women.
Then they hooked up again. At some point, people stopped talking about them.
Besides, she was gone for a while. We all knew she’d traveled up north. ”
Mm-hmm. To my father’s bedroom.